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 poet begging his girlfriend to lay aside her reservations and engage in coitus. The poem is written in three verse paragraphs, which lay out three different stages of this love poem which illustrates the Classical topos of "carpe diem," the Horatian exhortation to enjoy life's pleasures in the face of inevitable mortality. I hope to show that over the course of these three paragraphs, Marvell employs tonal shifts which accompany three different views of time, as part of his argument to the mistress to cease her coyness and sleep with the poet.
The first verse paragraph engages in an interrelated set of images, all of which are meant to lend comic exaggeration to the idea of how lazy and protracted the courtship of the poet and his "coy mistress" could be if they had infinite time and space ("world enough and time," l.1) in which to engage in such courtship. He imagines the distance between the two of them to be as grand -- and as comically deflationary...
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
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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