Go and catch a falling star: A Poem by John Donne

 

Love poems by John Donne are fantastic and they a joy for readers even today. Donne’s treatment of love is different from that of other poets who wrote about love and man and woman relationship. His poem 'Go and catch a falling star is very good example of his ever-changing stance towards women. An air of cynicism pervades this poem. 

Woman loyalty and consistency in love is ever-present theme in poetry. John Donne endorses this view-point in many of his poems, but there are other poems where Donne explodes the myth of woman loyalty and consistency in love. Go and catch a falling star is one such poems.

The poet starts off with many impossibilities and tells that these impossibilities can become possibilities, but it is impossible that a woman is loyal and consistent in love. He asserts that someone can catch a falling star, someone may find a mandrake which produces human children, someone may find where all the years of the past have gone, someone may teach him how to understand and interpret what mermaids, human like creatures of the sea, sing, someone may convince him that envious has stopped feeling stings of jealousy, even someone may persuade him and make him believe that an honest man can prosper and progress; all these impossibilities are possible, yet it is impossible that some beautiful woman is true and loyal in love.    

The poet speaks to his audiences, who most probably are the readers of this poem, that they should, if they like, travel far and wide and see all the strange things during the course of journey—even if they ride their horses and travel for ten thousand years—even the hair on their head have turned snow white because of their advanced age, when they will return from their journey, they will tell the poet that nowhere they have met a true and loyal woman.

The third stanza of the poem is even more fantastic of the all. He says that if they find some woman who is true and loyal, they must tell him: he will go to meet her as meeting her will by akin to a religious duty for him. But on the second thought he declares that he will not take this trouble even though she lives next door because surely might have fallen with two or three men before he reaches her dwelling to pay her homage.

The poem has all the qualities for which Donne was castigated in his times and also for which he is lauded now. It is metaphysical in the sense it yokes heterogeneous ideas. Of course, loyalty and consistency of woman have nothing to do with a falling star and all other things against which it has been juxtaposed: they are seeming different things and cannot be compared and contrasted in any way, but Donne has done so and has put every possible effort to make them look common place.

It also has many hyperbolic statements which make the whole argument of the poem appear ludicrous and funny. For example, convert ten thousand days and nights into years and see the results. Note the humour in the last stanza of the poem: the woman might have fallen in love with two or three men before a letter can be written.

another thing for which Donne and his followers were criticised the colloquial nature of his verse. Donne's verse is a very good example of a man talking to a man. No doubt, this was not an established practice when Donne was writing. So, it was considered a demerit. But, is it a demerit?

We can conclude that Go and catch a falling star is a fantastic poem penned by John Donne. It has all the qualities of Donne's thought and technique. It shows great fusion of what Eliot calls emotion and thought.