Rhetoric in Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”
Poet Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) was closely tied to Oliver Cromwell’s associates throughout much of his career. He tutored the daughter of Lord Fairfax, a general of the parliamentary army, and worked as Latin secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. Many of his poems “—explore the human condition in terms of fundamental dichotomies that resist resolution.” (“Andrew Marvell” 1696). The main conflict in his poem “To His Coy Mistress” is the conflict between idealized courtship and the passage of time. Like many other carpe diem poems of the time, “To His Coy Mistress” solves this conflict by arguing that it is better to give in to the wants of the moment rather than waste precious time. However,
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The sarcasm hints at an underlying ethos, because the speaker is asserting his position as an educated man constructing an argument while also acknowledging that the woman he is addressing carries the power to address or deny him. Near the beginning of the poem, while explaining how long he is willing to love her, he says, “And you should, if you please, refuse” (9). “If you please” is the speaker’s acknowledgement that the unnamed mistress would have, and does have, all the power in the situation. Its placement within the sentence as an interrupting phrase carries a certain bitter, sarcastic tone, as if the speaker may be running out of patience with her. The second interrupting phrase the speaker uses once again references the mistress’s power, but this time his sarcasm comes across more clearly in opposition of it. He says, “The grave’s a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace.” (31-32). The phrase “I think” gestures to her power in the situation once again, because up until this point she has denied sleeping with him, and he is afraid that she will continue to deny him until their deaths. It is also obviously impossible to embrace while dead, so by saying “I think”, he is intentionally injecting sarcasm into his statement. He is speaking as an intelligent person pointing out something that should be obvious to the person he is …show more content…
The speaker imparts a sense of urgency upon his words by saying, “Now therefore, while the youthful hue / Sits on the skin like morning dew,” (33-34). “Hue” represents an aspect of light, which can be observed through one of the five senses—sight. The fact that this hue “sits on skin” refers to its superficial aspect. And because it “sits on the skin” like “morning dew”, like dew it is subject to the passage of time. Therefore, one can conclude that the like dew, the woman’s beauty will disappear eventually. She must sleep with her now before time passes. A few lines later, he once again repeats “now” before saying “—let us sport while we may…like amorous birds of prey,” (37-38). The repetition of the word “now” once again conveys the speaker’s urgency. The simile “like amorous birds of prey”, suggests an animal state of being. Unlike humans, animals are not constrained by social and moral conventions. They only follow instinct. Therefore, the speaker suggests to his mistress that they should throw those same social and moral conventions aside in favor of instinct. The idea of limited time gives credit to the simile, and thus the simile gives a reason for the
The poem “The Old Maid”, by Sara Teasdale, takes place on a sidewalk on Broadway. The speaker in the poem is a woman walking with who you can infer to be her fiancée and she is describing a brief encounter she had with another woman in the car driving by her. The speaker describes the woman as “The woman I might grow to be,” She then notices how her hair color “…was as mine” and how “Her eyes were strangely like my eyes”. However, despite all these similarities the woman’s hair compared to the speaker’s was “…dull and drew no light”. Her eyes also did not shine like the speaker’s. The speaker assumed that the reason for the woman’s frail appearance was because she had never had the opportunity to know what it was like to be in love. In the last stanza, the speaker no longer looks upon the old maid but to her lover and knows that even though they may look similar she will never be like her.
In the second stanza, Marvell turns his attention to another “problem” that his lover might pose by not sleeping with him. He writes, “But at my back I always hear/ Times winged chariot hurrying near” (21-22). Marvell is concerned about death in this situation. He is now pleading to his woman because he feels threatened by time. He tells her that time is running out and that they had better sleep together before it is too late. Marvell solidifies this argument a few lines later by presenting the idea of death and the fact that they can not have sexual intercourse once they are dead. He writes, “The grave’s a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embra...
She depicts her life as magnificent, she lays her legs and arms out and feels the bliss of being this age with no prerequisites set upon her. It is this feeling and memory that the speaker will be pulling from for whatever remains of her life. It would,"…always be there, behind those nights (33)."Even when she is more established, the age she is currently, and considerably assist, later on, she can draw satisfaction and peace from recollecting what her life used to resemble. She will recollect when she had boundless drains (at regular intervals). Her life was kept exclusively by "[a] clock of cream and flame (36-37)" or the warmth of their closeness. This is the thing that the speaker alludes to as "heaven."A heaven she will always remember and can simply rationally come back to. She has "known heaven" and will always have
He says that they should start sleeping together sooner rather than later. Which the speaker translates to “ And your quaint honour turn to dust, / And into ashes all my lust. / The grave's a fine and private place, /
In the poem “To His Coy Mistress”, the speaker is trying to seduce his wife. In the assumption the mistress is his wife; she is being bashful towards losing her virginity. The speaker, which is the mistress’s husband, develops a carefully constructed argument where the speaker seeks to persuade his lady to surrender her virginity to him.
Throughout his life... was a man self-haunted, unable to escape from his own drama, unable to find any window that would not give him back the image of himself. Even the mistress of his most passionate love-verses, who must (one supposes) have been a real person, remains for him a mere abstraction of sex: a thing given. He does not see her --does not apparently want to see her; for it is not of her that he writes, but of his relation to her; not of love, but of himself loving.
“To seduce this girl or not?” is a simple question for most men. Andrew Marvell knew very well what the outcome of reciting his poem, “To His Coy Mistress”, would be. Back in the 16th century, when Marvell wrote this poem, women were treated as second-class citizens. Most were uneducated or if they were, it was to an insignificant amount. Women only knew what they were told and what they were told was to benefit a man’s world.
Response to His Coy Mistress Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" is the charming depiction of a man who has seemingly been working very hard at seducing his mistress. Owing to Marvell's use of the word "coy," we have a clear picture of the kind of woman his mistress is. She has been encouraging his advances to a certain point, but then when he gets too close, she backs off, and resists those same advances. Evidently, this has been going on for quite some time, as Marvell now feels it necessary to broach the topic in this poem. He begins in the first stanza by gently explaining that his mistress's coyness would not be a "crime" if there were "world enough, and time…" (l.2).
At the start, the first stanza of the poem is full of flattery. This is the appeal to pathos. The speaker is using the mistress's emotions and vanity to gain her attention. By complimenting her on her beauty and the kind of love she deserves, he's getting her attention. In this first stanza, the speaker claims to agree with the mistress - he says he knows waiting for love provides the best relationships. It feels quasi-Rogerian, as the man is giving credit to the woman's claim, he's trying to see her point of view, he's seemingly compliant. He appears to know what she wants and how she should be loved. This is the appeal to ethos. The speaker seems to understand how relationships work, how much time they can take, and the effort that should be put forth. The woman, if only reading stanza one, would think her and the speaker are in total agreement.
Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh both create speakers who disagree about the nature of romantic love. The titles of the twin poems, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” by Marlowe, and “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” by Raleigh, show that they are two sides of a rhetorical exchange. The poems’ structures are identical; each of the shepherd’s optimistic requests has a corresponding refusal from the nymph. Although the word choice and meters are similar in the two poems, the shepherd uses an optimistic tone while the nymph uses a pessimistic one. While both speakers are addressing the concept of love, their distinct uses of diction and imagery underscore how the shepherd’s optimism conflicts with the nymph’s skepticism.
The Theme of Love in the Poems First Love, To His Coy Mistress, Porphyria's Lover, My Last Duchess and Shall I Compare Thee?
Marvell chooses not to employ many of these techniques in the opening of "To His Coy Mistress." Instead, his images and tools stress how he wishes his love to be- tranquil and drawn out. Rather than beginning with a focus on the concept of death, he opens the poem with the lines, "Had we but world enough, and time / This coyness, lady, were no crime" (ll. 1-2) He will later take on the trappings of the carpe diem poem, but his focus will then be on the grandeur and passion of love, rather than its instability.
Nevertheless, the speaker is using fake flattery in expressing that he would spend all of this time on different parts of his mistress’ body. This paradigm makes the speaker appear insincere, rendering the notion of love merely a mocking joke. Conversely, in Last Night, the speaker never came off as insincere, nor did she make love seem like a mockery. The succeeding four lines of flattery in To His Coy Mistress reveal the true irony of the speaker: An age at least to every part,
Andrew Marvell in his poem describes a young man convincing his fair mistress to release herself to living in the here and now. He does this by splitting the poem up into three radically different stanzas. The first takes ample time to describe great feelings of love for a young lady, and how he wishes he could show it. The idea of time is developed early but not fully. The second stanza is then used to show how time is rapidly progressing in ways such as the fading of beauty and death. The third stanza presses the question to the young mistress; will she give herself to the young man and to life? Although each stanza uses different images, they all convey the same theme of living life to the fullest and not letting time pass is seen throughout. Marvell uses imagery, symbolism, and wonderful descriptions throughout the poem. Each stanza is effective and flows easily. Rhyming couplets are seen at the ends of every line, which helps the poem read smoothly.
Structure, a major tool stressed in this poem, tends to rearrange the text in a large-scale way. In "To His Coy Mistress", the reader should focus on the most significant types of structure: stanza and temporal. In other words, time and chronological order assemble the whole meaning of the text throughout the poem. Although the story contains seduction and intimacy, which is portrayed in the title alone, it is merely a cry for two lovers to be together before time runs out. Temporally, the man first explains to the woman how he would love her if he only had the time. The man's sincerity is truly expressed when Marvell writes, "Had we but world enough, and time...I would love you ten years before the flood...nor would I love at lower rate," (373: 1, 7-8, 20). It seems that the man genuinely cares for the lady, or is he secretly seducing her into bed? Taking a look at the second stanza...