Compare and contrast how the women are wooed in A.Marvells ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and J.Doones ‘The Flea’

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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.

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        In both poems they use symbols to prove their points to try and get their women to have sex with them. In ‘To His Coy Mistress’ the symbol is time as throughout the poem the man complains about the lack of time in life. In ‘The Flea’ the symbol is quite literally the flea as the man uses this to seduce the women. Both poems are about the speaker trying to seduce and woo the women. Wooed means how the men tried to encourage the women into doing what they wanted. They then try anything to win the women’s hand. ...

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