love. This was the young Donne who wrote pas-
sionate, highly erotic poems, such as ‘‘To his
Mistress Going to Bed,’’, and intense romantic
poems about the all-encompassing world of the
lovers, such as ‘‘The Good Morrow’’ and ‘‘The
Sun Rising.’’
The John Donne of this period can be seen
in the portrait painted by an anonymous artist
around 1595 that frequently appears on the cov-
ers of editions of Donne’s work. The portrait
hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Lon-
don, and a reproduction of it can be found online
at the gallery’s Web site, http://www.npg.org.uk. This
could well have been the time, give or take a few
years, when Donne wrote one of his most cynical
poems about love and women, ‘‘Song.’’ In the
painting, Donne’s attire, with the large hat and
the lace around the collar, suggests a certain
raffish glamour, or at least the young Donne’s
idea of what such glamour might look like, and
the expression on the face might suggest that of
the melancholy lover (as Carey puts it). Is there
a brooding quality in that face, a sullen silence
that might suddenly, one supposes, give way to a
contemptuous tirade against women?
Donne was certainly not the first poet or liter-
ary character to note the sad but irrefutable fact of
the inconstancy of women. In Edmund Spenser’s
romance,The Faerie Queene, published in its com-
plete form in 1596, a knight known as the Squire
of Dames (a title that refers to his promiscuous
nature) confides that he once conquered three hun-
dredwomeninlessthanayear,which,thecurious
will note, is not far off one woman per day. How-
ever, at the request of the lady Columbel, whom
he loves and serves, he searches all over the country
for a chaste woman who will resist him no matter
how hard he tries to seduce her. In three years, the
Squire of Dames finds three such women—a pal-
try total, one might think, for such a lengthy
search. Moreover, on closer examination, the
Squire’s modest haul becomes even less impres-
sive. One of the three women is a courtesan who
spurns his advances because he cannot pay
enough; the second is a nun who turns him down
because he refuses to swear to keep the seduction
secret. That leaves just one woman who is the
genuine article. She turns out to be a humble
country girl, who—ghost of Donne’s cynical
speaker in ‘‘Song,’’ take note—was not only chaste
but also beautiful.
Nearly two hundred years later, Lorenzo Da
Ponte wrote the libretto for Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart’s operaCosi fan tutte(1790) and made
Spenser’s Squire of Dames look a little too opti-
mistic. The title of the opera means ‘‘they are all
like that.’’ They? Women, of course. In the plot,
two young men, egged on by a cynical older man,
decide to test the loyalty of their respective fian-
ce ́es, confident the ladies will pass the test. The
men pretend they have been sent off to war, but
they soon return in disguise. It does not take long
for the oh-so-loyal ladies to switch their roman-
tic allegiances to the newcomers. But what else
could have been expected? After all,cosi fan
tutte, just as Donne’s speaker asserts in ‘‘Song.’’
His complaint is not just against some women,
or a particular woman, or even most women, but
allwomen. However, that speaker, so confident
in the rightness of his absolute views, may not
realize that in stanza 2 he lets slip something that
reveals a great deal about the psychology of men,
at least in Donne’s time, when it comes to think-
ing about women. The key passage comes in
stanza 3: ‘‘If thou find’st one, let me know, /
Such a pilgrimage were sweet.’’ A pilgrimage is
a religious journey, usually to a sacred site, for
the purpose of worship. In other words, Donne’s
speaker is saying that if such a pure woman can
be found, he will go on a pilgrimage to meet her
(this of course is before he changes his mind in
the next line). He appears to regard such a
woman as a kind of goddess, a holy figure to be
worshiped. But then look what happens when
his cynical side immediately reasserts itself, and
he says that before he could reach such a woman,
she would prove false, not once, not twice, but as
many asthreetimes. In other words, to put it
bluntly, she will turn out to be no better than a
whore. Thus in the space of one nine-line stanza,
the speaker has veered from one extreme to theTHUS IN THE SPACE OF ONE NINE-LINESTANZA, THE SPEAKER HAS VEERED FROM ONE
EXTREME TO THE OTHER: FROM WOMAN-AS-
GODDESS TO WOMAN-AS-WHORE. THIS HINTS AT A
WAY OF THINKING, OF HOW MEN RESPOND TO
WOMEN, THAT IS FOUND MANY TIMES IN
RENAISSANCE LITERATURE, AND ELSEWHERE.’’
Song