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.
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