Song

Sunday, August 21, 2011

SONG

by John Donne

GO and catch a falling star,


Get with child a mandrake root,


Tell me where all past years are,


Or who cleft the devil's foot,


Teach me to hear mermaids singing,


Or to keep off envy's stinging,


            And find


            What wind


Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,

Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand days and nights,

Till age snow white hairs on thee,

Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,

All strange wonders that befell thee,

            And swear,

            No where

Lives a woman true and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,

Such a pilgrimage were sweet;

Yet do not, I would not go,

Though at next door we might meet,

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.

This poem may seem even more spiteful than “The Flea,”  but still, Donne uses a backhanded compliment and reverse psychology to woo.

If I say to a girl, “You’re probably going to cheat on me because really pretty girls always do,”  I’m...

1              a)Saying the girl is really pretty, and ...

2              b)getting her to say, “No, Frank.  I’m not          .                 like those other slatterns.  I’ll be faithful!”

Harry Potter fans will recognize the mandrake root.  It’s a veggie that looks like a human and supposedly screams when it’s pulled from the ground.  Actually, they rarely look  too human.  I mean, it’s not like you can go out in the backyard and get a turnip Barbie doll.  Don’t eat mandrake, okay?  It’s an alkaloid, and thus both toxic and hallucinogenic.


These are all impossible things. In the first stanza, we don’t even know what he’s railing against, we just know that he’s saying something is impossible, like it’s impossible to hear sirens singing without smashing your head on the rocks.  At the end, we get a clue, though.  “Honest” can mean faithful, and he implies that making someone faithful is one of the impossible things.  Also, he’s feeling envy’s sting.  A girl has broken his heart AGAIN!

Notice the paradox in the quest he challenges the reader to take on.  If you want to try to see things that can’t be seen.... This, of course, is setting up the reader for the resolution of his conceit.  He swears that no matter how many crazy things one sees, one will never find a pretty girl who is faithful.

Of course, Donne hates resolution.  Once an argument is complete, we stop thinking, so he has to be a wise guy and muddle things further. He says, “Just for argument’s sake, let’s imagine you found a pretty girl who wasn’t a floozy."

Since, in many of Donne’s early poems, Love and Sex are the sacred things - he later became quite religious - he thinks going to see a pretty and faithful girl would be a pilgrimage.  But no, he says ,don’t get my hopes up;  it will never happen.

This last stanza is funny!  If you don’t get that “met her” rhyming with “letter” sounds silly, you’ve got a tin ear.  Check out the old rap, “Bust a Move,” for funny multisyllabic rhymes. (I especially loved rhyming libido with tuxedo.)

Also, the assertion that the pretty girl will make out with two or three guys in the time it takes to walk next door is obviously a joke.  Still, it IS true that beautiful people have more opportunity to be unfaithful, since more people are interested in getting with them.  Once somebody complimented me at being a faithful husband and I told her it’s easy when one is short and chubby. (Well, my mom used to say “husky,” but that’s a mom’s eye view.)