John Donne and the Bell that Calls Us Together

In the England of kings and plague and crowded churches, there lived a man who began his life writing fevered love poems and ended it as the most famous preacher in London. His name was John Donne. He was born in 1572 into a Catholic family at a time when being Catholic in England could cost you everything. He buried that danger, buried much of his early ambition, and in time he was ordained in the Church of England. He rose to become dean of St Paul's Cathedral, and crowds packed in to hear him speak of death and judgement and mercy as though he had seen them with his own eyes. And in one terrible season, he very nearly had.

In the winter of 1623, Donne fell desperately ill. It may have been typhus, or relapsing fever; the physicians of his day could not say for certain, and they feared the worst. He lay in his bed, weak and burning, while the city of London went on living outside his window. And from his sickbed he could hear the church bells. In those days the bells told the city everything. They rang for births. They rang for weddings. And they tolled, slow and heavy, for the dying and the dead. So there he lay, listening, and a bell began to toll for someone else. Some other soul in the parish was passing. A stranger, perhaps. A neighbour he had never met.

And Donne, sick enough to wonder whether the next bell might be his own, did not hear it as another man's grief. He heard it as his own summons. Out of that fever he wrote a book of meditations, written line by line as the illness ran its course. In one of them he set down words that have outlived every sermon he ever preached. No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. He wrote that when one clod is washed away by the sea, the whole continent is the less. And then the line that the centuries could not forget. Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

He was not making a pretty saying about friendship. He was a dying man listening to a dead man's bell, and seeing the truth that pride hides from us in health. We are not separate. We are not islands. When one suffers, the whole body feels it. When one neighbour is lowered into the ground, the bell is calling all of us to remember that we belong to one another, and that we belong to God.

Donne recovered from that illness. He lived another eight years, preaching still, his voice growing more urgent as his own end drew near. In 1631, knowing he was dying, he rose from his bed, wrapped himself in a burial shroud, and preached a final sermon that listeners called his own funeral sermon. He died not long after, and they buried him in the cathedral he had served. A monument to him survived even the great fire that destroyed old St Paul's.

What John Donne left behind was not only his poems, beautiful and strange as they are. He left a way of hearing the bell. For four hundred years his words have reached people who never knew his name, reminding them that no grief is a private grief, and no death is somebody else's problem. He had learned it the hard way, flat on his back, listening to the tolling of a bell meant for a man he would never meet. And he understood at last that there are no strangers in the country of the dying. The bell that rings for one of us is ringing, even now, for thee.