2 quotations linked to Devotions upon Emergent Occasions by or associated with John Donne, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Mortality, illness, community, interdependence, death, spiritual reflection and Meditation XVII’s famous island and bell images.
Use these links when you want to inspect the wording in its wider work or edition.
“No man is an island, entire of itself.”
Donne argues against imagining people as self-contained units; individual life is bound up with the lives of others.
Meditation XVII.
“Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
Another person’s loss is not completely separate from us because human lives participate in a shared condition.
Meditation XVII; modernized capitalization.
