"No man is an island" was originally "No man is an Iland" and is a famous line from John Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, a 1624 prose work. It was the 17th devotion, Meditation XVII. When you see this a s a poem, it is that Donne's punctuation becomes line breaks. The poem also includes the line "...for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee."
That prose work as a whole is considered similar to 17th-century devotional writing generally, and particularly to Donne's Holy Sonnets. It might surprise you that Donne's early career was also notable for his erotic poetry, especially his elegies, in which he employed unconventional metaphor. In "The Flea," a flea biting two lovers being compared to sex.
Donne is considered to be a "Metaphysical poet" which was coined by the critic Samuel Johnson to describe a loose group of 17th-century English poets whose work was characterized by the inventive use of conceits, and by a greater emphasis on the spoken rather than lyrical quality of their verse. Modern critics often say that "baroque poets" may be more accurate as Donne and other don't fit our more common philosophical use of metaphysical as meaning the study of reality and existence.
If you read any of Donne in school, it was probably "No Man Is An Island" or "Death Be Not Proud," but not his erotic "To His Mistress Going to Bed" or "The Flea."
"No Man Is an Island" is a poem that explores the interconnectedness of humanity and the impact of loss. The speaker asserts that no individual is isolated, but rather an integral part of the broader human collective. The poem uses the metaphor of comparing humankind to a continent, with each person being a "piece" or "part" of the whole.
Loss appears as the erosion of land by the sea. Donne suggests that the death of even one person diminishes the entire human race. This idea is emphasized by the shift from the hypothetical ("If a clod be washed away") to the personal ("As well as if a manor of thy friend's/Or of thine own were").
The poem's concluding lines, "And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; / It tolls for thee," encapsulate the theme of shared mortality and emphasize the inevitability of death for all.
For this month's call for submissions, we invite poems that consider the island metaphor, our shared
world and the inevitability of death. Donne loved metaphors and that should be a starting place for you. Perhaps, an island suggests other metaphors to you. In Shakespeare's The Tempest, the island is a metaphor with multiple layers as it represents isolation, both physically and psychologically, away from the regular world where the characters are stranded.
Some Donne allusions trivia: No Man Is an Island is a 1955 book by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton.
"For
whom the bell tolls" was used by Ernest Hemingway as the title of his 1940 novel. Hemingway uses
it as a metaphor for the Spanish Civil War, implying that people in America or other countries should care about what was
happening there, and not ignore it because it was happening far away.
The band Jefferson Airplane inserts between the track "A Small Package Of Value Will Come To You Shortly" and the song "Young Girl Sunday Blues," this Donne joke "No man is an island! He's a peninsula."
John Donne (1572-1631) was an English poet, scholar, and soldier who later became a cleric in the Church of England as Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London.
Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several
years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money that he inherited during and after his education on
womanizing, literature, pastimes and travel.
In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children. In
1615 he was ordained Anglican deacon and then priest, although he did not want to take holy orders and only did so because
the king ordered it.
He served as a member of Parliament.
Donne died on 31 March 1631. He was buried in old St Paul's
Cathedral.
The deadline for submissions for the next issue is March 31, 2025.
Please refer to our submission guidelines
and look at our archive of 26
years of prompts and poems. Follow our
blog about the prompts and topics in poetry.
