He didn’t know who. Ill as he was, he wondered whether the people around his bed had asked the church to ring for him, without telling him.
Rung while someone was still alive
In 1604, the Church of England set down its rules for every parish in 141 canons, or church laws. Canon 67 is about what the minister, the parish priest, must do when someone in his parish is dangerously ill. Its last lines are about the bell:
“And, when any is passing out of this life, a bell shall be tolled, and the Minister shall not then slack to do his last duty. And after the party’s death, if it so fall out, there shall be rung no more than one short peal, and one other before the burial, and one other after the burial.”
So the slow tolling came first, while the person was still alive, and the priest had to do his last duty to the dying person without delay. After the death, there was only a short peal, a brief round of ringing. People called the first one the passing bell, because it was rung for someone passing out of this life.
Why toll for someone who hasn’t died yet? In 1662, a bishop sent his parishes a list of questions to check on each church. One of them asks whether anyone neglects to toll the passing bell, “whereby good people, remembering their own mortality and all our Christian Society, may recommend their estate unto God’s mercy.”
In plain words: whoever heard the bell would think of their own death, and pray for the person who was dying.
What was the passing bell?
It was the church bell that tolled slowly while someone in the parish was dying. An English church law from 1604 required it. A bishop gave the reason in 1662: whoever heard it would remember their own mortality and pray for the dying person. After the death came a short peal.
A fever in London
John Donne was an English poet and priest, and the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, the clergyman in charge of it. While he held that post, a dangerous illness brought him close to death. In bed, he wrote one meditation for each stage of his illness, 23 in all, and published them in 1624 as Devotions upon Emergent Occasions: prayers and reflections on things that happen to you without warning.
In the sixteenth meditation, he lies listening to the bells of the church next door as they ring for one funeral after another. They can hardly mark anyone’s funeral, he writes, “but that I knew him, or knew that he was my neighbour.” All those funerals of men like him gave him, in his words, “a comfort whensoever mine shall come”: some peace about his own death, whenever it would come.
In the seventeenth, the sound changes. Now the bell tolls slowly, for someone who is dying, and Donne doesn’t know who. He writes:
“perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that.”
The bell he heard could have been his own.
A few lines later comes the sentence everyone quotes. Donne writes that “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” Diminishes means makes smaller. To send to know is to send someone out to find out, and thee is the old word for you.
Then he does what the passing bell was rung for. At the end of the seventeenth meditation, he prays for the dying stranger, and asks God to make up for “the shortness of time” that man has left. In the eighteenth, the slow tolling turns into a stronger ringing. The man has died.
Why does Donne say a stranger’s death is about you?
He gives two reasons in one paragraph. The bell tolls for you because you will die too: Donne, in bed with a fever, could not even tell whether it was ringing for him. And it tolls for you because you are part of mankind, so you lose something with every death.
Grief for people you will never meet
Every bell that tolls for a stranger’s death is also tolling for you.
I came across the thought behind that line in a column by René Diekstra, a Dutch psychologist. His column ends with this bell. Before that, he writes about grief, and then widens it to the whole world. In my translation: “only those who can grieve over the pain in the world (such as the pain in Gaza or Sudan) can love the world, life, others.”
Then he turns to Hemingway’s 1940 novel about the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Hemingway was right, Diekstra writes: the bell always tolls for you too. Strictly speaking, that answer is Donne’s. Hemingway printed part of Donne’s passage at the front of his novel.
Is it true, though? Does the thought of your own death make you care about strangers?
In front of a funeral home
In 2002, the psychologist Eva Jonas and three colleagues tested something close to it. They named what they found the Scrooge effect, after Ebenezer Scrooge, the miser in A Christmas Carol by the English novelist Charles Dickens, who turns generous after a ghost shows him his own grave.
In the first test, people on the street were asked how they felt about two charities they themselves thought were important. Some were interviewed right in front of a funeral home. Others were interviewed a few blocks away. In front of the funeral home, people were more positive about their charities.
In the second test, people were first made to think about their own death. A comparison group got an unpleasant topic that had nothing to do with dying. Afterward, they could give money to a cause in the United States and to a cause abroad. Those who had thought about death gave more to the American cause. To the cause abroad, they gave no more than the others.
Near the funeral home, people grew warmer, and in the second test that warmth stayed close to home.
Donne’s passage goes further. In the same paragraph as the bell, he writes: “If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less.” A clod is a lump of earth. Even a lump of earth that washes away far from where you stand makes the whole continent smaller.
Does thinking about death make people more generous?
In a 2002 study led by the psychologist Eva Jonas, it did, up to a point. People interviewed in front of a funeral home felt more positive about charities they cared about. People who had just thought about their own death gave more to a cause in their own country, and no more to a cause abroad.
Headlines and sirens
You hear about a stranger’s death in other ways now: a headline, a number from a war far away, a siren down the street.
The next exercise follows Donne’s three meditations, and no study has tested it.
What can I do when I hear that a stranger has died?
Follow Donne’s order. Don’t send to know first. Let it be about you for a moment: you will die too. Then turn to the person who died and the people at their bedside. If you pray, pray for them, as Donne did. If you don’t, keep them in mind for one minute before you move on.
Your own hour first
I built Last Hour Experience as one hour you spend alone, with headphones, as if it were your last. Near the end, you write a farewell letter to whoever you choose. Donne needed a fever and the church next door to hear his own bell. The bishop of 1662 put the steps in order: first remember your own mortality, then turn to the stranger who is dying. After an hour like that, who would you think of the next time you read a stranger’s name in the news?
Questions people ask. One of them is me.
Is it “ask not for whom the bell tolls”?
John Donne, the English poet and priest, wrote “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee” in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions of 1624. The words “ask not” don’t appear in his text. To send to know meant sending someone out to find out who the bell was for.
Is the famous line “No man is an island” from a poem by John Donne?
No, John Donne wrote it as prose. He means that no one stands alone: every man, he writes, is “a piece of the continent.” The line comes from the seventeenth meditation in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, published in 1624, in the same long paragraph as the bell tolling for thee. It is often printed in short lines, like a poem.
Why did Hemingway call his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls?
Ernest Hemingway, the American novelist, took the title from John Donne’s seventeenth meditation and printed part of that passage at the front of the book. The 1940 novel follows Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, who is sent to blow up a bridge.
Do I have to be religious to take John Donne’s bell seriously?
John Donne was a priest, and his meditation is full of God. The reason in his famous sentence needs no faith, though. Every death makes him smaller, he writes, because he is part of mankind. Anyone can hold that thought, religious or not.
Sources
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions by John Donne, the English poet and priest, printed in London in 1624. Meditations 16 to 18 and the prayer after the seventeenth are about the bells. The edition at Project Gutenberg, an online library of old books, also has the account of Donne’s illness by Izaak Walton, an English writer who wrote an early life of Donne.
The Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiastical of the Church of England, the church laws of 1604, in an 1874 edition with notes by Mackenzie Walcott, a clergyman at Chichester Cathedral. Canon 67 has the bell. The note under it quotes the bishop’s question from 1662 about the passing bell. I read the scan at the Internet Archive, an online library.
The Scrooge Effect, the 2002 study by Eva Jonas, Jeff Schimel, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pyszczynski in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, a psychology research journal. The two tests with the funeral home and the charities are described in the summary the journal publishes with the article.
Voor wie de klok luidt, Dutch for For Whom the Bell Tolls, a column by René Diekstra, a Dutch psychologist, published online by Noordhollands Dagblad, a Dutch newspaper. The quotes come from the printed page I came across, and the English translations are mine.
For Whom the Bell Tolls on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, for the facts about Hemingway’s novel.