The make statements in turn. The man is optimistic and thinks that the love can survive and rift between them will cure. The woman is demanding, she wants loyalty and respect, but also believes that it is beyond repair and they will not get back together.
The poem is made out of eight stanzas in free verse. In each stanza when the man speaks he finds the positive in everything while the woman finds something slightly negative in the same thing.
In stanza one the man uses the example of skin healing over a wound but in stanza two the woman replies that the mark from the scat will always be there and never fully disappears and whatever happened in their relationship will always be there, it will haunt them for the rest of their relationship.
Stanza three is the man’s image of a scab on burnt flesh, which will disappear but the woman’s image of whitened dead skin in stanza 4 has no feeling. Stanza five the man says that it is like cutting hair and it will always grow back to being how it was, but she says that the style changes can never be quite the same. Stanza 7 has an image of a tree that got damaged in a storm he says that everything goes back to normal and the tree lives on but the woman believes that like their love the tree dies.
The poem is metaphorical and each stanza implies the use of physical violence using metaphors. The first four stanzas talk about scabs on a person and that they never heal just turn ugly and horrible always there as a permanent reminder of the horror for the woman. Stanzas five and six talk about life, which metaphorically is the hair, the woman was physically abused and so she changed her life style so that it would not happen again. In stanza 7 the tree is the love they had between them, something strong and bad happened, the storm is a metaphor to describe a fight, abuse of some one that affected the love badly, badly enough to have killed it but left it lingering there as a reminder of it being there, like the tree which dies and is left there.
The poem is set out in the form of a debate, eight stanzas in pairs to each other. The stanzas are in free verse though stanzas one to six are set out formally with five short lines. Each stanza is introduced by ‘I said’ or ‘she said’ as if recording a debate. Repetition is a feature of the poem giving it a tighter structure.
The last lines of the female’s stanzas beginning ‘she said’ all echo the words ‘such is our love’, a brief unemotional statement which underlines the hopeless finality of the situation, ‘forever dead’ like a sad echo of someone departing forever.
The shortness of the lines in the whole poem evokes a feeling of failure, even exhaustion at the end of the relationship when there is no more to be said. There are few really emotive words except in stanza three and seven ‘burnt flesh’, ‘scab’, ‘ugly’, ‘raging’, showing some feeling in the man, because he has stronger belief in the relationship. The women’s language shows less sentimentality than the man’s, as she seems more realistic bout the future.
Andrew Marvell who was one of the great metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century writes ‘To His Coy Mistress’. In his lifetime there was a great intellectual excitement of expansion of knowledge.
A time-honored belief is shown in the title of the poem, the man is ‘the hunter’, he takes the initiative in making love whilst the woman is ‘his prey’ or ‘sex object’. He must satisfy his sexual needs at all costs, the women’s hesitancy or shyness is an obstacle to be overcome, it helps turn him on. The man convinces himself that the woman really wants a sexual relation ship with him and she is simply being a ‘tease’, flirting in a coy manner with him. In his urgent, ardent approach, he cannot imagine any serious reason for refusing him, such as fear of pregnancy or loss of virginity or the need for more than a sexual relationship.
The hero of the poem starts of by saying that time is short and they should seize the day, Caper Diem, she should get over her shyness and get into bed with him. He then says that she deserves all the time in the world. He says that she is the river Ganges while he is the river Humber, he is complementing her on her beauty and at the same time saying that he is ugly. He says that he would have loved her ten years before Noah’s’ flood. He says that if she wants she can carry on refusing until the conversion of the Jews, which is never going to happen. He says that his ‘love grows faster than empires are built’. He flatters her by telling her that her eyes should be flattered for one hundred years. He says that ‘two hundred years should be spent to adore each breast’ and thirty thousand years to adore the rest of her. At the end of the first stanza he says that she deserves all the time in the world and he will love her as much as he says for the whole time.
The second stanza he starts by saying that he hears time drawing near and he has nit got as many years as he says. He then says that eternity lies before their eyes but her beauty will not be found, he says that she will die and worms will eat her corpse but at the same time he is saying ‘why save your virginity’ you will die and it will go to the worms. He’s feelings will turn to dust and all his love to ashes. He says that a grave is ‘fine’ and ‘privet’ but people do not hug in graves.
In the third stanza he flatters the colour of her skin, he tries to flatter and scare her into having sex with him. The last two lines say that cannot make the sun stay, but we can make it run.
This is a metaphysical poem. He puts his side of the argument forward, it is structured in stages, how if there was time, how much he would give her, how death is near and then a conclusion with a sense of both previous stanzas. It has a tight rhyming scheme, the poem is monosyllabic and written in the first person.
‘One Flesh’ has a lot of love between the two people, they do not need to show it because there is an invisible string, which joins them together. They are not as passionate and so do not need to show the love for each other. ‘Our Love’ has no love in it, it has the man lusting for the woman but she does not want to go back to him, after what he did, how he hurt her. ‘To His Coy Mistress’ has a wealthy rich man desperate to take advantage of a woman, he will get what he wants and then leave her. This poem, like ‘Our Love Now’, also has no love in it.
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