Compare and contrast how the women are wooed in A.Marvells ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and J.Doones ‘The Flea’
By Amit Shah
Andrew Marvell was born in the year sixteen-twenty one, in Yorkshire. He became a lecturer in Hull and was educated at Hull Grammar School, and in sixteen-thirty three he matriculated as a Sizar of Trinity College, Cambridge. Marvell wrote many poems, and ‘To His Coy Mistress’ was one of them. The poem was published in the seventeenth century and is a good example of love poetry in this century. Also in the seventeenth century, a poet called John Doone also wrote a similar poem about love. John Donne's poem ‘The Flea’ appears to be a love poem, a dedication from a male suitor to his lady of honour, which renounces to yield to his shameless desires. In this poem, the speaker tries to seduce a young woman by comparing the consequences of their lovemaking with those of an insignificant fleabite. He uses the flea as an argument to demonstrate that the physical relationship he desires is not in itself a significant event, because a similar unification has already taken place within the flea. The poem was written in the seventeenth century and in those days, if blood was mingled it meant you had had sex with that person.