and Thomas de Quincey tried to restore interest
in Donne’s work, and Victorian poet Robert
Browning was an admirer of the poet. But other
than that, the revival of appreciation for Donne
had to wait until the early twentieth century, with
the advent of the movement known as modern-
ism. Modernists saw in Donne a spirit close to
their own who could offer them a model for their
own poetry. He was championed by T. S. Eliot in
the 1920s, and his work quickly came to enjoy a
popularity and critical appreciation it had not
enjoyed since the generation after his death.
Since then Donne’s poetry has been the subject
of numerous critical interpretations. As one of his
slighter works, the poem, ‘‘Song’’ has not received
as much attention as many of his other poems.
For example, Roger B. Rollin, in ‘‘‘Fantastique
Ague’: The Holy Sonnets and Religious Melan-
choly,’’ contrasted this poem with the seriousness
of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, which were written
later, when Donne had become a clergyman.
Rollin wrote: ‘‘Whereas a trifle like ‘Goe, and
catche a falling starre’...with its comic portrait
of the rejected lover-turned-amatory Jacques, is
obviously intended merely to entertain, the Holy
Sonnets... are... intended to instruct as well as
entertain.’’
However, critics havecertainly not ignored
the poem. Frank Warnke, inJohn Donne,sawit
as exemplifying one of three categories into which
Donne’s love poems fall. Using a term that Donne
himself employed disparagingly about his own
poems in his letters to friends, Warnke called
this category ‘‘lightly cynical ‘evaporations’,’’ and
grouped it with poems such as ‘‘Woman’s Con-
stancy’’ and ‘‘The Indifferent.’’ His comment about
the structure of many of these cynical poems might
be applied to ‘‘Song’’: ‘‘A series of propositions,
each more outrageously ingenious than the one
before it, seems to be leading in one logical direc-
tion, only to be overthrown by an opposed—and
unexpected—proposition yet more outrageously
ingenious.’’ John Carey, in John Donne: Life,
Mind and Art, noted that infidelity of women is a
common theme in Donne’s poetry but suggested
that ‘‘Song’’ ‘‘catches briefly at hope’’ in its use of
the word ‘‘pilgrimage,’’ which is normally used of a
religious journey, to describe the search for the
ideal woman: ‘‘There’s no mistaking the poetic
effect of the word ‘Pilgrimage,’’’ Carey wrote. ‘‘It
floods the line with relief, like a sob of joy.’’ Carey
further commented that‘‘when Donne allows him-
self to imagine a state beyond betrayal, he chooses
a word which relates to sanctity, not sex.’’ In a
lively interpretation ofthe poem, Judah Stampfer,
in John Donne and the Metaphysical Gesture,
placed it in the category of Donne’s ‘‘promiscuity’’
poems, which include ‘‘Loves Usury’’ and ‘‘Con-
fined Love.’’ Stampfer described the first two stan-
zas as ‘‘a zestful expansion of human experience
in the dew of youth, touching the quicksilver
unknown,’’ and he also commented on the youth-
fulness of the speaker, who is ‘‘so inexperienced he
consults friends about the world, so young he
hangs in an atmosphere of boyish magic, a green
and lyrical schoolboy, baldly asserting universal
promiscuity, so worldly wise.’’CRITICISMBryan Aubrey
Aubrey holds a Ph.D. in English. In this essay, he
discusses ‘‘Song’’ in terms of Donne’s life in the
1590s as well as misogynist views expressed in
other Elizabethan literature.Mandrake root, 14th-century engraving
(ÓINTERFOTO / Alamy)
Song