What’s Up With the Epigraph?

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,

            Or to keep off envy's stinging,

                        And find

                        What wind

Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'est born to strange sights,

            Things invisible to see,

Ride ten thousand days and nights,

            Til age snow white hairs on thee,

Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me

All strange wonders that befell thee,

                        And swear

                        Nowhere

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, til you write your letter,

                        Yet she

                        Will be

False, ere I come, to two, or three.

—John Donne, 1572-1631

What's up with the epigraph?

We're totally on board with the first line of John Donne's poem: "Go, and catch a fallen star." It's exactly what Tristran does, after all, and what half the rest of the characters want to do. But that's where the obvious parallels between the epigraph and the rest of the book fall apart, so what's a Shmooper to do? Why turn to Neil Gaiman himself, of course. Check out what he says about his epigraph choice in this interview:

"There were things I knew I wanted to do going into it—one of which was very quietly to almost offer a reply to John Donne's 'Song,' which is the single most misogynist little piece of poetry in the entirety of the English language. It's the epigraph to Stardust."

Ah-ha. Let's reread the epigraph, with special attention to the second and third stanzas. The speaker/narrator is telling his addressee to keep an eye out for a woman both true and fair, and he's warning the addressee that even if she's true when they meet, and when they correspond, that eventually she'll wind up being false. In this context, false could mean any number of things, from unfaithful to impure. None of them are good, though, so the poem's pretty much about how half of humanity is incapable of being virtuous or truthful. Not sexist at all, Donne. Oh wait…

If we view Stardust as a response to the gender politics of "Song," then we'll get a slightly different meaning out of it. Yes, the book on one level is about the protagonist going and catching a fallen star, and finding cool magic stuff. But we also see lots of female characters doing lots of things, and importantly, while some of these things are bad, some of them are all good. Ahem, John Donne? Now might be a good time to start taking notes on the, shall we say, complexities of ladies.

We see Victoria, haughty and mocking when she sends Tristran off, actually intending to follow through with her promise to marry him if he returns, even though it means not getting to marry the dude she loves. We see Yvaine acknowledging that her fate lies with Tristran once he's saved her life, and she never runs away again. And we see Lady Una tenaciously clinging to her identity as a daughter of the Lord of Stormhold, determined to make it back to her own lands no matter how long it takes to wait out the terms of Madame Semele's spell.

In Stardust, the characters (both female and male) are motivated by a lot of things, and they're pretty darn persistent, too. They travel, and return to tell tales and make choices that turn out well or poorly. We get a way more complex vision of humanity than Donne presents in his poem, and we think that's just what Gaiman intended.