Meditation 17

Donne was the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, a position of great honor in the Anglican Church. Before he attained that role, Donne was a well-known lyric poet, womanizer (the sublimated eroticism of his early poetry earned him the nickname “Jack the Rake” in later scholarship), man of letters, and suspected Catholic recusant. Thus, his works encompass a wide range of secular and religious topics. The striking contrasts between Donne’s early and later life manifest most notably in his sermons, which many scholars regard as the most brilliant and eloquent of his time. “Meditation 17” is among the most well-known of these sermons, and an allusion to it famously appears in Modernist literature: American writer Ernest Hemingway titled his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls as a call to a personal involvement in the Spanish Civil War and as a concrete expression of common humanity. Another wartime application was the British government’s borrowing of the phrase “no man is an island” at the beginning World War II; this became a slogan justifying the British troops’ defense of Poland and France. The themes and words of “Meditation 17” clearly stand the test of time.