To His Coy Mistress Essays (1624 words) - To His Coy Mistress

To His Coy Mistress "To His Coy Mistress" is a dramatic monologue, in which the speaker addressed to his lady. In this poem, there are argument and counter-argument, as well as a conclusion. The poem is also different from conventional courtly love poetry, because in the first two stanzas, the speaker used a lot of exaggeration of time and space. The first stanza is the part of argument. From line 1 to 4, the speaker expressed his wish that if he and his lady had enough time, he would take the conventional way to praise and court his lady. But in the following lines, exaggeration of time and space make it clear that conventional way of courtship is simply impossible for them, and such exaggeration serves as an irony to conventional ways of courtship. First, from line 5-10,the speaker used the distance between the Indian Granges and Humber to represent the vast space,and the length of time is suggested by "ten years before the flood... till the conversion of the Jews. " In line 11 and 12, the word, "vegetable" implies the slowly growing sense of the speaker's love; "vaster than empires and more slow"again shows the exaggeration of space and time. From line 13 to 17, the speaker said he would use hundreds of years to praise his lover's different body parts, and such expression only implies their lack of time, line 92: To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell (1681) Lines 41-42: "Let us roll all our strength and all Our sweetness up into one ball," from: T.S. Eliot: Poet and Dramatist by Joseph Chiari: "And after all, would it have been worth while, amid such trivialities, "to have squeezed the universe into a ball", as Marvell proposed to do with his "Coy Mistress"....The argument starts again, and the question is once more raised: should he have dared? And again the same answer: "Would it have been worth while?"-- for the lady, turning towards the window, could say: "That is not it at all, That is not what I meant at all" Issues and Research Sources: Most of Marvell's lyric works were never published in his lifetime, when he was known as an author of political satire attacking religious intolerance and political corruption. Upon his death, his housekeeper, Mary Palmer, sent his manuscript works to press under a Preface she signed "Mary Marvell," suggesting she was his wife. The Marvell canon remained in disarray for two centuries until Herbert Grierson's annotated edition of Marvell's poems (1912) and the critical study, Metaphysical Lyrics (1921). These attracted the attention of T.S. Eliot, whose essay on Marvell brought him to the attention of American critics, as well as continuing a reappraisal of metaphysical poets' strategies. How might this long period of neglect and misunderstanding have changed the way Marvell's work affected later poets? Contrast this with the effects of the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare, which never went out of print and continued to have enormous influence in nearly every generation until the mid-twentieth century. Might unknown poets constitute a potentially revolutionary force against the reigning authorities, or are they unknown for good reasons? Marvell's relationship to the Puritan and Royalist causes seems to have been extremely complex. The library does not have the best political biography, but it is available in the area (H. Kelliher, Andrew Marvell: Poet and Politician [1978]). How might you trace out the Royalist and Parliamentary strains in his poetry? Under what circumstances may a poet's politics be entirely ignored? "To His Coy Mistress" is (with Herrick's "To Maidens to Make Much of Time") one of the era's most famous expressions of the carpe diem motif. Note the comparisons one might make with Donne's and Jonson's poetic flights of fancy regarding the lover's claims about the vast world's riches, and the cosmic scale of time. The phrase "But at my back I always here" shows up in Eliot's "The Wasteland," with a slightly different sound accompanying the persona's observation. Note that, like many Marvell poems, this one unfolds in stanzas that work like verse paragraphs, opening with a hypothetical exposition of timeless love, changing to the dreadful effects of time (see Spenser and Shakespeare), and turning the threat into the motive for reversing the effect of "devouring time" ("Now let us sport us while we may, / And now, like amorous birds of prey, / Rather at once our time devour / Than languish in his slow-chapped power."). His closing three couplets are a triumph of the metaphysical conceit's power to represent the human condition in violent, memorable,