The year was 1623, and the Dean of Saint Paul’s, the Reverend John Donne, poet and preacher, was battling through an illness he believed would mean his death. He was, in fact, preparing to die, and he was not a man unused to suffering. When he and his wife Ann got married, it was in secret, because her wealthy and high-born father did not approve, and that meant that John and Ann and their beginning of a very large family lived for some years in dreadful poverty. It was so bad for them, that once when Ann lost a child at birth, John felt relief — but this was also quite a while before, at the urging of King James who had finally become a patron of his, he took Holy Orders, eventually rising to the post at Saint Paul’s, in London, where his fame as a powerful and most unusual and arresting preacher was legendary. But John Donne was never a man who gave sound advice to others while not taking it himself. If anything, he was more severe with himself than with other people, and he thought he had reason for it, because when he was young he lived a kind of rakish life, as the poems he became famous for may testify. I say “may testify,” because even then we cannot simply identify Donne the poet with his speaker in the poems. Irony is something you learn to identify almost by touch, as when you say, “Not only is he pushing things a bit far here — he knows he’s doing it, and he expects us to know it too. I wonder…”
Well, Donne recovered from his long illness, and in the following year, 1624, he published a book of devotions, springing from his experience of sickness and near-death, and turning upon his subject all the keenness of a powerful and learned mind, and the honesty and self-knowledge of a man accustomed to examining his conscience, without softening the edges of sin. The work, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, is one of the greatest prose works of an age renowned for them, and Donne, as in his poetry, startles us into truth by giving us ways of beholding things that we aren’t likely to have thought of, but once he shows them through his eyes, we say, “That’s right, that’s the way it is.” Each devotion in the book consists of three parts: a Meditation, an Expostulation (in which he addresses God with urgency and sometimes seems, like Job, to enter into an argument with him, but always patient and ready to learn), and a Prayer. Our Poem of the Week this time isn’t a poem. It’s the 17th Meditation, of 23. Its heading is as follows: “Now, this bell softly tolling for another, tells me, Thou must die.”
I have never, in my own person, been close to death. I was at my father’s side, as were my mother, my brother, and my sisters, when he died, fully conscious, with eyes wide open, and his last words were to my mother, in a whisper, “I love you.” I was with Debra and my father-in-law Herb when her mother died, quietly, in a coma. But I’ve thought about death a lot. I’ve had to; it’s what you will think of when a high fever and uncontrollable chills suddenly strike you without warning, and you lie in excruciating pain. That’s happened to me about once a year since I was 15 years old. It’s a rare congenital condition I’ve got, and one of these days, I guess, it will be my ticket out of the world. That lies in the hands of God. But when you hear a church bell tolling, and you think, “Someone has died,” the sound is solemn, and as you grow older you know that someday that bell will sound and you will not hear it, not with these ears of clay. Yet the real heart of Donne’s meditation isn’t that you apply the death of somebody else to your own situation. It’s that it already is your situation.
And that’s where our Word of the Week, island, comes in. So much of modern politics is a wild flailing between the anthill and the island, between faceless people in a collective, and a strange insistence that each person is his own island, his own little universe, separate from everybody else. That’s wrong on both sides, and strangely enough, wrong in the same fundamental way: it’s to forget that man is made in the image of the Three-Personed God. But I won’t do any more preaching now — best to let the master be heard.
“Now, this bell softly tolling for another, tells me, Thou must die.” (Meditation 17)
Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness. There was a contention as far as a suit (in which both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled), which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world?
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking upon us the misery of our neighbors. Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did, for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction. If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it. Another man may be sick too, and sick to death, and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction, digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.
