John Donne

In December 1623, poet, and Anglican priest John Donne (1573-1631) was laid low with a life-threatening illness. It could have been the bubonic plague that was ravaging England and Europe or perhaps typhoid fever. John decided to put pen to paper and write twenty-three devotions corresponding to the number of days he was afflicted. As he wrote in Meditation 17, “Affliction is a treasure and scarce any man hath enough of it.” His firm conviction was that physical illness was an opportunity to grow spiritually. Each devotion contained a meditation designating a stage in his illness, an expostulation commenting on his reaction to each stage, and a prayer to help him make peace with that stage. Within a month of his recovery, he published the meditations in book form, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. Meditation 17 is the most well-known since it contains two of the quotes for which John Donne is most famous. You’ve likely heard, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” The second may be familiar also: “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” In John’s time, a church bell was rung every time someone died to alert the surrounding community. He was so seriously ill that when he heard the bell toll, he wondered if it was tolling for him. John addressed death in his meditations as he contemplated his own mortality and grieved the death of his young wife following complications from childbirth. Some thought he was morbid and morose. I have a different take on things. He was honest about death and its place in the task of living. It is only by keeping death near that we can truly live.