Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it…

Meditation XVII of the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions is written to the sound of a church bell tolling for a dying man. Donne, himself sick in bed, reflects that the bell may be tolling for him without his knowing it; that “The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth”; and then, in the most famous sentences of the book, that “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” If a clod is washed away, Europe is the less. “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind”, and therefore, the line.

Donne, Dean of St Paul’s, wrote the Devotions during and just after a grave illness in the winter of 1623, and published them in 1624.

Hemingway took the passage as the epigraph and title of For Whom the Bell Tolls in 1940, and the line has stood since for the bond between all human lives.

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII, 1624

Checked word for word in the work itself.

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