Song - John Donne

Question 1

Song - John Donne Summary…

Answer 1

• a man (the speaker) outlines a number of outlandish and impossible tasks.
• if the listener was born with the power to see mysterious and powerful things they should go on an impossibly long quest until he becomes an old man. On this quest, he’ll never see a women who is both faithful and beautiful.
• If the listener manages to find a beautiful and faithful women then he should tell the speaker about it. However, even if she were faithful when the speaker met her, by the time the listener got to her she’d have become a cheater.

Question 2

What is the significance of the mandrake root in Song?

Answer 2

• Root of a mandrake plant where often given human properties
• They were said to scream when dug up
• Associated with witchcraft and were said to grow under hanged men.

Question 3

What is the structure in Song?

Answer 3

• Lyric poem/musical (single lines ‘And find’ ‘what wind’ - sense of melody
• lyrical tone and rhythm
• conversational tone ‘till you write your letter’
• conversation between listener and speaker
• 3 stanzas with 3 different arguments/motives
• start of 1st stanza is imperative ‘go’ which starts as a command and then 2nd and 3rd start with ‘if’ which contrasts and is the opposite of an imperative.

Question 4

Key aspects of song?

Answer 4

• No female recipient
• Written to an audience like a song
• Sense of misogyny - no such thing as an honest women
• Impossible images ‘falling star’ ‘mermaids singing’ - fantastical references.
• Sense of journey/Discovery/legend
• women are inconstant
• that women are seen as negative
• sexist poem

Question 5

Themes in Song?

Answer 5

• Women infidelity
• Exploration/Discovery
• Misogyny
• Impossibility and paradox
• Search for truth

Question 6

Links to other poems?

Answer 6

The Good Morrow:
- Love as a form of spiritual awakening
- Exploration of ‘New World’ in Good Morrow whereas mythical discoveries in Song.
- song is the act of not believing in love or happy relationships whereas the good Morrow is the obsession of love and the thought of not surviving without the other person.

‘To His Coy Mistress’:
- witty, urgent, philosophical
- use of elaborate arguments to discuss love and mortality

‘The Collar’:
- internal spiritual struggle, full of rhetorical outbursts and tension.