For Whom the Bell Tolls... Post #2

I do not deny that the world needs priests to remind us that we shall all one day die; but I insist that the world also needs another kind of priest, the poet, to remind us that we are not dead yet.


GK Chesterton

I wrote my greatest contribution to the world of poetry in the early 90s. 

Joe and I had recently become parents, and the world was a fatigued fog.

I wrote my poem about secrets.

The first line read:  "I keep my underwear in that top drawer..."

The first line was bad, and the poem only got worse after that.  I could tell how bad it was by the horrified silence in the room when I finished sharing it with the other English majors. 

I've never found it overly distressing to be bad at something.  Nor have I ever longed to possess someone else's talent.  I think it harkens to the year we learned the Ten Commandments in faith formation classes.  If there were two commandments about coveting, I thought, coveting must be pretty bad stuff.

I am an excellent reader of other people's creative work.  Just recently I finished reading "For Whom the Bell Tolls" by Ernest Hemingway.  I find myself wishing I were still in college writing critical papers about great fiction.  I could write a dissertation on "For Whom the Bell Tolls."  And you'd think, having assigned not only the book but also the critical paper, the professor would be interested enough to read said dissertation.

Intrigued enough to read what critics thought about the book, I turned to the internet.  My thoughts about what others wrote about the book could fill a second dissertation. 

What caught my attention though, was John Donne's "For Whom the Bell Tolls."

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 see, Europe is less...
Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

Obviously Donne inspired Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.  His main character, Robert Jordan is sent to destroy a bridge behind enemy lines during the Spanish Civil War.  Jordan knows he cannot survive the mission.  He's not the only character to contemplate his own death and the impact his life and dying will have on those he loves.

It dawned on me that these men write about living as the body of Christ.