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To his coy mistress critical analysis
To his coy mistress critical analysis
To his coy mistress critical analysis
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Individuals often get confused because they do not know the difference between love and lust. Love, it can refer to an emotion of strong attraction and personal attachment. Lust is a very strong sexual desire for someone. These two authors Andrew Marvell, and T.S. Eliot are very different. Andrew Marvell’s poem “To his coy mistress” is referring more about lust. T.S. Eliot’s poem “The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is more toward love.
In the poem “To his coy mistress” by Andrew Marvell, this author is referring to his lust for his mistress. The feeling of lust is a strong desire. Just as, in this poem the author does not really love his mistress. “And your quaint honour turn to dust, / and into ashes all of my lust,” (29-30). What the author
means is that when his mistress is dead her honour will mean absolutely nothing as well as all of his lust. He basically confessed that he only lusted for her, it was never love. According to Marvell “My vegetable should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow” (11-12). Marvell refers to his love as “My vegetable love” but, indeed if he really loved her he would not compare his love to her as a vegetable love. The reason being is that vegetables do not last for a very long time they start to rot. So his explanation is that his lust for her will also rot. Marvell also mentions in his poem “My echoing song: then worms shall try/ That long preserved virginity” (27-28). What this means is that Marvell is chasing after her virginity the fact that she is playing hard to get, he is saying if you don’t give it to me the worms will have it. That does not sound like someone who is in love, this is a man who did not get his way and is talking out of anger. In the poem “Prufrock and other observations” by T.S. Eliot, this author is referring to the love that he has for his mistress. Love is a feeling that can often make an individual feel nervous. According to Eliot “It is impossible to say just what I mean! / But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:” (104-105). What this means is that Eliot truly loves his mistress and is nervous. When you truly love someone there’s that overwhelming moment and it does not come out the way you want. In the poem Eliot is very nervous and does not know what he wants to say to his mistress and he would end up rambling. “Should I, after tea and cakes, and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” (79-80) Eliot is trying to sum up all of his courage to actually go out and ask the question to his mistress. He has even fasted on making this decision. Eliot paid attention to every detail of the woman he loved, and was indeed scared to approach her. This really affected him and he also spoke very genuinely. T.S. Eliot talks about how he loves and also how he is going to kill himself over the mistress that he loves. Andrew Marvell talks about how he lusts for his mistress and also how he just wants his love for his mistress for her virginity. In his poem Eliot also talks about how his love for his mistress really bugs him and affects him because he truly wants her. On the contrary Marvell only has a lust for his mistress. Likewise, both authors have approached their mistresses, and wanted them. Only T.S. Eliot truly loved his mistress, meanwhile Marvell was not pertaining to love at all, he was pertaining to lust. In conclusion, love and lust are very different. Love and lust are two different feelings that have two different effects. Haven has seen the difference both authors have between love and lust. So love versus lust, love will always conquer.
This poem dramatizes the conflict between love and lust, particularly as this conflict relates to what the speaker seems to say about last night. In the poem “Last Night” by Sharon Olds, the narrator uses symbolism and sexual innuendo to reflect on her lust for her partner from the night before. The narrator refers to her night by stating, “Love? It was more like dragonflies in the sun, 100 degrees at noon.” (2, 3) She describes it as being not as great as she imagined it to be and not being love, but lust. Olds uses lust, sex and symbolism as the themes in the story about “Last night”.
“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Rober Herrick and Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” have many similarities and differences. The tone of the speakers, the audience each poem is directed to, and the theme make up some of the literary elements that help fit this description.
'To His Coy Mistress' is a lyric of seduction. It is about a young man
A common practice when faced with a difficult choice, self-examination, is the centerpiece of two popular poems: Gregory Corso’s Marriage and T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Both poems are dramatic monologues in which the speakers address the similar situations that they find themselves in. While the speaker of Eliot’s poem has a nervous and bashful approach in his attempts at romance, the hesitant postmodern speaker in Corso’s poem makes use of sarcasm to attack the institution of marriage. When these two monologues given by similar personas are analyzed together, the result is a dialogue which discusses two distinguishing views on the ideas of romance and love. Despite the similarities between these two poems, Corso and Eliot shared little in common.
a man named Prufrock. Prufrock, at first glance, has a cool composure. He leads his
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. ed. M. H. Abrams New York, London: Norton, 1993.
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.
T.S. Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. His poem“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, is different and unusual. He rejects the logic connection, thus, his poems lack logic interpretation. He himself justifies himself by saying: he wrote it to want it to be difficult. The dissociation of sensibility, on the contrary, arouses the emotion of readers immediately. This poem contains Prufrock’ s love affairs. But it is more than that. It is actually only the narration of Prufrock, a middle-aged man, and a romantic aesthete , who is bored with his meaningless life and driven to despair because he wished but
Who is J. Alfred Prufrock? The answer is not stated in the poem. You will have to make an argument and defend it.
For Eliot, poetic representation of a powerful female presence created difficulty in embodying the male. In order to do so, Eliot avoids envisioning the female, indeed, avoids attaching gender to bodies. We can see this process clearly in "The Love Song of J. Prufrock." The poem circles around not only an unarticulated question, as all readers agree, but also an unenvisioned center, the "one" whom Prufrock addresses. The poem never visualizes the woman with whom Prufrock imagines an encounter except in fragments and in plurals -- eyes, arms, skirts - synecdoches we might well imagine as fetishistic replacements. But even these synecdochic replacements are not clearly engendered. The braceleted arms and the skirts are specifically feminine, but the faces, the hands, the voices, the eyes are not. As if to displace the central human object it does not visualize, the poem projects images of the body onto the landscape (the sky, the streets, the fog), but these images, for all their marked intimation of sexuality, also avoid the designation of gender (the muttering retreats of restless nights, the fog that rubs, licks, and lingers). The most visually precise images in the poem are those of Prufrock himself, a Prufrock carefully composed – "My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, / My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin" -- only to be decomposed by the watching eyes of another into thin arms and legs, a balding head brought in upon a platter. Moreover, the images associated with Prufrock are themselves, as Pinkney observes, terrifyingly unstable, attributes constituting the identity of the subject at one moment only to be wielded by the objective the next, like the pin that centers his necktie and then pinions him to the wall or the arms that metamorphose into Prufrock's claws. The poem, in these
In Andrew Marvell's poem "To His Coy Mistress," he's arguing for affection. The object of the speaker's desire wants to wait and take the relationship slow, while the speaker pushes for instant gratification. This persuasive poem makes the point that time waits for no one and it's foolish for two lovers to postpone a physical relationship.
In the case of To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvall, a not-so-gentle gentleman is trying to woo a “coy” young lady with claims of love. This poem is strewn with hyperbole to the point that it becomes exactly the opposite of love. When there is such over exaggerated praise, it starts to lose the real meaning of the message. If you take a look at lines 13-18, you can see the obvious amplification:
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is an ironic depiction of a man’s inability to take decisive action in a modern society that is void of meaningful human connection. The poem reinforces its central idea through the techniques of fragmentation, and through the use of Eliot’s commentary about Prufrock’s social world. Using a series of natural images, Eliot uses fragmentation to show Prufrock’s inability to act, as well as his fear of society. Eliot’s commentary about Prufrock’s social world is also evident throughout. At no point in the poem did Prufrock confess his love, even though it is called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, but through this poem, T.S. Eliot voices his social commentary about the world that Prufrock lives in.
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...