“To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell

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Name: Mehmet Tuncer

Stimulus: “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell

First Draft: 27/09/2001

Final Draft: 26/03/2002

Type: Poetry Analysis

        Andrew Marvell in his poem, “To His Coy Mistress” stresses the temporality of youth. With cleverly tooled literary devices, Marvell creates a powerful and playful love poem in "To His Coy Mistress." He unites elements of form, rhetoric, and imagery into a subtle argument with which the speaker in the poem also attempts to seduce a reluctant lady.

        To assist the argument, Marvell breaks the poem into three parts. He presents one set of ideas, then argues against them, and then presents a second set of ideas. In the opening part of the poem stress how he wishes his love to be, and in this case it is tranquil and drawn out. Instead of beginning the poem with the concept of death, he opens it with the lines, “Had we but world enough, and time / This coyness, lady, were no crime”. He proceeds to outline what he would do out of love for his lady if they were both much longer-lived, mentioning such lengths of time as centuries and ages. Then he opposes this idea, because they will not live so long - "yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity" - and so the premise of the foregoing argument is false. Finally, he draws the conclusion that since his desire to love her slowly and coyly is belied by their mortality, they must resort to a temporary affection: "Now let us sport us while we may . . . Rather at once our time devour / Than languish in his slow-chapped power".

The speaker in Marvell’s poem carefully controls his imagery to enhance his argument. There is a discernible progression from exotic and luxurious imagery in the first section to lifelessness in the second and to fiery passion in the third. In the first section of the poem, the speaker creates exotic imagery, presumably to tease his listener. He has her imagination wandering to rivers both near (the Humber) and far (the Ganges), and his evocation of rubies and empires suggests exotic and fantastic realms removed from and more appealing than any domestic scene in England. The speaker progresses from understandable amounts of time to unknowable amounts, by asking her to imagine thirty thousand years. The effect of this imagery is to bring her outside of the immediate moment and into ancient history and beyond. The speaker abruptly changes imagery and brings his mistress to the grave. The “deserts of vast eternity” could have been the age the speaker would devote to worshiping his listener’s “every part”. Instead, neither the speaker’s passion nor his listener's beauty will endure through eternity. The poem has progressed from ten years before the Flood into eternity, but the lifelessness of the second section is in plain contrast with the rich luxury of the first. To make the lifelessness of the preceding lines even more distasteful, the speaker introduces repulsive images associated with the decomposition of bodies in graves. I think by this effect the speaker is trying to make the listener fully appreciate the differences between beautiful life and disgusting death. Once he has set up the contrast between the eternity of his love and human mortality in the first two sections, the speaker uses images of fiery passion in this final section.

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The speaker’s vocabulary shifts as his argument goes through the three phases that make up the three sections of the poem. When the reader tries to understand the position of the listener, the poem’s occasionally difficult language becomes simpler to understand. The speaker’s diction changes, depending on whether he is trying to appeal to his lover, to flatter her, or to persuade her. Initially, the speaker’s words are meant to impress his lover, so the speaker implies to world geography. He also flatters her by placing her in an exotic location (the Indian Ganges) while he remains in England ...

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