John Donne is one of my favorite poets, but that doesn't separate me from most poetry lovers.  If any one poet came up with great quotable lines, he surely tops the list.   His work Meditation XVII gave us at least two great lines, one about isolation and the other on morality.  He bring these two themes together in this work, isolation and mortality, and there is geat wisdom in the words he wrote many years ago.  Donne was obviously trying to make some sense of the great plague that swept through Europe, killing up to half the residents of some nations.  With the tolling of the death bells ringing in his ears, Donne wrote, "Perchance he for whom this bell tolls, may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myelf so much better than I am, as that they who are about me . . . may  have caused it to toll for me . . . and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tools for thee."

In that same work he also said, "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clob be washed way by the sea, Europe is the less . . . any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind."  I don't know that anyone contemplates death well enough to fully understand it, but we at least understand the concept of mortality.  We die, and that's a fact of life.  Understanding why we die is more difficult, and that sends inquiring minds scurrying for answers.  I'm not sure that Donne pulls together the ideas that isolation and mortality are intertwined, or even that he intended to do so.  Poems often put forth ideas without attempting to draw conclusions as to how they fit together, but I think Donne tried to draw a line between his two ideas in this work.  Some things are just too obvious to miss.

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must me so translated . . . as therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come; so this bell calls us all," Donne also wrote.   These are all great lines, wonderful reminders of who we are, what our purpose might be, and where we are going in the end.  Take it as a poem to be pondered if you like, but you might also take it as a prophecy.  Is there a warning here that we need to realize our limitations as indivuals?  That's the way I see it.

We live in a nation that touts individualism, and it surely acts as a separate entity in its dealings with other countries around the world.  We like to talk about our generosity when it comes to foreign aid, but that's no excuse for the way we act.  So . . . do you think George W. Bush even knows who John Donne is?  Has he ever read a poem, and if so, do you suppose he understood it?  I read lots of poems I don't understand, will freely admit that, but I think anyone with reasonable sense should understand John Donne's ideas about bells tolling and the concept that no man is an island.  Bush isn't the first politicians who can't understand those concepts . . . but he's a mortal who'll answer to the bell's call one of these days.  Just one more clod will drop into the ocean, and when that happens the entire continent will be slightly the lesser.  According to Donne, that's the way it is because we're all tied together in this thing.

OK, John, I get it!  I understand the concepts of mortality, bells tolling, all that.  I appreciate the idea that no man is an island, that he's in the same boat with everybody else in the final analysis . . . but I just can't quite buy it.  In fact, I think some people are indeed islands, say for instance, like George W. Bush.  Let's not just pick on George, let's go ahead and throw in everyone like him.  These people are indeed islands, and we can call them islands of discontent.  They will never fit in with the rest of us, never be a contribution to the betterment of mankind . . . and there's lots of island people like that in the world. 

Donne might be right about how a clod falling into the ocean means we're a lesser continent, but I sure hope not.  The clod thing is a slick metaphor for the point he was making, but I'd like to think more of them as clods that fall into the ocean and become little floating islands of discontent . . . away from the rest of us who'd like to see world peace, an earth where people can live in dignity without wars.  Believe me, we might end up being a smaller continent, but we sure won't miss the stupid, war-mongering clods that fell away from us.

Most of the clods that drop off the continent of mankinds aren't bad and will be missed.  Maybe they'll sink to the bottom and find a new existence as an aquatic being of some kind.  But what about the bad clods?  You know the old saying that shit floats, right?  My guess is that's what hapens to them . . . they just float off into a watery wastland and remain little islands of shit forever. 

I'd write a poem about my negative (but realistic) twist on Donne's no man is an island idea, but he made that diffucult, if not impossible.  It would sure be diffucult to one-up someone with lines like he came up with.  He stole the show in that regard.  It's just as well.  Nobody would want to read a poem called Shit Floats. 

PMC, 12/26/07