Devotions upon Emergent Occasions / Death's Duel (Vintage Spiritual Classics) [Paperback]

I must admit that I bought this book solely for the most famous of Donne's Meditations - Nunc lento sonitu dicunt, morieris, AKA "no man is an island". I was unaware of the circumstances which surrounded Donne's writing of the Meditations. He had taken ill with a strong and high fever, and believed that he was dying. The meditations trace his spiritual journey through his illness, starting with the beginning (The first alteration, the first grudging, or the sickness), through attempts to treat him (The physician is sent for), to treatments (They apply pigeons, to draw the vapors from the head - yuck!), until he comes to terms spiritually with his fate (From the bells of the church adjoining, I am daily remembered of my burial in the funerals of others).

These meditations make a fascinating contrast with the other work by Donne in this book: Death's Duel. This was the last sermon that Donne ever preached, one month before he died. Not only did he know that the end was near, but so did his audience, who called it "the doctor's funeral sermon". It is interesting to see how Donne's view of death had changed in the years between the two works. By the time Death's Duel was written, Donne's mother, wife, and six of his twelve children were already dead.

In spite of the fact that Donne wrote over three hundred years ago, I am still influenced by his writings. Although I am not Christian, I agree with many of Donne's thoughts on how people interact with each other, and how we effect the lives of others, though we might not realise it. "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind." Donne, though dead, is still involved in mankind, and this book aptly displays it.

When John Donne was writing his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, he was convinced that he was near death. For most of his early life, he led a life that he would later come to see as profligate and dissolute. After he was appointed as Dean of St. Paul's Parish, he slowly changed into a zealous believer in God, the Bible, and the afterlife. His parishioners and reading audience well knew of his early lifestyle and could see that his metamorphosis was genuine. When he grew ill in 1623, they could relate to the inner turmoil that they knew he felt as he lay in bed contemplating the excesses of his past life and the uncertain future of the next. But there was far more to the bare facts of his infirmity. His meditations, which were never intended for publication, have held readers spellbound for centuries due to the rhetorical flourishes of prose that ironically bring to mind the very libertine poems that he wrote as a call to celebrate the joys of a carnal-based love. His meditations, despite their seeming fragmentary nature, are resonant with dramatic immediacy, memorable phrasing, driving rhythms, compelling figurative language, and an unexpected level of emotional passion mixed with a more traditional amount of acceptance of the inevitable.

Just as Donne has the ability to enthrall the reader in his early light verse, so does he in his later serious prose. His initial meditation directly and immediately involves the reader with his doleful lamentation of personal illness. Donne uses a combination of metaphor and parallelism as he writes, "But in a minute, a cannon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all." This "cannon" is a symbol of heavenly displeasure of Donne's self-professed sins. Donne also has a talent for choosing the apt phrase. His use of paradox as in "we beggared ourselves by hearkening after false riches," forces the reader to connect the unreality of earthly riches with the poverty that results when those riches are achieved. Further in Meditation I, his mention of "we die and cannot enjoy death," emphasizes the duality of death in that death is legitimately to be feared but to those who have led sinful lives, death cannot bring an end to worldly pain.

In Meditations IV and XII, Donne makes frequent and forceful use of micro and macro imagery, the result of which is to take humanity and "blow" it up into a gargantuan state that emphatically connects his belief of man as a creature of free will to having to accept responsibility for the acting out of that will. When he writes that "It is too little to call a man a little world," he suggests that man's bodies and thoughts, now impossibly enlarged, are titanic enough to house and radiate ideas that can traverse the universe all the while implying by ironic contrast the present immobility of his bedridden form.

Donne is also a master of personification, the ability to portray non-human entities as possessing human traits. As he attempts to emphasize his contention that all of humanity is linked in such a way that what one link feels or experiences has some measurable effect on the others, Donne pictures a kindly nature that is intimately involved in human affairs. He describes in Meditation XVII, a nature that can baptize a child, and at the same time can connect that baptism to him personally. He pictures that child as becoming connected to a body of Christian believers as analogous to that child's being "engrafted into that body whereof I am a member." In the same meditation, he writes what has since become one of the most widely quoted sentences in English. "Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." In these few words, Donne punctuates his thesis that all the separate parts of humanity are linked in ways that transcend the physical.

It is one of the ironies of Donne's conversion from the libertine "Jack" Donne of his early verse to the mature "John" Donne of the meditations that the very qualities of rhetoric that pleased the former are still used by the latter to set out a moral view of the universe that filled him with an overpowering sense of dread. That we today can feel this dread in each meditation is a marker of a man obsessed with past sins but unable to find a way to live with them.

for this book,devotions upon emergent occasions and deaths duel has already been so good. Wow! what more can i possibly say....alot. firstly, fascinating stuff. it was really great and jesus Christ we love him, John Donne? WOW?!! what do you think? read it really it is very nicely proportionate for me the dimensions where spectacular and also a very nice size, John Donne? Where in the world is John Donne when we need him now....bye John Donne?