SONG - JOHN DONNE
SONG
-JOHN DONNE
INTRODUCTION
John Donne was an English poet, scholar,
soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a cleric in
the Church of England.John Donne’s lifespan is between
1572-1631, London, a leading English poet of the Metaphysical school
and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London (1621–31). Donne is often considered
the greatest love poet in the English language.
He is also noted for his religious verse and treatises and
for his sermons, which rank among the best of the 17th century.
WOMEN’S TRAITS
The poem Song: Go and Catch the
Falling Star the tone of light and frivolous, ‘Go and catch a falling
star’ seems to endorse the misogynistic belief that all women (or all beautiful women,
anyway – just to make it worse) are unfaithful and shouldn’t be trusted. Yet
the way Donne builds to this conclusion is beguiling.In summary, he advises the
reader (or, as this is a song, the listener) to perform a series of impossible
tasks:
‘Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,’
IMPOSSIBLE TASKS
Similarly, the
listener is commanded to hear mermaids singing (possibly a reference to the
sirens of Greek mythology, who were actually half-bird; it was impossible,
unless you were Odysseus, to hear the sirens’ song and survive). Other
impossible commands include finding a cure for the ‘sting’ of envy, and what
wind exists that can help an honest mind to get on in life.
In the second
stanza, the impossibilities continue: Donne’s speaker says that if you seek
strange sights – things which are invisible, even – then ride for ten thousand
days till you’re old and your hair is white (‘ten thousand days and nights’ is
just over 27 years, if you’re wondering), and when you return, you’ll be able
to tell Donne’s speaker about all the strange things you saw, and also, you’ll
be prepared to swear that truly faithful and beautiful women do not exist. (In
other words, if women are ‘fair’ or attractive, they will not be true to you.)
INCONSISTENCY OF WOMEN
The final stanza
might be summarised as follows: ‘If you do manage to find a woman who is both
faithful and beautiful, let me know – a journey to find such a woman would be
worth it. But having said that, even if she were next door and you wrote to
tell me to come and see her, before I’d managed to make the journey to meet
her, she would have been unfaithful to several men.’
ANALYSIS
‘Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two, or three.’
Can we still enjoy a poem that
seems to be so down on half the human race? (Or the beautiful section of that
half, leastways: poor unattractive women can apparently be trusted to remain
true, presumably because Donne’s speaker thinks no one else would want them.)
This aspect of Donne’s poem – and the problem is not confined to ‘Go and catch
a falling star’ – has exercised critics for a while now.
Christopher Ricks, in
his comments, has a good essay on what Ricks sees as the unhealthy endings
to many of Donne’s poems: they seem to become uncharitable as they reach
conclusion. But Ricks’s issue with this poem in particular is not its misogyny
(which loses its power to offend by being such a worn-out complaint) but the
fact that the poem’s ending seems false to itself: it goes against what the
rest of the poem promises.
Thus the author said the ugly
women’s are always true and loyal but beautiful are not the same. All through
the poem the poet pessimistically talk about the society of beautiful women
according to his point.
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