Images of war are used differently from poem to poem, ‘To His Coy Mistress’ at the end of this poem, he uses to image of war by saying that his love for this woman will be as strong as a cannon ball. He compares in this poem whereas in ‘The Fair Singer’ he links the two. In ‘To his Coy Mistress’ he talks of the iron gates of life and as a cannon ball smashing through it so would they with their love. ‘In A Prospect Of Flowers’ is describing a little girl whom will possibly grow up to be a strong minded ‘warrior’. In the second stanza it says ‘under her command severe, see his bow broke and ensigns torn’, the writer is telling the reader that this little girl when she grows up to be a woman will be beating love at it own game. Each of these military images is used in different ways to create different effects. The most effective of them all will be ‘The Fair Singer’ because the writer is constantly associating the military images to the love images and it gives off a strong sense of love.
If we also look at the narrator’s attitude to the woman in these poems, there are different styles used to correspond with the images used in them. In ‘The Fair Singer’ we are given a dramatic style because the narrator has not confronted this woman therefore he only describes her beauty, he cannot give too much military images at all because that does not agree with the style of the poem and wouldn’t work very well. But if we look at ‘To His Coy Mistress’ this poem is an argumentative style poem and therefore using the military images will work very well and give a good effect to the reader. She is trying to preserve her virginity in this poem, and the narrator is saying that they don’t have all the time in the world and that she will not be beautiful forever. He tries different methods to try and get her to say yes. He uses the military images as in the cannon ball so that they should ‘Carpe Diem’ (cease the day), and seeing as this is an argumentative theme, he tries to shock her into saying yes. He uses animal images; in this case ‘worms’, he tells her that if she won’t be with him and lose her virginity to him, when she dies the worms will only take what he could not have. So they may as well Carpe diem.
In ‘The Flea’ the narrator has based the whole poem around this animal. The style is the same as ‘To His Coy Mistress’ it’s an argumentative poem but the images given in here are both extreme and unexpected. The woman in this poem seems to want to preserve her virginity as well. The narrator has idolised the flea into being himself and the woman bonded together, because the flea has sucked both of their blood and the blood mixing has ‘spiritually tied them together’.
The narrator has made the flea seem a really important object and as the woman being so determined to preserve her virginity she tries for the first time to kill it. The narrator has stopped her and telling her if she does do it she will be murdering the flea and the both of them because of the fact that they have been bonded. But she eventually does kill the flea and the narrator turns the whole thing around by telling her that after making the flea seem like such a big thing, she didn’t feel nothing by killing it because in fact the flea didn’t mean a thing, just like her virginity. That is the shock to the woman of this whole poem. It is far more effective to the reader than ‘To His Coy Mistress’ because of the ending where not only the woman gets shocked but also the reader.
If we look at the images of the sun used in some of these poems and the effect it has on the characters in the poem and on the readers. Again in ‘To His Coy Mistress’ we are given images of the sun. ‘Winged chariot hurrying near’, it was believed at the time the poem was written the sun was pulled by the chariot, and as its ‘hurrying near’ the narrator is saying that they do not have all the time in the world. Which carries on the theme of the argumentative style in this poem. He carries on to say in the end of this poem that if the woman and himself to get together that they could enjoy their lives so much that they could make the sun have to chase after them.
‘The Rising Sun’ has based the sun around the couple that have already slept together. This poem is split into three sections. The first he tells the sun to go away and wake others up such as ‘Late school-boys’. The second he is now asking the sun why he thinks that he is so important, just being able to rise every morning and wake up everyone, because all the man has to do is close his eyes and the sun is gone. But as we get to the third stanza, the narrator completely reverses himself to the first one in saying because the woman and him are so much in love with each other, ‘She is all States, and all Princess, I; Nothing else is’ that they are the whole world itself in this one bed so the sun doesn’t have to move at all.
I find that if you concentrate on I theme like ‘The Flea’ with is being based around the flea, and ‘The Rising Sun’ being based around the sun. You will get a far more dramatic effect than poems such as ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and ‘In A Prospect Of Flowers’. You’ll get far more drama and effect concentrating on a moment than mixing everything all up.
