National Poetry Month, Day 1: "Song" - John Donne

 

This was my second favorite poem.  I found it when I was fourteen in an
anthology on the bookshelf of my English classroom. I liked it so much that I asked for the
same anthology for my birthday, and started teaching myself to read poems that were too
old for me, like this one, which is not as much about mermaids as it is about the
inevitability of infidelity.  I still like it enormously, as do a lot of other people,
as it's been continuously in print for four hundred years. 

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee;
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear
No where
Lives a woman true, and fair.

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet:
Though she were true, when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three.