On the eve of his daughter’s wedding, in late November 1623, the poet John Donne was struck down by a mysterious “relapsing fever” (so-called because the patient often died during convalescence) and reduced to many weeks of frailty, in which he was “barred of my ordinary diet, which is reading”.

What exactly it was that Donne suffered from, and survived, is not known. Some say typhus. The patient himself believed that he was on his deathbed, that the illness reflected his own sinfulness and amounted to a divine rebuke. His response was at once pious and literary: he asked for pen and paper in order to record, for himself, the experience of this “emergent occasion”. (He also wrote Hymne to God my God, in my Sicknesse.)

As well as hymns, in this enfeebled condition, the poet also turned to a new and sombre kind of prose, his urgent response to the threat of imminent extinction. Incredibly, he planned, wrote, and finally published, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, his intense meditation on the meaning of life and death, in a matter of days, while still convalescing. Written with astonishing speed and intensity, the work was registered with the Stationers’ Company on 9 January 1624 and published without delay: rarely has such a dramatic affliction had such an immediate literary outcome.

Many of the books in this series are an answer to a crisis of one kind or another. Donne’s Devotions, a neglected classic, actually braids the author’s personal “emergency” into the title. Writing to a friend, he described the process whereby the thoughts sponsored by his “relapsing fever” brought this book into the world:

“Though I have left my bed, I have not left my bedside; I sit there still, and as a prisoner discharged sits at the prison door to beg fees, so I sit here to gather crumbs. I have used this leisure, to put the meditations I had in my sickness into some such order as may minister some holy delight. They arise to so many sheets (perchance 20) as that without staying for that furniture of an epistle, that my friends importun’d me to print them, I importune my friends to receive them printed.”

Like all Donne’s greatest writing, these Devotions, as the poet and critic Andrew Motion has written, “are a performance, and because they are a performance, we feel held at arm’s length. To put it another way: Donne’s sickbed is a stage and we admire the patient as if we were looking at him across footlights.”

The shape of the Devotions helps condition this response. The 23 sections correspond to the 23 days of the poet’s fever. Entitled “The Stations of the Sickness”, each of these is divided into three parts: “Meditations upon our Humane Condition”, “Expostulations, and Debatements with God” and “Prayers, upon several occasions, to him”.

Within these sections, the reader encounters a succession of dazzling observations:

“We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises; and we hew, and we polish every stone, that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and regular work. But in a minute a cannon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity; nay, undeserved if we consider only disorder, summons us, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant.”

As well as reflecting on the shocking propinquity of life and death, Donne is tormented by his isolation, as a patient:

“As sickness is the greatest misery, so the greatest misery of sickness is solitude… Solitude is a torment which is not threatened in hell itself.”

From his sickbed, he hears the bell in the neighbouring square and translates the moment into one of his most famous lines: “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

As a Christian, a famous love poet who became a great priest, he is eager to address his admiration (and some anxieties) to the almighty:

“My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that wouldst be understood literally and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest ? But thou art also… a figurative, a metaphorical God too.”

Inspired by his metaphorical God, Donne employs the imagery associated with these “devotions” to express his faith:

“All mankind is of one author, and in one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.”

Or, to phrase this is more secular terms, he is acutely aware, in the Devotions, of having turned his body into a text: “I have cut up mine own anatomy, dissected myself,” he writes, before placing himself, with a poet’s egotism, once more at the centre of God’s concerns: “These spots are but the letters in which thou has written thine own name and conveyed thyself to me.”

Donne needs God. “Enable me by thy grace to look forward to mine end,” he writes, confronting his mortality. If that seems alien and remote, in an age dominated by agnosticism and aetheism, other some other passages are both touching and strikingly modern:

“Death is in an old man’s door, he appears and tells him so, and death is at a young man’s back, and says nothing; age is a sickness, and youth is an ambush; and we need so many physicians as may make up a watch, and spy every inconvenience. There is scarce any thing that hath not killed somebody; a hair, a feather hath done it; nay, that which is our best antidote against it hath done it, the best cordial hath been deadly poison.”

A Signature Sentence

“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.”

Three To Compare

Jeremy Taylor: The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650)

Sir Thomas Browne: Urn Burial (1658)

Thomas Cranmer: The Book of Common Prayer (1662)