17 pages • 34 minutes read

No Man Is an Island

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1624

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Immutable Communion of all Humanity

Donne challenges the notion that all human beings are solitary creatures who can live independently of one another. Counter to this selfish concept of human singularity, Donne promotes a framework of interdependence. Using an extended metaphor of humans as pieces of land or earth, Donne illustrates how every piece of land is a “piece of the continent” (Line 3). Every piece of earth compounds upon others to create “the main” (Line 4), just as every human life adds to the entirety of humanity. One life affects the other, just as one outcropping of land can overlap another. No human life goes unnoticed. As the metaphor extends, Donne highlights how if one “clod” (Line 5) of earth is washed away, then “Europe is the less” (Line 6). If a “promontory” (Line 7) or a “manor” (Line 8) are removed, the landscape changes irrevocably. In fact, it is possible that the absence of these landmarks would precipitate some local ecological shift. Similarly, if one human dies, the speaker notes how this death “diminishes me” (Line 10). This loss is innately felt by the speaker because they are “involved in mankind” (Line 10). Whether readers like it or not, the poem suggests that by simply being born, all humans are inexorably joined together on life’s journey.

The Universal Inevitability of Death

Meditation 17, the prose piece from which the poem is excerpted, bears the Latin epigraph, “Nunc lento sonitu dicunt, morieris,”; it translates, “Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die” (Donne, John. The Works of John Donne. 1839. Volume III, Edited by Henry Alford). Following from the first of human communion, part of what connects all of humankind is its shared mortality—a commonality that, as the last two lines of the poem suggest, is all too often forgotten. The penultimate line of the poem is an injunction to “never send to know for whom the bell tolls” (Line 12). When the church bell signals someone’s passage from this earthly life into the next, the poem acknowledges that a person’s first instinct may be to wonder who has passed away. This may be from simple curiosity rather than from empathy. However, the speaker contends that the deceased’s individual identity doesn’t matter; the passing of any member of humanity is both a diminishment of the humanity still living and a harbinger of the reader’s own eventual destination. The death knell, regardless for whom exactly, really “tolls for thee” (Line 13). As radically morbid as the thesis may seem, the full spirit of Donne’s poem cannot be severed from his religious beliefs of eternal life and the soul’s eventual reunion with its creator—a union given earthly intimation through the fundamental human unity theorized in the poem.

The Essential Transience of Materiality

Beyond Donne’s primary messages of the inevitability of death and the interconnectedness of human existence, there lies another theme advocating for a particular way of living. In the poem’s prescriptive theory of human relation, all materiality is transitory. Neither property nor possessions last. The poem implicitly encourages readers to look for their strength beyond the corporeal world. Earthly impermanence is suggested in the “clod washed away by the sea” (Line 5). Nothing remains in its prime state but changes over time and fades away. Through an extended metaphor, the speaker escalates the images of dissolution, progressing from a “clod” to a “promontory” (Line 7). Bits of earth, both small and large, can be torn away from the whole. Besides land, buildings can be swept away: “a manor of thy friend’s” (Line 8) as well as the reader’s own residence. If all material is so vulnerable to extermination and diminution, then perhaps the cultivation of material wealth is not a worthy paramount aspiration; perhaps there is another, better deserving outlet. In this excerpted poem, shorn of its original context in the religious Meditation, there is no explicit delineation for an ideal path, but readers can readily infer Donne’s intentions. The poem ends in a memento mori, implying the most fruitful object of contemplation, and pursuit, is salvation. Meditation 17 concludes:

Another 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 (Donne, John. The Works of John Donne. 1839. Volume III, Edited by Henry Alford).