No Man is an Island

John Donne

(1572-1631)

No Man is an Island

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.

Therefore, never send to know

For whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

The poem above is part of a longer work, Meditation XVII. Have a look. It’s not that long and it’s quite beautiful. Donne was a poet but also a cleric. Reading Meditation XVII gives one a good feel for how Donne’s poetry was informed by a searching theological mind. The fact that we treat this excerpt as a stand-alone poem is a contrivance. It wasn’t meant to be that way. But the message it imparts, and the simple, direct language makes the case that, intended or not, it is poetic.

So, what about the message? For a Roman Catholic it is hard not to connect the poem with the concept of “The Mystical Body of Christ” of which we are all a part. There is a sense of being connected to one another no matter how different we may be.

For some our common humanity is the overriding reality to which we should be attuned. For others, the most salient aspects of personal identity are tribal in nature – race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, political stripe, and so on. And still others would feel no connection to anything other than the “sovereign individual.” Donne, I suspect, would find the concept of the sovereign individual shallow or at least incomplete. Not that these other ways of thinking have no place at all; rather, they fall short of the over-arching reality which Donne asserts - we are all connected. We are “part of the main.”

I find Donne’s message here very appealing and very challenging. There is a lot in the American way of life that draws us into what one sociologist called “lifestyle enclaves.” We accumulate wealth, find our place, and pull up the draw bridge. We keep the other, whomever we think that might be, at a distance. I don’t consciously subscribe to this way of being, but I see elements of it in my life, present and past.

I chose this poem this year because it represents a response to the nationalism and tribalism that seems to be taking root not just here in the United States but in other countries as well. America First, Brexit, authoritarian rulers, and demonizing immigrants are in our daily news cycle. It has a corrosive effect on what Donne presents as a first principle – no man is an island. We can pretend otherwise but nationalism and radical individualism are not our best selves and for Donne, the cleric, not how we were meant to be.

Ernest Hemingway chose the line “For whom the bell tolls” as the title of one his most loved novels. Most broadly, Donne’s poem and Hemingway’s novel are both meditations on death and how we are all the same in the face of that ultimate certainty. Interestingly, the original title of Hemingway’s novel was The Undiscovered Country, which is a reference to death found in Hamlet’s soliloquy. Death was “the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.”

So, as 2018 closes, this seemed like a good choice to add to By Heart. I recite it when the political news is depressing, which is to say I recite it frequently.