"For Whom the Bells Toll…"
"Meditation 17", a prose work by John Donne, is a work that analyzes the importance of each person’s role in every other human’s life. The theme of this work is a very clear message delivered by the way of metaphors. He compares the way we are all connected to three specific ideas or objects. The first metaphor is a comparison between the human race and the pages of a book. Another metaphor implementing this theme is his reference to the connection of man and the earth or land. The last and most significant metaphor is his reference to the tolling death bells.
Donne creates a moral of sorts as he discusses each person’s place in this world. He refers to humankind as being some sort of book with God as the author. Each person, he says, is a leaf of paper that has been picked up and bundled by God’s hands with the other "leaves" from the world to form a completed volume of humankind. He goes on to say that we are never deleted or torn out of that book but merely changed or translated into different "languages" by certain occurrences such as sickness, age, war, and justice in which God plays a part. In the end, he says that God places all of his perfected volumes of work in His own library in heaven.
"No man is an island…" begins the next metaphor. He tries to bring the point across that we are not here in this world alone; we are here with one another and everything we do affects everyone else. In the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley the characters often say, "everyone belongs to everyone else," which is basically the sentiment presented here. He is saying we do not belong only to ourselves as an island surrounded by nothing but water, but to the whole body of people as each centimeter of land of a continent belongs to and is connected to every other centimeter of land that surrounds it. He also says that every little piece that is washed away from the mainland affects the entire body of land because it is lessened by that one piece. It does not matter whether the piece taken away was an acquaintance or someone unknown to you, he or she was still a part of the whole and the whole will be changed because of the loss.
The main and most meaningful metaphor represented in this work is that of the tolling bells. "For whom the bell tolls" is unimportant to him. He believes it does not matter who the death knell is for because the death will affect us anyway. The bell tolls is to have the affect of bringing us closer to God in Donne’s opinion. He believes that each time a death bell rings it should cause us to reflect on it and how it could have been our own death bell. After reflecting, we should then prepare ourselves for death so that one can enter the kingdom of Heaven and to be with God.
I believe this meditation has some truth that is represented today. Recently, a notable public figure has passed away and her death affected entire nations. Each time we find ourselves in any kind of problem, we usually pray to God to help us through the problem, which brings us closer to Him. The actions of those an ocean away could and do have an affect upon us here in the United States. Everyone’s actions have serious effects upon everyone else. We are all connected by a thin string so that our actions affect and can help the other "pages" of the book.