This darkness is the poem is the suggestion of death, which Eliot's character contemplates throughout the poem. In fact, the last lines of the poem refer to death. Eliot writes, "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown" (Eliot). Eliot's character knows his life is ending, and love and courtship are far behind him. Marvell's character also contemplates death. Marvell writes, "Time's winged chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity. / Thy beauty shall no more be found, / Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound / My echoing song: then worms shall try / That long preserved virginity, / And your quaint honour turn to dust, / And into ashes all my lust: / The grave's a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace" (Marvell). However, his idea of death seems removed and far away, while Eliot's is much closer and far more real. Both men realize their own mortality and know they will not live forever, but they approach it differently. Marvell uses it, as a younger man would, to try to get his mistress into bed, while Eliot uses it as a means to look back on a life and the loves of that life. The poems actually contain similar messages, but they convey those messages in very different ways.
Reading these two poems together is helpful because they show that different poets can handle the same theme in very different ways. Love seems...
Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" Andrew Marvell is loosely affiliated with the Metaphysical school of poetry, much noted for the wit and novelty of their "conceits" (or figurative language), and his poem "To His Coy Mistress" accordingly adopts a series of different rhetorical figures -- fixed within a tightly rhymed tetrameter stanza -- which attempt to place great rhetorical flourish on what is a simple request on the part of the
Andrew Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress," the narrator makes it clear that coyness is a "crime," (line 2). Coyness is a crime because it represents withholding gratification for an indefinite time, when human beings do not have unlimited time. Thus, coyness is akin to a crime against nature. To be coy is to deny the passage of time, to deny death, and to deny the reality of aging.
That is not what King Henry II had in mind when he gave the ring to Eleanor of Aquitaine. He had in mind love, devotion, and using every moment possible for the best in life. In "We Real Cool," the young pool players are not in fact seizing the day, they are wasting their lives doing exactly what they want to do, rather than doing what will pay them
" The rest of the poem deals with the seeming artificiality of life in light of the spiritual death that led man out of the Garden and into the world of Nature to begin with. 4) How does "To His Coy Mistress" compare to Herrick's "Upon Julia's Clothes"? What theme(s) and images do the two poems share? How is the treatment of women similar? Both of these poems use contrast to
Gender Criticism of Poetry: To his Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell versus "When I am dead my dearest" by Christiana Rossetti -- A masculine defiance of mortality through sexuality, a female acceptance of the inevitable nature of death When examining the poem "To his Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell, in comparison to the poem "When I am dead my dearest" by Christiana Rossetti one can see that, although both explore a similar
Marvelous Marvell We have world without an end, and time as a tool, Since love, tangible love, breeds not in an empty pool. Let's sit down and deliberate without haste Whether to walk or leave the love a day to prostrate. Lest Dead Sea for Indian Ganges we mistake And fowl smell, sea shells and fish we take. For all your complains I withstood, So should you stand with me through the flood. Though I may or may
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