The poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell is about a man who is trying to manipulate and seduce a woman. My first impression of this poem was that the man is very manipulative and puts a lot of pressure on his mistress, but his mistress is reluctant to sleep with him because she is shy (coy). The man seems to get a bit violent by the end of the poem.
The poem I am comparing with ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is ‘The Passionate Shepherd To His Love’ by Christopher Marlowe. This poem is about a shepherd who is trying to convince his love to come live with him. My first impressions of this poem is that the shepherd cares a lot for his love and only wants to be with her, so he is going out of his way – offering her lots of precious gifts – to try and convince her to live with him.
In the poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’ the man tries to seduce his mistress by saying things like being shy is a crime, ‘This coyness, lady, were no crime.’ She losing her looks and she’s not getting any prettier, ‘Thy beauty shall no more be found;’ and then resorts to saying if she doesn’t lose her virginity soon, she will die a virgin and the worms will take her virginity from her in her coffin, ‘…worms shall try that long served virginity:’ – this comes across as a bit of a threat, which indicates he is getting impatient and violent.
In the poem ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ Christopher Marlowe treats seduction in a completely different way than Andrew Marvell does in ‘To His Coy Mistress’. In ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ the shepherd tries to seduce his love by offering to make her many wonderful things, ‘Will I make thee beds of roses And a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flowers and a kirtle…’, ‘Fair lined slippers for the cold,’ and many more other wonderful things.
In ‘To His Coy Mistress’ the poet uses similes whereas in ‘The Passionate Shepherd To His Love’ Christopher Marlowe doesn’t use any. The similes in ‘To His Coy Mistress’ are; ‘sits on thy skin like morning dew’ and ‘like amorous birds of prey’.
Andrew Marvell uses seduction, in the poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’, in a very negative way. The man in the poem tries to convince his mistress to sleep with him using just negative points. The way he tries to convince her could be classed as bullying, like when he tells his mistress that she should sleep with him when she’s young and full of the passions of life because she isn’t getting any prettier, ‘Now therefore, while the youthful hew Sits on thy skin like morning dew, And while thy willing soul transpires At every pore with instant Fires.’ In ‘The Passionate Shepherd To His Love’, Christopher Marlowe treats seduction in a lot more of a positive way. The shepherd in the poem attempts to convince his love to live with him using only positive points and being romantic an example of this is, ‘Come live with me my Love, And we will all the pleasures prove That hills and valleys, dale and field, And all the craggy mountains yield.’
By Tom Rushton-Large
