go and catch a falling star

I personally don't agree with Donne's views but they were widely shared at the time. Writers in Donne's time often expressed negative views of women, and some of Donne's poems seem to express such views with biting force. One corollary to seeing divine and physical love as coming forth from the same source is the almost obsessive focus on fidelity in Donne's works. In "Go and Catch a Falling Star," for example, the reader is asked to travel for ten thousand days and then confirm: No where Lives a woman true, and fair. He then asks his reader to inform him "if thou find'st one" who is faithful after all, but immediately changes his mind: 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. Read literally, the poem seems sexist, suggesting women's universal fickleness and susceptibility to straying from true love. Read as more broadly about fidelity, however, the poem may suggest mankind's propensity to stray from dedication to God.