Misogyny
The tone of the speaker might be seen as playful as
he expounds on the inconstancy of women, but it is
possible to take a darker view of the speaker’s
attitude. In his complaints about the lack of moral
fitness on the part of women, he reveals himself to
be a misogynist. A misogynist is someone who hates
women.Theclueiscontainedinthefactthatthe
speaker ascribes promiscuity, sexual looseness, to
all women, not just one or two whom he might
happen to know, but to all of them. This suggests
not an opinion formed rationally on the basis of
knowledge or information but a prejudice blindly
held. This is to take a more serious view of the poem
than perhaps it merits, but lying just behind the
speaker’s attitude it is perhaps not difficult to see
the double standard that sometimes operates in
those who demand standards of others that they
are not prepared to observe for themselves. After
all, if the speaker claims to know that all women are
unfaithful, he must have had a lot of women himself
to make such a statement—and what does that say
about his own fidelity? It is not difficult to imagine a
song or poem that gives the opposite point of view
in this eternal battle of thesexes. Actually, one does
not have to imagine it since it has already been
done, and around Donne’s time, too, by William
Shakespeare, in Act 2 scene 3 ofMuch Ado About
Nothing, when the character Balthasar sings a song
that starts like this:
Sigh no more ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
As lovers have known through the ages, when
it comes to making negative generalizations about
the opposite sex, two can play at that game.
Style
Trochaic Tetrameter
The poem is written in trochaic feet. A trochaic
foot consists of a stressed syllable followed by an
unstressed syllable. The trochee is the opposite of
the more common iamb, which is an unstressed or
lightly stressed syllable followed by a more heav-
ily stressed syllable. Each line of the poem consists
of four feet, which means the meter is trochaic
‘‘They Swam Before the Ships and Sang Lovely Songs,’’ illustration by Louis John Rhead(Blue Lantern
Studio / Corbis)
Song
