Devotions upon Emergent Occasions; Together with Death's Duel

In 1624, John Donne was dying. Battered by fever, grief-stricken from losing his wife, several children, and numerous lifelong friends, the fifty-one-year-old poet and Dean of St Paul's turned his formidable mind toward the only subject that mattered: what does it mean to die, and is there anything beyond? The resulting work is neither abstract theology nor consoling piety but something far more gripping - a man in physical and spiritual agony, thinking with ferocious clarity about faith, mortality, and the possibility of salvation. His famous declaration that "no man is an island" emerges here not as comfortable wisdom but as a desperate realization about human interconnection in the face of dissolution. The prose pulses with intellectual power, bodily suffering, and a refusal to look away from death's face. This edition also includes "Death's Duel," Donne's own funeral sermon, delivered eighteen months after he completed these devotions - a document written by a man who knew he was composing his own preface to eternity.