However, this over confident attitude could just be her trying to cover up anything that doesn’t seem so rosy on the surface. She may feel that now she is ruined and made a name for herself, she needs to gain some respect back, so she could be pretending that it wasn’t a bad decision although and she has no shame, although she may be thinking this inside.
It is clear that Melia has become better off being ruined and some people may question how she has enough money to look so well, sparking suspicion that she may have become a prostitute. Therefore being ruined is not a problem for her, and she seems much happier now, ‘to know not of megrims or melancho-ly’ so it is ironic that she has done so well for herself whereas usually it would have ruined a woman’s hopes and plans for the future.
The reader of this poem would be expected to think badly of Melia as she had sex out of marriage which is still frowned upon now although it was much worse when the poem was set, however as she has done better for herself and seems to be much happier the reader may just accept what she has done without passing judgement or they could think that Melia was over confident in herself for what she had done, which is what I believe.
I think that Hardy wrote the poem this way on purpose, so that people could make up their own minds of what to think of Melia and to see that being ruined isn’t necessarily a bad thing, that they shouldn’t pass judgement so quickly without knowing the full story.
‘To his coy mistress’ is written by Marvell in a tree part structure, one of which upper class school boys where taught in school as a good structure for speech writing as it is seen as impressive, where two statements are followed by a logical conclusion, a syllogistic framework, simplified by ‘if’, ‘but’ and ‘so’.
‘Had we world enough, and time, This coyness, lady were no crime’ the man begins, meaning that if they did have all the time in the world then the coyness of the mistress wouldn’t matter, however in time they will get older and less beautiful. ‘Thy beauty shall no more be found’ he continues explaining that they will get older, and then will not be as beautiful as they are now and says ‘now let us sport us while we may’ saying that they should just have sex now, before they get too old.
Marvell writes that he flatters his mistress, using a technique called hyperbole: exaggerating it. ‘An age at least to every part’ he writes, talking about the amount of time the man would spend adoring her ‘For lady, you deserve this state’ he says, continuing to flatter her. I think that Marvell wrote using hyperbole because flattery can be very persuasive language when used in the right context and using the technique in this poem was highly suitable.
He is trying to persuade his ‘coy’ mistress to have sex with him but obviously she is hesitant and he has to try and persuade her that what he is proposing is the right thing to do.
‘yonder all before us lie vast deserts of eternity’ he says explaining that they don’t have all the time so he can’t do everything that he said he would. But then, suddenly Marvell changes the tone of the poem by writing: ‘then worms shall try that long- preserved virginity’ and ‘your quaint honour turn to dust; and into ashes all my lust’. These lines come across as very powerful and create images of death and rotting to the readers. The mistress and the readers would be shocked by this as only a few moments before, the man was flattering her, whereas now he is talking about her death, dying a virgin. Marvell uses language, as a tool by creating images i.e.- ‘worms shall try’ because he knew the affects they would have, they are very powerful and very different to the images he wrote earlier in the poem; the effects of this being that the mistress could have been made to feel insecure and possibly emotionally blackmailed into losing her virginity as she would have been put off dying a virgin due to the horrible images.
In the last stanza the man suggests that they have sex again and uses language to describe the physical side of it. This is the ‘therefore’ section.
All the man’s efforts and attempts to try and persuade his mistress to have sex are now reinstated in this end stanza. ‘Now let us sport us while we may; and now, like amorous birds of prey’ he says, giving the impression that it is no big deal and that they should just get it over and done with.
‘And tear our pleasures with rough strife’ Hardy writes next, choosing carefully the words ‘tear’, ‘pleasures’ and ‘rough’ as they clearly describe the act of sex, almost crudely but he knows that the reader (and the mistress) will understand it and perhaps see how desperate he wants to have sex now, rather then late
Both poems, although written by different writers and at different times are very closely linked.
‘To his coy mistress’ is a single sided argument of a man trying to persuade his mistress to lose her virginity to him, she gets no input or say at all in the poem, which I think relates to how men were seen to be more important back when the poem was written, so the mans view was the only one that mattered, taken into account. ‘The ruined maid’ however is a conversation between two friends, where one is stating how much she has become better of after having sex, being ruined. So it is almost as if the poems were ‘before’ and ‘after’ statements.
In ‘To his coy mistress’ he is trying to persuade the woman into having sex, although it is obvious that she does not want to, as she would have known that it wasn’t the best thing to do, that her marital status would have been in ruins, her reputation in tatters. However in ‘The ruined maid’ Melia had already have had sex and although her old life and the only way she knew was gone, she had gained a much better one, where although she is no longer of any marital value, she appears (unless it is just a cover) to be more polished and seems happier in general life.
If you look at it in one way, ‘The ruined maid’ could be what could happen to the mistress in ‘To his coy mistress’. It could be what happens to her if she goes through with the man’s proposal so in conclusion, although the poems tell the tales of two different stories, they could easily be part of the same one, where ‘The ruined maid’ follows on from ‘To his coy mistress’.
