Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) records John Donne’s meditations written as he lay gravely ill, charting the stages of a serious fever through prose of extraordinary intensity. In twenty-three sequences of meditation, expostulation, and prayer, the great poet and preacher turns sickness into an occasion for profound reflection on mortality, sin, and the soul’s relation to God.
It is here that Donne wrote his most famous words—”No man is an island,” and “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”—lines that have echoed through English literature ever since. The volume is paired with Death’s Duel, Donne’s final, unforgettable sermon. Dense, passionate, and richly metaphorical, these writings show one of the supreme masters of English prose confronting death with searching honesty and faith.