Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, April 17, 2024.

Today's poem is by John Dunn, and it's called No Man is an Island.

I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it again.

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 manner of thy friends 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 bell tolls. It tolls for thee.

This is a remarkably well-known poem, but I'd venture to say that in some cases it's better known in and for the works that it has inspired than for its own sake

there is the classic hemingway novel for whom the bell tolls that takes its title from this poem

there is the just slightly less classic acDC track by the same name.

And there is the Simon and Garfunkel song, I Am a Rock, which is more intimately linked to this poem, perhaps,

as a kind of willfully ironic inversion where the speaker in the song

who has already discovered all too entirely how susceptible they are to human relationship

and how vulnerable they are to love and loss of love, is insisting, he thinks the Lady

Death protest too much, but is insisting that they are impervious to these things that have

already wounded them.

I am a rock.

I am an island.

I have my books and my poetry to protect me.

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