No Man Is an Island

John Donne’s religious background bears on the poem’s interpretation. After all, the poem is excerpted from one of his most famous religious writings, “Meditation 17.” While the excerpted poem, taken on its own, contemplates human interconnectedness and mortality, the full Meditation relates these things to the concept of affliction and spiritual purgation, suggesting that the pain of mortality—and all human suffering—is a purifying gift: “No man hath affliction enough, that is not matured and ripened by it, and made fit for God by that affliction” (Donne, John. The Works of John Donne. 1839. Volume III, Edited by Henry Alford).

Apart from the specific context of the Meditation, the poem reflects the later years of a person who has suffered much and been made to question their deepest convictions. While the first half of Donne’s work is marked by spirited eros, the second half of his writing career presents musings of a more religious theme. Donne published his collection Divine Poems in 1607 and was ordained in the Anglican faith in 1615. He then served as the dean of St. Paul’s in 1621. Given his fraught conversion from Catholicism to Anglicanism at the age of 22 and his devotion to religion, it is unsurprising that his poem focuses on the impermanence of earthly life and the reckoning of human mortality.