Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions is a 1624 prose work by the English writer John Donne, who dedicated it to the future King Charles I. It is a series of reflections that were written as Donne recovered from a serious illness, believed to be either typhus or relapsing fever. (Donne does not clearly identify the disease in his text.) He describes this as a "preternatural birth, in returning to life, from this sickness".[1] The work consists of twenty-three parts ('devotions') describing each stage of the sickness. Each part is further divided into a Meditation, an Expostulation, and a Prayer.[2]

Meditation XVII is perhaps the best-known part of the work. It forms part of Devotion XVII (subtitled "Now, this bell tolling for another, says to me, thou must die."[3]), in which the patient prepares himself to die,[4]and contains the following passage:

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

It is the origin of the phrase "No Man Is an Island". The phrase "For whom the bell tolls" was later famously used as the title of a 1940 novel by Ernest Hemingway about the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway's title in turn provided the title for a song by the heavy metal group Metallica.

Notes

  1. ^ John Donne (1839). The works of John Donne: With a memoir of his life. 3. London: J. Parker. p. 494. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fy8-AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA494. 
  2. ^ Anthony Raspa. Introduction to Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. Oxford University Press, 1987.
  3. ^ Donne (1839). p.574. Also given in Latin: "Nunc lento sonito dicunt, morieris".
  4. ^ "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions". Literature, Arts and Medicine Database. http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/Annotation?action=view&annid=1128. Retrieved 20 August 2010. 

See also

External links

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