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,
…show more content…
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
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
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.
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.
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).
Through his writing, Andrew Marvell uses several strategies to get a woman to sleep with him. In his seduction poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” Marvell first presents a problem and then offers his solution to the problem. Marvell sets up a situation in which he and his lover are on opposite sides of the world: “Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side/ Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide/ Of Humber would complain….” (5-7). He has set up a circumstance in which his lover is in India and he is in England; however, this situation can be interpreted as a metaphor for sexual distance. Marvell then goes on to profess his love for this woman, telling her that he will always love her, saying “...I would/ Love you ten years before the flood” (7-8) and saying that his “vegetable love should grow/ Vaster than empires and more slow” (11). This suggests that he is promising permanence in their relationship. In doing so, Marvell is also trying to pacify his lady’s fears of sexual relations. He wants his lover to feel secure and confident about having intercourse with him.
The logical argument for the "carpe diem" theme is built up from beginning to end. At the start, the first stanza of the poem is full of flattery. This is the appeal of pathos. The speaker uses 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 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.
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,
Marvell uses many images that work as tools to express how he wishes to love his mistress in the first stanza of the poem. From line 1 to 20 Marvell tells his mistress how he wishes he had all the time in the world to love her. In the very first line Marvell brings up the focus of time, “Had we but world enough and time/This coyness, lady, were no crime”. The second line shows the conflict that the author is facing in the poem, her coyness. Marvell continues from these initial lines to tell his mistress what he would do if he had enough time. In lines, three and four Marvell talks of “sitting down” to “think” where they will walk on their “long love’s day”. All of these word...
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.
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, /
The Theme of Love in the Poems First Love, To His Coy Mistress, Porphyria's Lover, My Last Duchess and Shall I Compare Thee?
“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.
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.
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...