Go and Catch a Falling Star Summary and Analysis by John Donne

Noticeable is the terse and taut end-stopped line, deployed in profusion by Donne throughout the three stanzas, especially while appropriating his claims to finding the desired woman with the elaborate use of stylized conceits. The poet is sure of where he stands, and what he has to say there, especially when the subject of discussion is women, it seems.

In the second stanza, the cynicism manifests in comparing finding the faithful woman to a spectacle of sorts, a “strange sight”, things ”impossible to see”. Not having the courage to admit that he would not dare to desert the quest for that woman himself, the poet stresses on the futility of searching for that elusive woman throughout a man’s life. There is a satire embedded in his command to the prospective male reader/admirer to see something invisible, and riding for ten thousand days and nights till he returns with grey hair on his head, and the abominable certainty of experience in life’s ways. The poet is very sure that he too will fail to find such a woman as he has desired, and that history will repeat this brutal trajectory through the ages. Donne’s diction here (“ten thousand days and nights”, ‘snow white”) mocks that of a fairy tale, and is in fact aimed at not only establishing the fantastical element of such romantic quests that litter the breadth of popular children’s fairytales, but also denouncing the mythically propagated lie of such a woman ever existing, at any corner of the earth. .

The third stanza, while retracing his brief optimism, quickly recedes into the pessimistic view of women propounded at length so far. The poet will be the first one to admit that the “pilgrimage” would be “sweet” if it yielded in procuring that faithful, true woman who would confound his view. Yet, as if in a sudden fit of alertness, the poet retrogrades to almost warn/plead the man to not go on the quest, not because he himself would not, but because the perils of such a “pilgrimage” far outweigh the gains (of experience, wisdom…).

The eventual assault, which smacks of crass misogyny, comes subsequently, when, while talking of the desired woman with apparent amicability, and who lives next door, the poet justifies his blunt refusal of partaking in courting her, even if she were to be found, that is. He claims that the man should not bother I investing his energies in her since, by the time it takes to write her a letter, she would have already slept with “two or three”. Her virtue can never be unquestioned, her faculties are always prone to such falsification, such gross indecencies, which by way of the poet’s implication, seem to be innate to her and her sex, and should, consequently be avoided by men.