No (Wo)Man is An Island

I had to think today of that poem by John Donne, “No Man is an Island.”  It came to me in the middle of some tense family moments. It was quarantine o’clock and, as usual,  my wife and I were being the worst parents ever.

Then, quite out of nothing, the poem popped into my head and I was taken back to my memory of those solemn lines. I said them loudly to inject a little absurdity into the family din.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,Every man is a piece of…

But here I stopped.  I couldn’t remember the line.  I cursed, mildly, and my daughter scolded me. “Daddy!”

I’m not supposed to curse, you see. I love to curse.

Well, the first free moment, I dropped myself in front of a computer to look the poem up. Like a cat, my daughter came out of nowhere to sit in my lap. She can read pretty well and so her mouth automatically began reciting the words.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man…

And for a brief moment I marveled at the sound of John Donne coming from the lips of an eight-year-old.  The wisdom of the words mingled with the childishness of voice. It made the poem hover between the boring and the miraculous.

But she stopped.  She became enraged.  “Man?  MAN! I don’t want to hear the word MAN!”

This is what happens when you send your daughter to a liberal girl’s school.

She once asked me “do men go to college?” I feigned outrage of course, but secretly I was very happy.  It was the right kind of ignorance. And perhaps that is how we should measure our progress as a culture, by the quality of our ignorance.

Well, the poem lost her and she was about to get up, but the old English teacher in me didn’t want her to quit, so I offered to read the poem differently. I read it this way:

No woman is an island,

Entire of itself;

Every  woman 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 friend’s

Or of thine own were.

Any woman’s death diminishes me,

Because I am involved in woman-kind.

And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee.

I suppose it kept the gist of the poem, enough for my daughter to hear it through. But she was unimpressed.

I, on the other hand,  felt kind of left out by that reading. I mean, I felt like the whole world were suddenly run by a cabal of women and I–as a man–were oppressed not necessarily by actions, but in the very structure of the way the world was represented.  Hegemony! Is this what women were feeling all the time? It hit me like a ton of bricks. No wonder men have fallen into disrepute.

Now, I am not going to lie. I went back and reread the poem once more in the traditional sense. Look, I’m a guy. And I love John Donne.  And this one seemed strange to me.  For one, there wasn’t the usual mental gymnastics needed to read it.  Donne wrote poetry like a lawyer and often the hardest part of understanding this guys poetry is that you feel like you need a degree in 16th century alchemy.  (New online learning opportunity!)

And as far as I know, the main way he put those skills to use was in seducing women. He was incorrigible, an absolute cad.  But late in life, he found religion and became a high ranking holy man guilt ridden and reverent at the same time.  HIs late poems sound like this:

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

’tis a bit kinky for my taste, but you could tell he was sorry.

But back to this “No Man is an Island” poem.

The thing that struck me as I was thinking about the poem and watching my son drop oatmeal on the floor and my other son getting frustrated that the computer didn’t work; watching my wife try to take five minutes to look at her phone, only to wonder who left it at 1%; there on that quarantine Friday in the malaise and maelstrom of life, I had a question:

Why do we believe the bell is tolling for death?  Hemingway saw it that way, and that is the undisputed, standard reading. But church bells ring for lots of reasons: weddings, services, fires, landslides, as well as death.  If I had to generalize why the bell rings, I’d have to say: Duty.

The bell rings to call one to duty, for to serve one another is to serve oneself. No HUMAN is an island because we are actually one big thing, connected by duty.  And sure, it’s a misreading. But a misreading can be good too, right?  It’s about the quality of our ignorance.

Well, the moment passed and so did my time in front of the computer. Poetry isn’t an all-day affair. It was time for me to do the dishes.

John Donne thinking about doing the dishes.