Compare and contrast the attempts at seduction in To His Coy Mistress and The Flea

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Compare and contrast the attempts at seduction in To His Coy Mistress and The Flea

Although To His Coy Mistress and The Flea are both poems written in attempts to seduce reluctant love objects, they go about the matter in very different ways. In To His Coy Mistress the speaker focuses mainly on time, but also on the physique of his mistress. The Flea's speaker, however, concentrates more on the flea in question than the woman he is attempting to seduce. This may be so in The Flea because the speaker is improvising and so has to discuss what he can see around him or what influences him at a certain moment, and the reader gets the impression that the poem starts midway through the attempted seduction and so the speaker needs to deliver more ideas which may help him in his argument as he has previously failed to seduce the woman. Conversely, the speaker in To His Coy Mistress has pre-prepared an argument, so he can select his material carefully before presenting it.

The structures of To His Coy Mistress and The Flea are similar in that they are both tripartite, but otherwise they are very different. To His Coy Mistress is syllogistic, suggesting a necessary conclusion, when in fact the argument is non-sequitur. As it is presented as a syllogism, however, which has been regarded throughout history as a very effective way in which to present a logical argument, the conclusion is made to seem more necessary and the argument to seem logical. The Flea is also tripartite but is not syllogistic. Although the poem is made up of three distinct parts; these are based around live events as opposed to a staged argument. This is because The Flea is improvised, which has both advantages and disadvantages. Improvising the argument helps the speaker in The Flea as it demonstrates his wit, something which may help the speaker in his argument.

The argument of each poem is set up very early, with reluctance being immediately established as the impediment which each speaker must overcome, thus giving the woman in each poem the power to determine the outcome, making the seduction in each poem about the breaking down of reluctance. This reluctance is caused by the unwillingness for the woman to lose her virginity, which, in contemporary society, was very badly thought of outside of wedlock, therefore the reluctance is entirely justified. This makes the persuasion in each poem morally dubious, much like the lustful nature of each speaker. Because of this, both poems have to deal with the issue of the woman's honour, which each speaker trivialises to some extent. In To His Coy Mistress, it is described as the woman's "quaint honour" (line 29) which will be turned "to dust" (29) in the grave, furthering the speaker's argument that honour means nothing when you're dead. This also combines with the imagery of worms which, when the woman is dead, will "try/That long preserved virginity" (27-8), as "quaint" is a pun on the word 'cunt' which the speaker uses to explain that if she does not submit to him, she may lose her "long preserved virginity" to worms. In The Flea, honour is trivialised at the end of the poem by the speaker, who, for a final time, draws the analogy between sex and the bloods mixed inside the, now dead, flea. As the woman has killed the flea and shown that the mixture of bloods did not matter to her, and that she has not lost anything in herself by killing the flea, the speaker uses this to his advantage and tells her that "Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,/Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee" (26-7), showing the entire sex act to be insignificant based on this argument. Hence, both poems manage to trivialise honour so much as to suggest forcefully that it is pointless, however they both propose this in varying ways for different reasons.
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To His Coy Mistress and The Flea each present differing arguments as to why the speaker and the woman to whom the poem is written should have sex - To His Coy Mistress uses lack of time as the main reason, and The Flea uses the analogy of liquids being mixed inside a flea similar to the mixture of liquids during sex. Both fleas and time have been used in seductive poetry before, and so neither idea is completely original. The subject of time, especially, has been long associated with love poetry, as can be seen in the ...

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