Meditation 17

During the 1600s, church bells served various purposes, and the sound of their tolling would have been a frequent occurrence. For a mostly illiterate congregation, bells not only conveyed information but called people together. Bells would ring to indicate specific times of the day when the faithful would be called to church for prayers. Bells would also ring simply to give daily reminders of the joys of being a believer. They would celebrate happy events like marriages, births, and baptisms. In contrast, bells could also warn of impending dangers—and, as in “Meditation 17,” they would inform the congregants that a member was seriously ill or had even died. The bells rang in different sequences, with different sounds, to distinguish the nature of their message. Donne uses the bells as a familiar, even mundane tool to symbolize spiritual messages and the interconnectedness of all humanity.

One motif is God as the divine author. As this is also one of the three metaphysical conceits in the meditation, Donne builds elaborate symbol scaffolding to support the motif. He begins with the unifying claim that “all mankind is of one author and is one volume” (Line 6), meaning that every person’s life has been written by God, who has compiled those lives in one enormous book.