For Whom The Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a 1940 novel by Ernest Hemingway. It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an anti-fascist guerilla unit in the mountains during the Spanish Civil War. As an expert in the use of explosives, he is given an assignment to blow up a bridge to accompany a simultaneous attack on the city of Segovia. The title is drawn from "Meditation XVII" of Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, a metaphysical poem by John Donne.

The term "metaphysical poetry" is used to describe a certain type of 17th century poetry. Samuel Johnson first used the term "metaphysical poetry" to describe the specific poetic method used by poets like Donne. Metaphysical poets are generally in rebellion against the highly conventional imagery of the Elizabethan lyric. The poems tend to be intellectually complex, and is considred to express honestly, if unconventionally, the poet's sense of the complexities and contradictions of life. Below is an excerpt of the lengthy poem by Donne :

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The bell doth toll for him that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute that this occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God.
Who casts not up his eye to the sun when it rises? but who takes off his eye from a comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his ear to any bell which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell which is passing a piece of himself out of this world? 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 bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

poem poetry For Whom The Bell Tolls Donne Hemingway