Christian iconography, the devil is portrayed as
having a tail and horns as well as a cleft foot.
Line 5 presents the poet’s next challenge:
‘‘Teach me to hear the mermaids singing.’’ The
mermaids are the three sirens in Greek mytho-
logy. The sirens are women with wings and bird
feet. They live on an island near the Italian coast
and lure sailors with their irresistible singing.
The sailors are so entranced by the singing of
the sirens that they forget where they are going
and where they come from. Bewitched, they end
up on the island with the sirens and just while
their time away until they die. The only man ever
to resist the call of the sirens was Odysseus, in
Homer’s epicOdyssey. Since the sirens exist only
in mythology, who can really hear them or show
anyone else what they sound like?
In line 6, the poet moves from religious and
classical mythology tohuman psychology. He asks
for someone to teach him how not to be envious.
Envy is one of the traditional Seven Deadly Sins.
The poet is saying, in effect, that envy is a universal
emotion. Everyone feels it at some point. No teach-
ing in the world can instruct a person how to avoid
envy or the distress that it creates for the person
who feels it.
The final impossibility in this stanza is con-
tained in lines 5 to 7, which also reveal what the
poet is driving at in presenting all these impossible
tasks. He wants to find someone who is honest,
but suggests that such a quality is hard to find: is
there a certain wind that someone could show
him, that produces honesty in a person? Obviously
not, so this is the seventh impossible task that the
poet has listed in this nine-line stanza.
Stanza 2
In stanza 2, the poet continues his theme of
attempting the impossible. He suggests that if the
reader is the adventurous type, and enjoys ‘‘strange
sights’’ and likes to see ‘‘Things invisible to see’’
(which is an example of theliterary device called
a paradox, a statement that appears to be self-
contradictory), he should go on a journey. He
should ride for almost a lifetime—ten thousand
days is about twenty-seven years—until he is old
and his hair is white. Then he should return and
report to the poet about all the unusual things that
happened to him on his travels. After that, the
traveler would be expected, according to the poet,
to assure him that nowhere on his travels did he
meet, and nowhere lives, a woman who is ‘‘true,
and fair.’’ The poet thus reveals that when he
mentioned the quest for an ‘‘honest mind’’ in the
last line of the first stanza he was referring not to
humans in general but to women. ‘‘True’’ here
means honest (that is, chaste and virtuous) and
faithful. The final impossibility is to find a
woman who is both honest and beautiful (‘‘fair’’).Stanza 3
In the first line of the stanza, the poet appears to
hedge his bets just a little. In the previous stanza he
was confident that a woman both ‘‘true, and fair’’
could not be found, no matter how long the search.
But now he tells his imaginary traveler that if he,
the traveler, should manage to find such a woman,
he should inform the poet about her. In line 2 the
speaker adds that a journey that produced such an
unusual find would have been enjoyable (‘‘sweet’’).
In line 3, however, he changes his mind rapidly.
‘‘Yet do not,’’ he says, meaning that he does not
want, after all, to hear from the traveler should
that man in fact have found a beautiful and honest
woman. He adds by way of explanation, in the
same line (3), that he would not go to see her,
even if she lived next door (line 4), and in the
remainder of the stanza he explains why. Even if,
the poet says, the woman had the desired qualities
when the traveler met her, she would not retain
them for long. She might remain beautiful and
honest while the man wrote a letter informing the
poet that he had found her, but before the poet
managedtogettheretomeether,shewould,heis
certain, prove ‘‘false’’ (that is, dishonest, deceitful,
or unchaste) not just once but twice or even three
times. In other words, the woman will not be what
she at first appeared to be.THEMESInconstancy of Woman
The speaker complains about the universal incon-
stancy of women. No one can find a woman who
will be faithful, he says. In taking this approach,
the speaker is drawing on a common theme in love
poetry. For centuries, male poets have picked up
their pens to grumble about how their women
(to whom, of course, they are ready to be com-
pletely devoted) do not live up to their expect-
ations and their ideals. There is nothing new in
this, although the speaker in ‘‘Song’’ is determined
to take the argument to a new extreme. Who is this
speaker? There is no way of knowing whether
there is any autobiographical content in theSong