National Poetry Month: Song by John Donne
Nov. 19th, 2009 10:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lokifan_importI was really disappointed when we did John Donne at uni, because I didn’t like his poetry at all. This specific poem, though, I’d read years ago and loved. This is partly because of where I read it: it was used as a curse in a book I loved, Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. It was such a clever use of a poem, and of course reading it now I like the poem itself but also its rush of associations with a cast of characters I love – although mysteriously, the blond, sarcastic, insecure love interest who’s horribly bossy and a Casanova and much braver and better than he admits is not a particular favourite of mine.
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 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.
At least the module was good for one thing: the talk about Donne’s satirical comedy made me sure that the whole ‘no where/ lives a woman true and fair’ thing was not his real approach. It’s too jokey, for me anyway, to be read as a true denunciation of women as faithless.
Besides, it kind of adds a cool new element to the context: the curse is cast on the Wizard Howl to stop him from going in fickle fashion from woman to woman.
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 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.
At least the module was good for one thing: the talk about Donne’s satirical comedy made me sure that the whole ‘no where/ lives a woman true and fair’ thing was not his real approach. It’s too jokey, for me anyway, to be read as a true denunciation of women as faithless.
Besides, it kind of adds a cool new element to the context: the curse is cast on the Wizard Howl to stop him from going in fickle fashion from woman to woman.
