John Donne

by John Donne

  Devotions upon Emergent Occasions

  1. Meditation

  Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man! This minute I was well, and am ill this minute. I am surprised with a sudden change and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name. We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work, but in a minute a canon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity, nay, undeserved, if we consider only disorder, summons [10] us, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant. O miserable condition of man, which was not imprinted by God, who as He is immortal Himself, had put a coal, a beam of immortality into us, which we might have blown into a flame, but blew it out by our first sin; we beggared ourselves by hearkening after false riches, and infatuated ourselves by hearkening after false knowledge. So that now, we do not only die, but die upon the rack, die by the torment of sickness; nor that only, but are pre-afflicted, super-afflicted with these jealousies and suspicions [20] and apprehensions of sickness, before we can call it a sickness. We are not sure we are ill; one hand asks the other by the pulse, and our eye asks our own urine how we do. O multiplied misery! We die, and cannot enjoy death, because we die in this torment of sickness; we are tormented with sickness, and cannot stay till the torment come, but pre-apprehensions and presages prophesy those torments, which induce that death before either come; and our dissolution is conceived in these first changes, quickened in the sickness itself, and born in death, which bears date from these first changes. Is this the honour [30] which man hath by being a little world, that he hath these earthquakes in himself, sudden shakings; these lightnings, sudden flashes; these thunders, sudden noises; these eclipses, sudden offuscations and darkenings of his senses; these blazing stars, sudden fiery exhalations; these rivers of blood, sudden red waters? Is he a world to himself only, therefore, that he hath enough in himself, not only to destroy and execute himself, but to presage that execution upon himself, to assist the sickness, to antedate the sickness, to make the sickness the more irremediable by sad apprehensions; and, as if he would [40] make a fire the more vehement by sprinkling water upon the coals, so to wrap a hot fever in cold melancholy, lest the fever alone should not destroy fast enough without this contribution, nor perfect the work (which is destruction) except we joined an artificial sickness of our own melancholy, to our natural, our unnatural fever. O perplexed discomposition, O riddling distemper, O miserable condition of man!

  4. Meditation

  It is too little to call man a little world; except God, man is a diminutive to nothing. Man consists of more pieces, more parts, than the world, than the world doeth, nay, than the world is. And if those pieces were extended and stretched out in man, as they are in the world, man would be the giant and the world the dwarf, the world but the map, and the man the world. If all the veins in our bodies were extended to rivers, and all the sinews to veins of mines, and all the muscles that lie upon one another, to hills, and all the bones to quarries of stones, and all the other pieces to the proportion of those which [10] correspond to them in the world, the air would be too little for this orb of man to move in, the firmament would be but enough for this star; for as the whole world hath nothing to which something in man doth not answer, so hath man many pieces of which the whole world hath no representation. Enlarge this meditation upon this great world, man, so far as to consider the immensity of the creatures this world produces. Our creatures are our thoughts, creatures that are born giants that reach from east to west, from earth to heaven, that do not only bestride all the sea and land, but span the sun and firmament at [20] once; my thoughts reach all, comprehend all. Inexplicable mystery; I their creator am in a close prison, in a sick bed, any where, and any one of my creatures, my thoughts, is with the sun, and beyond the sun, overtakes the sun, and overgoes the sun in one pace, one step, everywhere. And then, as the other world produces serpents and vipers, malignant and venomous creatures, and worms and caterpillars that endeavour to devour that world which produces them, and monsters compiled and complicated of divers parents and kinds, so this world, our selves produces all these in us, in producing diseases and sicknesses [30] of all those sorts, venomous and infectious diseases, feeding and consuming diseases, and manifold and entangled diseases, made up of many several ones. And can the other world name so many venomous, so many consuming, so many monstrous creatures, as we can diseases of all these kinds? O miserable abundance! O beggarly riches! How much do we lack of having remedies for every disease when as yet we have not names for them? But we have a Hercules against the giants, these monsters, that is, the physician; he musters up all the forces of the other world to succour this, all nature to relieve [40] man. We have the physician, but we are not the physician. Here we shrink in our proportion, sink in our dignity, in respect of very mean creatures, who are physicians to themselves. The hart that is pursued and wounded, they say, knows an herb, which being eaten throws off the arrow, a strange kind of vomit. The dog that pursues it, though he be subject to sickness, even proverbially, knows his grass that recovers him. And it may be true that the drugger is as near to man as to other creatures. It may be that obvious and present simples, easy to [50] be had, would cure him; but the apothecary is not so near him, nor the physician so near him, as they two are to other creatures; man hath not that innate instinct to apply those natural medicines to his present danger, as those inferior creatures have; he is not his own apothecary, his own physician, as they are. Call back, therefore, thy meditation again, and bring it down; what’s become of man’s great extent and proportion, when himself shrinks himself and consumes himself to a handful of dust? What’s become of his soaring thoughts, his compassing thoughts, when himself brings himself to the ignorance, [60] to the thoughtlessness, of the grave? His diseases are his own, but the physician is not; he hath them at home, but he must send for the physician.

  17. Meditation

  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 head which is my head too, and engrafted into that body, whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns [10] 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 [20] 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 that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God. Who [30] 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 friends 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 [40] 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 monies, his treasure will not defray him as he travels. [50] 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.

  19. Expostulation

  My God, my God, Thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldest be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that Thou sayest? But Thou art also (Lord, I intend it to Thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter abuse it to Thy diminution), Thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too: a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to such remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious [10] elocutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding persuasions, so persuading commandments, such sinews even in Thy milk, and such things in Thy words, as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps, Thou art the Dove that flies. O, what words but Thine can express the inexpressible texture and composition of Thy word, in which, to one man that argument that binds his faith to believe that to be the word of God, is the reverent simplicity of the Word, and to another the majesty of the word, and in which two men, equally pious, may meet, and one wonder that all [20] should not understand it, and the other, as much, that any man should. So, Lord, Thou givest us the same earth to labour on and to lie in, a house and a grave, of the same earth; so Lord, Thou givest us the same word for our satisfaction, and for our inquisition, for our instruction, and for our admiration too. For there are places that Thy servants Hierome and Augustine would scarce believe (when they grew warm by mutual letters) of one another, that they understood them, and yet both Hierome and Augustine call upon persons whom they knew to be far weaker than they thought one another (old women and young maids) to read Thy Scriptures, without confining them to [30] these or those places. Neither art Thou thus a figurative, a metaphorical God in Thy word only, but in Thy works too. The style of Thy works, the phrase of Thine actions, is metaphorical. The institution of Thy whole worship in the old law was a continual allegory; types and figures overspread all, and figures flowed into figures, and poured themselves out into farther figures; circumcision carried a figure of baptism, and baptism carries a figure of that purity which we shall have in perfection in the New Jerusalem. Neither didst Thou speak and work in this language only in the time of Thy prophets; but since Thou spokest in Thy Son, it is [40] so too. How often, how much more often, doth Thy Son call Himself a way, and a light, and a gate, and a vine, and bread, than the Son of God or of man? How much oft’ner doth He exhibit a metaphorical Christ than a real, a literal? This hath occasioned Thine ancient servants, whose delight it was to write after Thy copy, to proceed the same way in their expositions of the Scriptures, and in their composing both of public liturgies and of private prayers to Thee, to make their accesses to Thee in such a kind of language as Thou wast pleased to speak to them, in a figurative, in a metaphorical language, in which manner I am [50] bold to call the comfort which I receive now in this sickness, in the indication of the concoction and maturity thereof, in certain clouds and residences, which the physicians observe, a discovering of land from sea after a long and tempestuous voyage …

  Death’s Duel, Selections

  Or, A Consolation to the Soul Against the Dying Life and Living Death of the Body. Delivered in a Sermon at Whitehall, Before the King’s Majesty, in the Beginning of Lent, 1630.

  By that Late Learned and Reverend Divine, John Donne, Dr in Divinity, and Dean of St Paul’s, London. Being His last Sermon, and Called by His Majesty’s household, the Doctor’s own Funeral Sermon

  To the Reader

  This sermon was, by sacred authority, styled the author’s own funeral sermon, most fitly, whether we respect the time or matter. It was preached not many days before his death, as if, having done this, there remained nothing for him to do but to die; and the matter is of death – the occasion and subject of all funeral sermons. It hath been observed of this reverend man, that his faculty in preaching continually increased, and that, as he exceeded others at first, so at last he exceeded himself. This is his last sermon; I will not say it is therefore his best, because [10] all his were excellent. Yet thus much: a dying man’s words, if they concern ourselves, do usually make the deepest impression, as being spoken most feelingly, and with least affectation. Now, whom doth it concern to learn both the danger and benefit of death? Death is every man’s enemy, and intends hurt to all, though to many he be occasion of greatest good. This enemy we must all combat dying, whom he living did almost conquer, having discovered the utmost of his power, the utmost of his cruelty. May we make such use of this and other the like preparatives, that neither death, whensoever it shall come, may [20] seem terrible, nor life tedious, how long soever it shall last.

  PSALM 68, verse 20, in fine. And unto God (the Lord) belong the issues of death (i.e. from death).

  Buildings stand by the benefit of their foundations that sustain and support them, and of their buttresses that comprehend and embrace them, and of their contignations that knit and unite them: The foundations suffer them not to sink, the buttresses suffer them not to swerve, and the contignation and knitting suffers them not to cleave; the body of our building is in the former part of this verse: it is this, He that is our God is the God of salvation; ad salutes, of salvation in the plural, so it is in the original; the God that gives us spiritual and temporal [10] salvation too. But of this building, the foundation, the buttresses, the contignations, are in this part of the verse which constitutes our text, and in the three divers acceptations of the words amongst our expositors. Unto God the Lord belong the issues from death, for first, the foundation of this building (that our God is the God of all salvation) is laid in this, that unto this God the Lord belong the issues of death; that is, it is in His power to give us an issue and deliverance even then when we are brought to the jaws and teeth of death, and to the lips of that whirlpool, the grave. And so in this acceptation, this exitus mortis, this issue of death is liberatio à morte, a deliverance [20] from death, and this is the most obvious and most ordinary acceptation of these words, and that upon which our translation lays hold, the issues from death. And then, secondly, the buttresses that comprehend and settle this building, that He that is our God is the God of all salvation, are thus raised; unto God the Lord belong the issues of death, that is, the disposition and manner of our death; what kind of issue and transmigration we shall have out of this world, whether prepared or sudden, whether violent or natural, whether in our perfect senses or shaken and disordered by sickness, there is no condemnation [30] to be argued out of that, no judgement to be made upon that, for howsoever they die, precious in His sight is the death of His saints, and with
Him are the issues of death; the ways of our departing out of this life are in His hands. And so in this sense of the words, this exitus mortis, the issues of death, is liberatio in morte, a deliverance in death; not that God will deliver us from dying, but that He will have a care of us in the hour of death, of what kind soever our passage be. And in this sense and acceptation of the words, the natural frame and contexture doth well and pregnantly administer unto us. And then, [40] lastly, the contignation and knitting of this building, that He that is our God is the God of all salvations, consists in this, unto this God the Lord belong the issues of death; that is, that this God the Lord having united and knit both natures in one, and being God, having also come into this world in our flesh, He could have no other means to save us, He could have no other issue out of this world, nor return to His former glory, but by death. And so in this sense, this exitus mortis, this issue of death, is liberatio per mortem, a deliverance by death, by the [50] death of this God, our Lord Christ Jesus. …

  It was prophesied before, said they, and it is performed now, Christ is risen without seeing corruption. Now, this which is so singularly peculiar to Him, that His flesh should not see corruption, at His second coming, His coming to judgement, shall extend to all that are then alive; their home shall not see corruption, because, as the apostle says, and says as a secret, as a mystery, Behold I show you a mystery, we shall not all sleep (that is, not continue in the state of the dead in the grave), but we shall all be changed in an instant, we shall have a dissolution, [60] and in the same instant a redintegration, a recompacting of body and soul, and that shall be truly a death and truly a resurrection, but no sleeping in corruption; but for us that die now and sleep in the state of the dead, we must all pass this posthume death, this death after death, nay, this death after burial, this dissolution after dissolution, this death of corruption and putrefaction, of vermiculation and incineration, of dissolution and dispersion in and from the grave, when these bodies that have been the children of royal parents and the parents of royal children, must say with Job, Corruption, thou [70] art my father, and to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister. Miserable riddle, when the same worm must be my mother, and my sister, and myself! Miserable incest, when I must be married to my mother and my sister, and be both father and mother to my own mother and sister, beget and bear that worm which is all that miserable penury; when my mouth shall be filled with dust, and the worm shall feed, and feed sweetly [Job 24:20] upon me; when the ambitious man shall have no satisfaction if the poorest alive tread upon him, nor the poorest receive any contentment in being made equal to princes, for [80] they shall be equal but in dust. … Truly the consideration of this posthume death, this death after burial, that after God (with whom are the issues of death) hath delivered me from the death of the womb, by bringing me into the world, and from the manifold deaths of the world, by laying me in the grave, I must die again in an incineration of this flesh, and in a dispersion of that dust. That that monarch, who spread over many nations alive, must in his dust lie in a corner of that sheet of lead, and there but so long as that lead will last; and that private and retired man, that thought himself his own for ever, and never came forth, must in his dust of the grave be published, [90] and (such are the revolutions of the grave) be mingled with the dust of every highway and of every dunghill, and swallowed in every puddle and pond, this is the most inglorious and contemptible vilification, the most deadly and peremptory nullification of man, that we can consider. …