The Tolling Bell Says You’re Not Alone

John Donne

John Donne

I talked yesterday about the poet being like one blundering around in the dark, making utterances that some, in their suffering, find consoling.  The poet doesn’t know which poems will reach which readers.  To make another analogy, he or she is like Queequeg, carefully constructing a coffin that then, after he is dead and in ways he could not imagine, floats to the rescue of Ishmael at the conclusion of Moby Dick.  (Lest this sound like a strange comparison, I note that John Donne in “The Canonization” uses a well-wrought funeral urn as a metaphor for poetry.)

One would think that a Donne scholar would turn to Donne poems in her hour of need.  But the poems cited by Vivian Bearing, the English professor and cancer patient in Margaret Edson’s play W;t, don’t work for her.  “Death Be Not Proud” and “If Poisonous Minerals” seem to come up short.

Rather than telling her cancer to be not proud, for instance, she feels defeated by it.  Death seems to be getting the last word.  And while the second poem captures Donne’s doubts about whether he can be forgiven by God, Vivian doesn’t think much about God or seem to believe in the afterlife.  Like Donne she has regrets (about her coldness and her lack of compassion as a teacher), but she doesn’t use Donne as a framework for examining her doubts.

It’s as though Donne is just standing in for arid intellectual exercise, an emphasis on head over heart, on mental dexterity over empathetic sensitivity, on wit over compassion.

It leaves me wondering if Edson chose Donne for her play for the same reason that cartoonist Charles Schultz chose Beethoven for Schroeder’s inspiration.  Schroeder, in case you need reminding, is the pianist in Peanuts.  He worships Beethoven, celebrates his birthday every year, and has a large grim-faced Beethoven bust on his piano.  Schultz once said he himself liked Mozart better than Beethoven but chose Beethoven because he was more heavy and imposing.  Beethoven captures Schroeder’s seriousness.

At the end of the play, Vivian turns to a children’s story for solace, giving Donne short shrift.  So that you don’t walk away from W;t thinking that, for all his brilliance, Donne is unable to perform at crunch time, I present Donne images that Vivian could have resorted to in addition to The Runaway Bunny.  In the following passage from Meditation 17, a plague victim hears the death bell tolling but is so ill that he doesn’t realize it is tolling for him:

Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me and see my state may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all.  When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that head which is my head too, and ingrafted into the body whereof I am a member.  And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.  God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.  As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness.

And further on:

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 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.

How could this help Vivian?  First of all, the bell she hears tolling is in fact tolling for her.  That in itself is a powerful image.  It could help her move past a sense of smallness so that she would see herself as part of a larger drama.

That larger drama involves an awareness of communal suffering.  When others die, part of ourselves is washed away, and when we die, others will lessened.  “Any man diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”

Vivian’s breakthrough in the play is to move from a sense of isolation to a feeling of community with the human beings around her.  She bonds with the “never very sharp” Susie and wishes that she had been kinder to Jason, her former smart student who is now her doctor.  Donne provides the comforting image of community in his meditation: we are all in this business of life and death together.

This means that we are all dying together, being translated together.   We each die in our own way, to be sure, but all are involved in humankind. And in the end, God’s hand shall bind up our scattered leaves in that library where every book shall lie open to one another.  (Given how fond I am of books, I love this image.)

Whether or not Vivian believes in God or an afterlife, this binding together image is the consolation she gets from The Runaway Bunny.  The mother bunny assures her little bunny that she will always be there, a sustaining presence (“have a carrot”), no matter how far away the little bunny has run.  As Vivian’s old mentor interprets, “Look at that.  A little allegory of the soul.  No matter where it hides, God will find it.”

Now, maybe Vivian so associates Donne was the world of arid academe that she needs a book that recalls her childhood rather than the poet that made her reputation. But in my experience, it’s not an either/or, either a great poet or a children’s book. In my own darkest moment when my son died, a range of different works came to my aid: scenes from Beowulf, poetic passages from Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Mary Oliver, the children’s book Bridge over Terabithia, the James Baldwin short story “Sonny’s Blues.”   

Among other things, these works showed me that I was part of a large community that has been suffering and wrestling with death since the dawn of time.  I realized, as never before, that people have been turning to poetry and story to try to capture a tragedy that is bigger than any of us.  And even though I knew, as they knew, that poetry and story can’t do justice to our suffering, I felt a measure of consolation in the way we were all in it together.  I can imagine, if I were immersed in Donne the way Vivian is, of having been consoled by the line, “I am involved in mankind.”

As it was, other images and stories reached out to me.  I was caught off guard by some of them.  I certainly didn’t realize that my grieving would find articulation in Beowulf’s battle with Grendel’s mother, for instance.  So maybe tolling bells and scattered book pages and diminishing promontories don’t do it for Vivian at this particular moment.  But poets and writers are working overtime to provide us buoys for when the white whale charges our ship, and we do ourselves a disservice if we don’t avail ourselves of their help.

Addendum: I omitted one other Donne poem that gets mentioned in the play: “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”–one that could also provide Vivian with comforting images.  It begins with an image of “virtuous men pass[ing] mildly away” and concludes with one leg of a compass (the kind used in geometry) returning home after having circumscribed a full circle (“Thy firmness makes my circle just,/And makes me end where I begun.”)  Love grounds us when we stray.

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