21 pages • 42 minutes read
John DonneMeditation 17
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1630A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Bells
During the 1600s, church bells served various purposes, and the sound of their tolling would have been a frequent occurrence. For a mostly illiterate congregation, bells not only conveyed information but called people together. Bells would ring to indicate specific times of the day when the faithful would be called to church for prayers. Bells would also ring simply to give daily reminders of the joys of being a believer. They would celebrate happy events like marriages, births, and baptisms. In contrast, bells could also warn of impending dangers—and, as in “Meditation 17,” they would inform the congregants that a member was seriously ill or had even died. The bells rang in different sequences, with different sounds, to distinguish the nature of their message. Donne uses the bells as a familiar, even mundane tool to symbolize spiritual messages and the interconnectedness of all humanity.
The Divine Author
One motif is God as the divine author. As this is also one of the three metaphysical conceits in the meditation, Donne builds elaborate symbol scaffolding to support the motif. He begins with the unifying claim that “all mankind is of one author and is one volume” (Line 6), meaning that every person’s life has been written by God, who has compiled those lives in one enormous book. Because each individual life constitutes a “chapter” (Line 6) in the book, the tome holds many personal stories—stories that are part of a larger human drama and history whose arc bends toward God. The book therefore represents “all mankind”; in accord with the meditation’s concluding paradoxical equation of affliction with wealth, God is the author of both birth and death. Dying is an analogical “translation” whereby God, as the author, has a “hand […] in every translation” and “employs several translators” (causes of death) to translate a person from life to death and, ultimately, from time to eternity.
An Individual as One Part of the Whole
One of the meditation’s primary conceits builds from the metaphorical premise that “every man is a piece of the continent” (Line 14). Donne prefaces this concept with the famous statement that “[n]o man is an island, entire of itself” (Line 14). A land mass is the mass of humanity, and losing even one clod of dirt equates to the loss of a promontory—even the loss of “a manor of thy friend’s […] or thine own” (Line 14). The latter comparison personalizes the motif, bringing the concept of loss closer to home to increase the audience’s empathy, a key factor in the overarching theme. This motif reaffirms Donne’s point that just as people are united in life, they are united in death: “[A]ny man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind” (Line 14).
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By John Donne
