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    A Study Guide for John Donne's "Song"
    A Study Guide for John Donne's "Song"
    A Study Guide for John Donne's "Song"
    Ebook32 pages23 minutes

    A Study Guide for John Donne's "Song"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for John Donne's "Song," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 2, 2016
    ISBN9781535833578
    A Study Guide for John Donne's "Song"

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      A Study Guide for John Donne's "Song" - Gale

      10

      Song

      John Donne

      1633

      Introduction

      John Donne was an English poet and Protestant clergyman who wrote in the late-Elizabethan Age and the Jacobean Age. He is the leading figure in a group of seventeenth-century poets known as the metaphysical poets. His Song, the first line of which is Go, and catch a falling star, is one of Donne's many love poems. He wrote it to a tune he knew, not one he composed himself. The poem was also set to music in the seventeenth century and has since been set by a number of modern composers, including William Flanagan, Bernard George Stevens, and Lee Hoiby.

      The poem was first published in Poems, by J. D. with Elegies on the Author's Death in 1633. This was the first collected edition of Donne's verse. The exact date the poem was written is unknown, since only a few of Donne's poems were published in his lifetime. However, it is usually thought that he wrote all his love poems before he was thirty years old. One scholar, Theodore Redpath, believes that the love poems that express a cynical point of view, which would include Song, were written before Donne met Ann More in 1598, when he was twenty-six. Donne married More in 1601. If Redpath's theory is correct, this poem was written in the late-Elizabethan period, contemporary with the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare.

      Unlike some of Donne's love poems, Song is not difficult to understand. In three stanzas, the cynical speaker claims that it is not possible to find a chaste woman anywhere in the world. The poet's use of a range of unusual images, his witty and argumentative approach to his theme, and his sudden turns of thought, stamp the poem as by Donne.

      Author Biography

      John Donne was born sometime between January and June 1572, in London. He was the third of six children. His father, John Donne, was

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