“No man is an island” is not the cliche it used to be.
Don’t get me wrong, “No man is an island, entire of itself” is solid, effective metaphor, especially when Donne embellishes it with consistent imagery: “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 promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were.”
But I submit that an earlier piece of imagery in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions might more deeply resonate with writers and word lovers, overlooked imagery that should be revived, especially in the light that “No man is an island” has become one of our indelible cliches.
Consider:
And when she [the Church] 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
Bill Brohaugh
io 8
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.
I offer this not as theological perspective, but as an example of the poetry that fades away when cliches are allowed to rule our language and our memory of the classics.