However, in the context of the Civil Wars, Vaughan’s and Crashaw’s introspection began to look like retreat, and, when the satires of John Cleveland and the lyrics of Abraham Cowley took the Donne manner to extremes of paradox and vehemence, it was symptomatic of a loss of control in the face of political and social traumas. The one poet for whom metaphysical wit became a strategy for holding together conflicting allegiances was Donne’s outstanding heir, Andrew Marvell. Marvell’s writing is taut, extraordinarily dense and precise, uniquely combining a cavalier lyric grace with Puritanical economy of statement. His finest work seems to have been done at the time of greatest strain, in about 1650–53, and under the patronage of Sir Thomas Fairfax, parliamentarian general but opponent of King Charles I’s execution, to whose retirement from politics to his country estate Marvell accorded qualified praise in “Upon Appleton House.” His lyrics are poems of the divided mind, sensitive to all the major conflicts of their society—body against soul, action against retirement, experience against innocence, Oliver Cromwell against the king—but Marvell sustains the conflict of irreconcilables through paradox and wit rather than attempting to decide or transcend it. In this situation, irresolution has become a strength; in a poem like “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland,” which weighs the claims of King Charles and Cromwell, the poet’s reserve was the only effective way of confronting the unprecedented demise of traditional structures of politics and morality.

The poem simply titled “Song” is often referred to by its opening line, “Goe, and catche a falling starre” to distinguish it from other poems published as Donne’s Songs and Sonnets. This 27-line poem is deceptively light, upon first reading, as so much of Donne’s poetry appears. On the surface, it suggests attitudes about love and the relations between the sexes, but once again Donne’s poem carries a spiritual metaphor. The tone is lightly satirical, with deeper truths peeking out from underneath the poet’s assumed worldliness and cynicism.The meter for this poem is slightly unusual for Donne. It is not a typical “song” meter, even though that is its title. The title “Song” also gives a certain lightness and flippancy to the poem which is matched by the early lines about doing impossible things. The early lines prepare us for a cynical perspective that calls to mind the attitude of the jaded courtier singing to a collection of adults who are well-schooled in the vagaries of love.This poem is not just about misogyny or even a sincere statement about the alleged infidelity of women. Yes, on the surface the poem could read as a way for a young, scorned lover to cope with a woman who was false to him. And misogyny in love poems, read with a contemporary lens, might even seem like a convention in seventeenth-century poetry. Yet, a spiritual reading suggests a gender-neutral criticism of fallen humanity. As much as people may pledge themselves to be true to the divine, they fall short and might sin two or three times in the course of an afternoon. People are false the world over.