Romancing Religion

John Donne’s life was a roller coaster. After sex, revelry, love, elopement and marriage came religion. In 1615 he was actually ordained priest in the Church of England and subsequently became the dean of St. Paul’s cathedral where he gave touching and enlightened sermons. The wind in the sail of his poetic inspiration had turned profoundly spiritual, but his Metaphysical cerebral style did not. Donne wrote The Holy Sonnets, a series of poems geared towards religious themes. How can religious spirituality be expressed through cerebral conceits? How can death and the spiritual afterlife be treated in a concrete Metaphysical way?

Donne does just that. He starts by personifying death and chastising him. Death Be Not Proud is a Holy Sonnet which does just that. The poet personifies death and tells him not to be proud. Although some have called death mighty, Donne says he really is not. Quite the opposite, he belittles him, saying that Death lives with sickness, poison and wars. He even tells him that he is a slave to destiny, to those who want to die and to those who decree death on others, like kings or murderers. Even drugs, like opium, have a better effect on humans than death does. This litany of abuse leads to the climactic paradox, “Death, thou shall die”. Donne’s rationale is that once all mankind has moved on to the other dimension, Death will be made redundant. He will die. Read the full poem here.

...never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 

It tolls for thee. 

Among the most beautiful words ever written on death are those of Donne in 1624- Meditation XVII: 

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.

Here Donne speaks about humanity, saying that every human being is spiritually intertwined with each other. We are not a rock surrounded by sea, but part of the mainland. This poem shows how humanity is one symbiotic existence; the death of just one human being affects all human beings; the suffering of one human being is the suffering of all human beings; the existence of one human being is the existence of all human beings. 

That is why, if we hear the church bell announce someone's death (or nowadays if we get the news on our mobile), we should not bother asking who has died; it is actually announcing part of our own death. Donne’s church bell that tolls the news of death became the inspiration for Ernest Hemingway's 1940 novel For Whom The Bell Tolls, which is regarded as one of his masterpieces. 

How we got from love to death is a mystery of literature. Tomorrow I shall steer back to love.