Donne uses an extended metaphor of a book's chapter to represent an individual's life. Our whole life is presented by Donne as a story written down in a great book. However, our lives are not the whole story; as a Christian, Donne believes in life after death. When a man dies, says Donne, a chapter has not been torn out of the book of life so much as translated into a better language. Death, like the various misfortunes that afflict us throughout our lives, gives meaning to the relatively short spell we occupy on Earth.

Each life, each chapter, is part of one great volume, and God is the divine author of that book. Though we may look upon ourselves as individual scattered pages, we are all part of the same book. When we die—when we are "translated," as Donne puts it—we pass into the realm of the spirit, where each of our individual chapters will be gathered together by the Almighty in his divine library. There, all division will cease. The fundamental unity of humankind will be affirmed, and we will all become known to each other. Or to carry the metaphor a stage further, everyone will be an open book.

A metaphor is a comparison that does not use the words like or as.

In the first paragraph, God is likened to the author of a book. People are likened to chapters in the book God is authoring. The death of a person is compared to a translation of that person's chapter into a better language. The bonds between humans are likened to the way chapters of a book are all bound together into one volume. All the chapters are needed: we are all part of a larger book.

Likewise, each person is compared not to an island but to part of a larger continent, so that the death of one person diminishes the continent.

Affliction or troubles in life are called a treasure by Donne, because they mature us and make us fit for God. Affliction in another person is compared to gold buried away: even if the afflicted person cannot benefit from his affliction, if you or I can by watching his example, that affliction is valuable like gold to us.

All of these are metaphors in this Meditation: we humans are each like a chapter in a book and like a piece of a continent, and our troubles are treasures and gold to us if we use them to mature.

To begin, one must first understand what a metaphor is (in order to identify them within the confines of a text). A metaphor is a comparison between two normally dissimilar things. The comparison is made without using the words"like" or "as" (is used with a simile).

Therefore, a couple examples of metaphors found in John Donne's Meditation XVII are as follows:

1. In the following quote, a comparison is made between death and a sort of rebirth. Donne is stating that when a man dies, a "chapter" is not destroyed, but rewritten. Therefore, the comparison between death, a book and a new language is made.

When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.

2. In the following quote, man is loosely compared to a piece of land.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

Here, Donne is stating that men exist as pieces of the land upon which they live. While Donne does not mean this literally, he is making the comparison between man and land in order to show how they are a part of the society within which they live.