Selected Poems by John Donne

The poem has an unusual metrical form. The tendency of English poetry to be iambic is well-known, but Donne uses trochees, for the most part in the first four lines of the stanza form he has chosen. Shakespeare famously uses a trochaic metre in the witches’ spell of Macbeth – ‘Double, double, toil and trouble’ – and in Donne’s poem there is a similar sense of a chant, as well as a listing of the improbable and occult that resembles in some ways the witches’ ingredients for their charm.

Details

‘Go and catch a falling star,’ = a meteor or ‘shooting star.’

‘Get with child a mandrake root,’ – Mandrake roots resemble the human form, and were used in witchcraft.

‘Or who cleft the devil's foot,’ – Traditionally the devil had goat legs and hooves.

‘And find/What wind’ – The rhyme was true in Donne’s time.

‘Serves to advance an honest mind.’ – A wind can fill a ship’s sails and cause it to ‘advance’, but how can a wind cause an ‘honest mind’ to ‘advance’ in the world, when, Donne is ironically suggesting, dishonesty is usually so much more effective.

‘If thou be'st born to strange sights,’ – Traditionally, the seventh child of the seventh daughter had second sight.

‘Till age snow white hairs on thee,’ – a particularly evocative line, combining the exposure of riding in all weathers, with the time taken to complete the journey.

‘Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,/All strange wonders that befell thee,’ – Traveller’s tales of foreign marvels were popular in Donne’s time.

‘And swear,/No where/Lives a woman true and fair.’ – The idea that beautiful women were inevitably faithless is a very old piece of sexist ‘wisdom’ – a cliché of Donne’s time – and it is deliberately anti-climactic here after all the excitement and wonder of the succession of ‘If…’ clauses that make up most of the poem.