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For whom the Bell Tolls
John Donne
From "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions"
(1623), XVII: Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris - "Now, this
bell tolling softly for another, says to me: Thou must die."
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 myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about
me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know
not that.
The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her
actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a
child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected
to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body
whereof I am a member.
And when she buries a man, that action concerns
me: 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 be so translated; God
employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some
by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in
every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered
leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one
another.
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; but how much more me, who am brought so near
the door by this sickness.
There was a contention as far as a suit (in which
both piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled),
which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the
morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that
rose earliest.
If we understand aright the dignity of this bell
that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours
by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well
as his, whose indeed it is.
The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth;
and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that this
occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God.
Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises?
but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who
bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who
can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out
of this world? No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is
a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the
less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy
friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Neither can we call this a begging of misery, or a
borrowing of misery, as though we were not miserable enough of
ourselves, but must fetch in more from the next house, in taking
upon us the misery of our neighbours.
Truly it were an excusable covetousness if we did,
for affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it.
No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by
it, and made fit for God by that affliction.
If a man carry treasure in bullion, or in a wedge
of gold, and have none coined into current money, his treasure will
not defray him as he travels. Tribulation is treasure in the nature
of it, but it is not current money in the use of it, except we get
nearer and nearer our home, heaven, by it.
Another man may be sick too, and sick to death,
and this affliction may lie in his bowels, as gold in a mine, and be
of no use to him; but this bell, that tells me of his affliction,
digs out and applies that gold to me: if by this consideration of
another's danger I take mine own into contemplation, and so secure
myself, by making my recourse to my God, who is our only security.
John Donne, " for whom the bell tolls " and
Ernest Hemingway
These
words have become one of the memorable phrases of the English
language. You will find them used in a wide swathe of meanings from
theological considerations of the meaning of life and death, to a
personal awareness of the unexpected arrival of the inevitable
finale. Today we find the phrase used in connection with the death
knolls attending the increasingly vicious warfare which this new
millennium has already spawned.
Of
course the modern reader's reference will be to Ernest Hemingway's
book "For Whom the Bell Tolls" from 1940, as set in the Spanish
Civil War of the previous decade which Hemingway witnessed as
fighter, reporter and author. One might wonder how Hemingway came to
choose these exact words, which are usually stated to be taken from
a poem by John Donne, and that does require some explanation.
Donne
as leader of the English "Metaphysical" poets of the early 17th
century was almost totally unknown until he was "discovered " by
Edmund Gosse and the late 19th century critics, when his poems
printed from authentic sources in Grierson's great two volume
edition of 1912. He was finally promoted after 1920 with widespread
influence by T. S. Eliot into the status of a major English poet.
The literary world was excited by the appearance of a "new" poet who
had hard edges to both his thought and his verse, a writer who could
be tough to read but well worth puzzling over. In the new world of
Pound's and Eliot's difficult poetry, Donne was immediately seen as
a welcome partner.
But
then, what might be the connection between Hemingway's Spanish Civil
War and Donne the poet and Anglican preacher of the 1620's? Looking
through the collected poems, you will not find a poem "For Whom the
Bell Tolls". And when you do locate those words it will be in an
entirely different prose setting, in a curious little book from 1624
"Devotions | upon |Emergent Occasions and se|uerall steps in my
Sicknes.....". Was Hemingway just capping a clever quotation for the
title of his book, like the hundreds of book titles neatly lifted
with a doubled meaning from a Shakespearean source ? Or was there
something more cogent and intimate which he was pondering, some
connection between death in battle and an inevitable death in
sickness in bed? To examine the threads of this three hundred year
old literary tissue, we must turn back our sense of history and open
some pages which have not been read for centuries. Perhaps there are
some surprises in areas we would not have suspected.
It was
in l588 that England was formally at war with Spain, constructing an
English fleet to oppose the Spanish Armada designed to attack and
subjugate the British Isles to Spain and the Catholic belief. The
Spanish fleet with a hundred thirty two vessels carrying 3165 cannon
was defeated in summertime in the channel, and completely destroyed
off Ireland later that year by a major storm. The number of soldiers
the fleet carried can be estimated from the amount of cups and
tableware recently salvaged from submerged ships off Ireland,
pointing to a staggering army of invasion.
Now
that England was clear of the danger, the next step was to retaliate
with raids on Spain as the home country, and in 1596 Essex conducted
a famous raid on the port of Cadiz on Spain's Atlantic Coast. Cadiz
had been an important trading port from Roman times, it was in the
16th century the wealthiest port of Western Europe and the
headquarters for the ships of the Spanish treasure trade. In fact it
was the exit port for Columbus' pioneering New World expedition.
Essex knew there was a fleet of warships in the bay at that time.
With the fleet he commanded combined with that of Charles Howard he
attacked the port destroying forty merchant vessels and thirteen
warships. The damage to port and town was so severe that it
necessitated the rebuilding of the town on a new plan in the
following years.
Now it
so happened that a young man named John Donne had enlisted in
Essex's expedition. Izaac Walton, the famed author of "The Compleat
Angler", had written several short Memoirs on famous men of his
time, including Donne (1640) and Donne's friend Henry Wotton (1651)
who was on the same expedition with Essex in l596. (It is curious
that in the early literary interchange between Donne and Wotton,
there is a charming poem by Wotton "On Angling", which may have
suggested Walton's manual "The Compleat Angler" written much later
in 1651. ) Here are Walton's words about Donne in l596:
About a
year following he resolved to travel; and the Earl of Essex going
first to Cales, and after the island voyages, the first anno 1596,
the second 1597, he took the advantage of those opportunities,
waited upon his lordship, and was an eye-witness of those happy and
unhappy employments. But he returned not back into England till he
had stayed some years, first in Italy, and then in Spain, where he
made many useful observations of those countries, their laws and
manner of government, and returned perfect in their languages.
John
Donne saw from shipboard the encounter of Essex's well prepared
fleet of warships blasting cannon at some fifty-three Spanish ships
in the harbor as they blew up or sank, then turning the cannon with
fire balls onto the town, which being on a promontory in the bay,
offered little chance of escape. What would this have looked like to
a twenty four years old educated and sensitive lad like Donne,
watching from the ships as the bay filled with smoke from burning
ships? The air was befouled by a dense and bitter haze from the
pervasive black powder of hundreds of cannon, cries of men in the
water clinging to spars, while the cannoneers on the ships loaded
and refired as fast as possible, intending to destroy the town
completely. Amid the smoke, flame and gunshot could be heard the
sound of alarm from the town, the warning that Cadiz was under
attack. Every church through the town kept its bells ringing through
the day as warning to the people to run and hide, continuing through
the night at a slower pace to ring the knell of those who had
perished in the daytime. Donne heard the sound of the bells ringing
in his ears, and those sounds were to be still there in 1624 when he
lad abed with a recurring malarial fever, hysterically writing a
little book of Devotions centered on issues of life and death, words
punctuated in the critical and most frantic sections of his
meditations, by the sound of the ringing of the bells.
We have
learned from bitter experience in a half dozen recent wars, that men
in battle under stress often much later will have recurrent dreams
and even hallucinations steming back to the stresses of battle.
After the sea-fight, Donne stayed in Spain and later took time to
travel across Europe, perhaps as much out of need for emotional
repairs as from curiosity. He and Wotton exchanged a series of
poems, but never wrote an account of the horrors of the Bay of Cadiz
. Perhaps it was better forgotten.
But
there is another thing which I surmise John Donne may have carried
away from his time in Spain. Malaria is a disease which seems to
have existed along with human life from ancient times, in fact its
necessary adjunct in the carrier system of the anopheles mosquito
has been found in very ancient fossil deposits. Malaria itself is an
infective disease caused by sporozoan parasites that are transmitted
through the bite of an infected Anopheles mosquito, with results in
the infected marked by paroxysms of chills and fever. We often
associate malaria with tropical climates where it may easily become
and endemic disease, but there has been an long history of
persistent malaria around the Mediterranean Basin, from the time of
Hippocrates who first described it as a disease, long before it was
isolated by Laveran in l880. It was prevalent in many European
countries as late as l940 when DDT finally removed it from listing
as a dangerous disease. In earlier times all the countries around
the Mediterranean Sea had some amount of malarial sickness, and a
port like 16th century Cadiz which was involved in world trade would
have been a natural spot for it. The Encyclopedia Brit. 11th ed. s.v.
Cadiz refers to the areas around the city as low-lying and unhealthy
as late as its period of publication in 1910.
Donne
had secretly married the daughter of Sir Thomas More in l601, and
this caused him severe personal problems for several years until
finally forgiven. In 1606 he and his wife were living in a small
house in Mitcham, where he was reported to have said that his house
was both a "hospital" and a "prison". We can't be exactly sure what
this may have meant, but it was less than ten years after going to
Cadiz and a perfectly suitable time for a recurrent attack of
malarial fever. We note that he used the word "feaver" in four
places in his poems, an unusual word there since not used in a
clinical sense, but probably suggested by a malarial episode in
those early years. Donne did have a tendency to use unusual words in
new senses, a feature of the style which he and a group around him
favored even to the point obscurity,. For this which reason Dryden
first called them followers of "Metaphysics", which led to Dr.
Johnson's invention of the standard term Metaphysical Poets.
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January 08, 2022 |