This phrase, For Whom the Bell Tolls, kept coming into my head this morning while I was doing my yoga and, as happens, set off a train of thought …
It is, of course, the title of Hemingway’s great novel of the Spanish Civil War. If you haven’t read it, do. And while we’re on that subject, let me mention another unforgettable Spanish Civil War novel, Winter In Madrid, this one by a contemporary British author, C.J. Sansom.
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway’s title, is a quotation from John Donne, the English poet and younger contemporary of William Shakespeare. Some think the character of Hamlet was at least partly based on Donne.
Now what Donne actually wrote was: Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
Donne was a great poet, one of the greatest in the English language, but these words do not come from a poem, they come from a sermon he delivered late in life when he was Dean of St Paul’s in the City of London. For Donne could not decide whether he was a bohemian poet – on the lines of the French poet Francois Villon – a lover of wine, women and song (which he was), or a devout Anglican priest (which he became). No doubt a lot of soul-searching and vacillation went on in The Mermaid Tavern and around the City and Southwark as he gradually gave up the former life-style and devoted himself to the latter. Soul-searching and vacillation which would have afforded Shakespeare and his fellow-actors and writers much amusement. And no one vacillates and soul-searches like Hamlet!
Those lines, as I say, do not come from a poem; but scan them:
Send not to ask for whom the bell tolls.
It tolls for thee.
The first line is a perfect pentameter, and the whole is something Shakespeare would have been proud to have penned.
You can’t keep a great poet down.
But what did Donne mean?
Immediately before these lines comes another much quoted line: No man is an island entire unto himself …
What happens to one, happens to all.
This is not the cold and soulless, so-called scientific, world view. This is the world view of the visionary and mystic. The world view of our ancestors. The view that mind is primary, that matter is a function of mind, not mind of matter. And minds are, mind is, interconnected. As above, so below. As here, so there. As then, so now.
The bell that Donne heard all those years ago across the roofs of the old city tolls for us.
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I’ll post a couple of Donne’s poems (one of each!) tomorrow and Monday.