John Donne wrote Devotions upon Emergent Occasions during an acute illness and recovery in late 1623 and published it within several weeks; believing himself to be on his deathbed with what most scholars agree was probably typhus, Donne wrote feverishly, and within the month of his convalescence, the Devotions entered the Stationers’ Register. The rapid composition and publication of Devotions thus represents a textual embodiment of Donne’s corporal suffering in illness, and his formal techniques for transmitting the ordeal of illness through written language serve as his greatest attempt to forge connection in the face of his sickbed’s profound isolation. My thesis enters a scholarly conversation about the particular temporal landscape of Devotions, and I ground my reading of the prose’s formal moves as a response to the solitude Donne laments and the connection to others he seeks. In order to accomplish my argument, I first read the sections of Devotions where solitude echoes the most clearly alongside repeated calls for connection, then explicate Donne’s theory of written communication from sections of Devotions, his letters, and his poetry, and finally move into an exploration of how the text’s temporal fixation on the present moment evokes a particular readerly immersion and textual renewal to ensure the narrative speaker’s survival, if only in the imaginations of his readers.