John Renbourn singing John Donne's "Song"

On his debut album, John Renbourn (later of Pentangle) recorded a version of John Donne's "Song" (the first line of which is "Go and catch a falling star"). Renbourn changed the last line to "False, ere I count one, two three.." Courtesy of Bartleby.com.

Song

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,	5
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,	10
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,	15
And swear
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.
If thou find'st one, let me know;
Such a pilgrimage were sweet.	20
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	25
Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three.

JOHN DONNE (1573-1631). from The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900, Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. 

Adrienne Rich's "Song"

Image from: lacymarschalk.blogspot.com

I haven't been able to express feelings about the loss of Adrienne Rich, maybe because for myself and any other reader of her poems, her work isn't lost. Or maybe because it will take a while to pull it together, to go back to "Diving Into the Wreck," to remember my discovery in "Split at the Root" that I wasn't the only one split at the root in the same way and in some other ways she was.

I saw her read, once, at Kane Hall, a huge auditorium at the University of Washington in Seattle. Yowza. The joint was jumping, the hall jam-packed, the rafters nearly squeezed up into and over the roof. I understood then that poetry could reach beyond a small audience of specialists to feed a greater body, to feed a spiritual hunger.

Here she is, feeding us.  Not to get maudlin, but being a woman can be a lonely endeavor if, like me, you strive to be original and not hide strength or intellect or opinion.

Song

You're wondering if I'm lonely:
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.
You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely
If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns' first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

_____

Adrienne Rich, republished from Southern Cross Review.  Their biography of her:

Adrienne Rich (1929 - 2012 ) Adrienne Rich was first published as a poet in 1951, when she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for A Change of World. Her poetry has reflected her own life changes and many roles. Adrienne Rich's feminism emerged in mid-career, and many of her later poems express a political rage and search for sisterhood and creative language. Her work includes nineteen volumes of poetry including The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004, which won the Book Critics Circle Award; Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995); Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970 (1993); The Dream of a Common Language (1978); and Diving into the Wreck (1973); three collections of essays, and a ground-breaking study of motherhood, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution.