Song
John Donne was an English poet and Protestant
clergyman who wrote in the late-Elizabethan Age
and the Jacobean Age. He is the leading figure in
a group of seventeenth-century poets known as
the metaphysical poets. His ‘‘Song,’’ the first line
of which is ‘‘Go, and catch a falling star,’’ is one
of Donne’s many love poems. He wrote it to a
tune he knew, not one he composed himself. The
poem was also set to music in the seventeenth
century and has since been set by a number of
modern composers, including William Flanagan,
Bernard George Stevens, and Lee Hoiby.
The poem was first published inPoems, by
J. D. with Elegies on the Author’s Deathin 1633.
This was the first collected edition of Donne’s
verse. The exact date the poem was written is
unknown, since only a few of Donne’s poems
were published in his lifetime. However, it is usu-
ally thought that he wrote all his love poems
before he was thirty years old. One scholar, The-
odore Redpath, believes that the love poems that
express a cynical point of view, which would
include ‘‘Song,’’ were written before Donne met
Ann More in 1598, when he was twenty-six.
Donne married More in 1601. If Redpath’s
theory is correct, this poem was written in the
late-Elizabethan period, contemporary with the
plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare.
Unlike some of Donne’s love poems, ‘‘Song’’
is not difficult to understand. In three stanzas,
the cynical speaker claims that it is not possible
235JOHN DONNE
1633