No Man Is An Island

No Man Is an Island names a passage from John Donne's Meditation XVII in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, published in 1624. It is prose, although it is often presented separately as a poem. Hearing a bell associated with another person's death leads the speaker to consider the spiritual connection among human lives. Images of land, books, and a shared church give this reflection different forms. The passage's enduring force comes from the way an apparently distant loss becomes a claim upon one's own attention and compassion.