No man is an island; unless, Donne might have added, he becomes a whale: '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.' But even if the whole feels the loss of a part, the part may not feel the loss of the whole. It is what happens to the clod or the promontory that counts, and in his earlier poem about metempsychosis, 'The Progress of the Soul', Donne describes the soul entering a whale so vast that it is as if 'seas from Afric's body had severed/And torn the hopeful promontory's head' (the Cape of Good Hope), allowing it to swim off into the southern ocean. The whale is not just a floating island: he is an entire world for the swallowed dolphins that swim inside his belly 'without fear,/ And feel no sides, as if his vast womb were/ Some inland sea'.

LRB 1 January 2009 | PDF Download