Today’s Poem: Go and Catch a Falling Star

John Donne’s diction and tone lift the conventional into the mystical

Robert Bateman, Three Women Plucking Mandrake (at the foot of the gallows), 1870 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Song: Go and catch a falling star

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.

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If we could discern what makes these verses click — what makes them rise to the memorable and the meaningful — we would make some genuine advance toward understanding the internal workings of poetry.

First published in 1633, two years after the poet’s death, this “Song” by John Donne (1571–1631) plays with the notion that women cannot be faithful to their lovers. The trope is old and hackneyed, a conventional gesture in the eternal comedy of the war between the sexes. It forms, to take just one example, the framing device for the stories that Scheherazade tells in One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. The modern outrage, too often repeated, at the trope’s misogyny tends to obscure its place as something with which men tease women as, in turn, women tease men.

We need to shake loose, returning to the comic conventionality of the canard, to see what Donne is doing in his song. Why does this version stick in the mind? Why does it flow so easily?

Bust of Donne at St. Paul’s (Wikimedia Commons)

The prosody helps, of course. Tetrameter tends to suggest song, as do inserted passages of altered rhythm, and Donne’s “Song” has both: each stanza six four-beat lines, then two one-beat lines, and a final four-beat line, rhymed ababccddd — the triple rhyme at the end another signal (not definitive, but suggestive) of song. And the fact that this is a song frees Donne from having to defend the verses’ dismissal of women’s fidelity; it’s just one of those lyrical claims that men and women sing to twit each other.

And with the freedom to take the comic stance of a conventional theme, Donne can concentrate on the magic of his diction and tone. Listing impossible things for their rhetorical effect is hardly unique (“Scarborough Fair,” for an easy example), but with “Go and catch a falling star,” the opening line, Donne takes us into fairy tale. And with “Get with child a mandrake root,” he adds hedge magic. The metaphysical impossibility of knowing where the past goes is paralleled by the moral impossibility of escaping all envy. The gnostic legends of the devil’s foot are joined to the changelings of the sea.

And so in each of the other verses. Why does this song version of a conventional trope stick in the mind? Because Donne takes us into the mists of fairyland in his word choice, his diction, and he indulges from the first line on, a tone of fantasy.

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