Devotions upon Emergent Occasions is a 1624 prose work by the English theologian and writer John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. It is a series of reflections that were written as Donne recovered from a serious illness. The work consists of twenty-three parts describing each stage of the sickness. Each part is further divided into a Meditation, an Expostulation , and a Prayer. The work is an excellent example of seventeenth century English spirituality and sometimes feels a bit dated. Yet much solid nourishment can be found. "Death's Duel" is Donne's last sermon prepared for presentation before the King during Lent; it is commonly seen as Donne's own funeral oration. The biographical material is from Izaak Walton's Lives. The most famous part of the Devotions is number XVII , containing these lines: No man is an island, entire of itself; every man 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 man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee. >/p>

John Donne was an English Jacobean preacher, sometime lawyer, later in life a Member of Parliament and Royal Chaplain. Marrying for love against the wishes of his influential father-in-law; Donne's career was cast into shadow: forcing him to support his wife, Anne, as best he might under a specter of unforgiving penury. Despite such hardships - perhaps because of them - Donne's writings demonstrate a mastery of poetry layered with metaphysical meaning and mystery: which continues to delight and challenge modern-day readers. Donne's "divine poems" - the focus of this collection - present profound theological insights using absorbing allegories and beautiful imagery.At the end of Donne's life - as his health deteriorated under illnesses of increasing severity - his poetry served him as: distraction, consolation, and even "public confession". With them, Donne cheerfully but soberly faces the limits of his own mortality: and contemplates the mysteries that lie beyond the grave.

The Holy Sonnets-also known as the Divine Meditations or Divine Sonnets-are a series of nineteen poems by the English poet John Donne . The sonnets were first published in 1633-two years after Donne's death.

Soldier, secretary, Anglican priest, MP, father of 12, Dean of St Paul's...it's amazing that John Donne had any spare time. But this collection of his poems shows why it is good to give work to a busy person. 'The Poems of John Donne' is an education and an inspiration, with his signature rhetorical style ever-present. Through love letters, songs, epigrams, satires and memorial verse, Donne reveals a breadth of knowledge and depth of understanding of the human spirit that has hardly been surpassed. This collection is perfect for fans of William Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. Born to parents who refused to reject their Roman Catholic faith, John Donne (1572-1631) defied the odds to live a remarkable life. He is best known as a poet, with his works celebrated by many as the greatest of all metaphysical verse. It includes sonnets, love poems, religious poems, epigrams, elegies, songs and satires. Despite his Catholic background, Donne was ordained as an Anglican priest and made Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in 1621. He was a Member of Parliament in 1601 and 1614.

"Donne's Style In John Donne's day, a satire was such a poem as a satyr might compose. Satyrs were rough, savage creatures in Greek mythology, human to the waist but goat from there down. That is the reason that Donne's style in these poems exceeds his normal difficulty in syntax, vocabulary, thought, and meter. His age enjoyed untangling such puzzles, and some poets cultivated obscurity as an art, called asprezza. Wordplay like "while bellows pant below" (Satyre 2), where the same syllables, stressed differently, produce two different words almost side by side, entertained them. An acoustical analogue to obscurity, Donne's rhymes are often deliberately lame, while his rhythms nearly defy scansion and yet refuse to become mere prose. By keeping the drum beat just barely audible, he makes us feel that we are stumbling, out of step-neither marching nor merely walking. Why was this abuse of the reader enjoyable? Perhaps for the same reason that grafitti appeals to some people. At first glance Donne appears lax, but in fact he is naughty; not undisciplined but rebellious; he does not fail to abide by the rules but rather gives the impression of breaking them. Metempsychosis The poem appears to be incomplete, its "First Song" having no counterpart, no "Second Song." Similarly its promise to end by identifying what celebrity the soul in question now inhabits is never fulfilled. On the contrary, the poem's initial epic pretentions founder at the second generation of mankind rather than tracing human history from the Garden of Eden to modern England, as was proposed. In view of the author's mock-heroic tone, however, the poem's apparent incompletion may be part of the satire, so it does no harm to suppose it as complete as necessary to accomplish its purpose. What it accomplishes is to demonstrate, by means of the Pythagorean doctrine of the transmigration of souls, the depravity of the object of the satire (identity unknown but perhaps easily guessed by Donne's audience). According to this doctrine, also called metempsychosis, the various guises that a soul takes in its travels are rewards or punishments for its conduct in each of its incarnations. It is debatable whether this process always leads to purification. In this poem it appears rather to be simple unfolding, dilation, the full realization of the soul's potential. This soul has an appalling capacity for evil, beginning ominously as the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and never rising higher than the moral neutrality of a fish. (A modern reader unfamiliar with The Bhagavad Gita may rely on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as background to the concept of the dilation and degradation of a soul.) The style of the poem reflects the theme of shape-changing, for Donne loves to employ words' multiple senses in close proximity: . . . Make my darke heavy Poëm light, and light . . . [not dark + not heavy] . . . to heare / Whose story, with long patience you will long . . . [adjective + verb] . . . Her, her fates threw . . . [object of verb + possessive] . . . Her sinne had now brought in infirmities . . . [verbal particle + prefix] . . . Ill steward of himself, himselfe in three yeares ends. . . . [object of preposition + object of verb] . . . Yet them all these unkinde kinds feed upon . . . [adjective + noun] Such wordplay is common in Donne's satires, but in a poem chronicling the exploits of fishes, a sparrow, a wolf, and a mouse-all being the same individual in different forms-it seems especially appropriate. - Summary by Thomas Copeland"

L’amour, la métaphysique et le génie littéraire s’unissent dans ce recueil emblématique de John Donne.