An Old Poem Revisited Me Recently

When I was a college underclassman in the early 1970s, we studied a short poem by British author John Donne, a poem called “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” At the time, as an immature young man, I thought I understood the poem, but I realize now my understanding at that time was purely intellectual. Recently, approximately 50 years after I first read that poem, it came to visit me again, and I finally have a better appreciation for the message and a spiritual and an emotional understanding that I could not possess so early in my life.

For Whom The Bell Tolls by John Donne

No man is an island,

Entire of itself.

Each is a piece of the continent,

A part of the main.

When I initially read the first four lines of this poem, I thought I had grasped the entire message: teamwork. As a high-school and college athlete, I quickly assumed that Donne was extolling all the athletic clichés that I had heard through the years: “There is no ‘I’ in ‘Team,’”; “A chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” and “Your teammate is your brother.” At that naïve moment in my life, my college baseball team meant everything…