All mankind is of one Author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated.

John Donne wrote this line in his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), a prose work composed during a severe illness in 1623 when he feared he might die. By then Donne was Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and a prominent Anglican divine. The Devotions are structured as a sequence of meditations, expostulations, and prayers keyed to the stages of his sickness and recovery. In this setting Donne reflects on mortality, the interconnectedness of human lives, and the Christian hope that death is not annihilation but a passage into a transformed state—imagined here through the metaphor of a single book authored by God.

Donne frames humanity as a unified text authored by God: each person is a “chapter” within one coherent “volume.” Death, then, is not a loss that diminishes the whole by tearing pages out; it is a “translation” into a “better language,” suggesting both continuity of identity and elevation of condition. The metaphor draws on early modern ideas of translation as faithful rendering into a new tongue, aligning with Christian doctrine that the soul passes into a higher mode of being. The line also implies ethical solidarity: because all belong to one authored work, each life is meaningfully connected to the rest.