For Whom The Bell Tolls

This phrase lately so often glimpsed in my head.. then I started to picking up by pieces all puzzles about this phrase just to feed my curiousity and satisfaction.

It was the famous line from a metaphysical poem by John Donne (1572-1631), "Meditation XVII":

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 sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. 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.

My additional information : This phrase basically means 'for whom the bell rings' but generally in a church because the word 'toll' implies that the bell is large and making a louder sound than a smaller bell ringing

In Europe, they used to ring a bell to announce a death. So the point of the line was, don't look around wondering whose death the bell is signalling; we are all going to die, including you.

Donne lived in Tudor and Stewart England, and at that time the tolling of church bells, to mark various events, was an important feature of daily life.

When Donne writes of the tolling bell, he is, of course, speaking of the funeral bell. It was traditionally rung three times for a man and two times for a woman followed by a pause and then a toll for every year of age for the deceased.

At 1940 the phrase taken by Ernest Hemingway for his novel´s tittle, It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains during the Spanish Civil War. As an expert in the use of explosives, he is given an assignment to blow up a bridge to accompany a simultaneous attack on the city of Segovia

In 1943 a film based on the Ernest Hemingway´s novel made. It stars Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Akim Tamiroff and Katina Paxinou. Directed by Sam Wood. Great attention to detail in keeping with the accurate depiction and the novel's successful translation to film was aided by Hemingway himself, who was present on the set during filming.

For Whom the Bell Tolls" also taken for the first single from the Bee Gees, album Size Isn't Everything. It peaked at #4 on the UK Charts. Composed by Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb.

"For Whom the Bell Tolls" a song by Metallica released 1984, the third track from their second album Ride the Lightning. The song is about a section of the novel For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, where five republican soldiers of the Spanish Civil War attempt to escape the fascists with their stolen horses and are killed by enemy aircraft on a hill on which they were surrounded.