To His Coy Mistress

Hello everyone, This blog is a part of my thinking activity. In this blog I will discuss about Andrew Marvell's poem “To His Coy Mistress” 

Introduction

“To His Coy Mistress,” though completely devoid of politics, was written during a time of extreme social and political turmoil. Its focus is on ordinary life in the countryside and, therefore, could be a reflection of Marvell's desire to avoid political disputes and retire to a simpler life.


“To His Coy Mistress” is one of Marvell’s several love poems, but it is unclear whether Marvell himself ever actually married. He also never had children. After Marvell’s death, his housekeeper, Mary Palmer, claimed the two secretly married in 1667. There are no records that support her claim, and some scholars believe she was merely involved in an inheritance scam. The mystery surrounding Marvell’s love life adds to the greater mystery behind his poetry.

About Author

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) is one of the greatest metaphysical poets of his time, yet very little is actually known about his personal life. “To His Coy Mistress” is thought to have been written during the 1650s, a time of political unrest in England when English society was transforming socially and politically after the English Civil War. Marvell himself seems to have escaped any involvement in the war.


Summary:

The poem is spoken by a male lover to his female beloved as an attempt to convince her to sleep with him. The speaker argues that the Lady’s shyness and hesitancy would be acceptable if the two had “world enough, and time.” But because they are finite human beings, he thinks they should take advantage of their sensual embodiment while it lasts.

He tells the lady that her beauty, as well as her “long-preserved virginity,” will only become food for worms unless she gives herself to him while she lives. Rather than preserve any lofty ideals of chastity and virtue, the speaker affirms, the lovers ought to “roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into one ball.” He is alluding to their physical bodies coming together in the act of lovemaking.


Analysis:

Marvell wrote this poem in the classical tradition of a Latin love elegy, in which the speaker praises his mistress or lover through the motif of carpe diem, or “seize the day.” The poem also reflects the tradition of the erotic blazon, in which a poet constructs elaborate images of his lover’s beauty by carving her body into parts. Its verse form consists of rhymed couplets in iambic tetrameter, proceeding as AA, BB, CC, and so forth.

The speaker begins by constructing a thorough and elaborate conceit of the many things he “would” do to honor the lady properly, if the two lovers indeed had enough time. He posits impossible stretches of time during which the two might play games of courtship. He claims he could love her from ten years before the Biblical flood narrated in the Book of Genesis, while the Lady could refuse his advances up until the “conversion of the Jews,” which refers to the day of Christian judgment prophesied for the end of times in the New Testament’s Book of Revelations.

The speaker then uses the metaphor of a “vegetable love” to suggest a slow and steady growth that might increase to vast proportions, perhaps encoding a phallic suggestion. This would allow him to praise his lady’s features – eyes, forehead, breasts, and heart – in increments of hundreds and even thousands of years, which he says that the lady clearly deserves due to her superior stature. He assures the Lady that he would never value her at a “lower rate” than she deserves, at least in an ideal world where time is unlimited.

Marvell praises the lady’s beauty by complimenting her individual features using a device called an erotic blazon, which also evokes the influential techniques of 15th and 16th century Petrarchan love poetry. Petrarchan poetry is based upon rarifying and distancing the female beloved, making her into an unattainable object. In this poem, though, the speaker only uses these devices to suggest that distancing himself from his lover is mindless, because they do not have the limitless time necessary for the speaker to praise the Lady sufficiently. He therefore constructs an erotic blazon only to assert its futility.

The poem’s mood shifts in line 21, when the speaker asserts that “Time's winged chariot” is always near. The speaker’s rhetoric changes from an acknowledgement of the Lady’s limitless virtue to insisting on the radical limitations of their time as embodied beings. Once dead, he assures the Lady, her virtues and her beauty will lie in the grave along with her body as it turns to dust. Likewise, the speaker imagines his lust being reduced to ashes, while the chance for the two lovers to join sexually will be lost forever.


The third and final section of the poem shifts into an all-out plea and display of poetic prowess in which the speaker attempts to win over the Lady. He compares the Lady’s skin to a vibrant layer of morning dew that is animated by the fires of her soul and encourages her to “sport” with him “while we may.” Time devours all things, the speaker acknowledges, but he nonetheless asserts that the two of them can, in fact, turn the tables on time. They can become “amorous birds of prey” that actively consume the time they have through passionate lovemaking.
To His Coy Mistress as a Metaphysical Poem

‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell is a perfect example of Metaphysical Poetry. Andrew Marvell, the poet, belonged to the second generation of Metaphysical poets. John Donne was the fountainhead of the genre and he influenced Marvell to adopt this unique style of the period. Andrew Marvell in this poem employs several metaphysical conceits and other elements of the genre. First of all, the far-fetched comparisons between coyness and crime, vegetables and love, and time and chariot, make it a metaphysical poem.


However, the paradoxical sentences along with the forceful arguments of the poetic persona take the poem to a next level. The stock images of romance are tinged with metaphysical colors. The unfamiliar yet unique images in the poem give it a brand new embodiment of love poetry. The image of lovers in the lines, “Let us roll all our strength and all/ Our sweetness up into one ball” can be taken as an example. The conceits, “iron gates of life”, “amorous birds of prey”, “Deserts of vast eternity”, and “vegetable love” make this poem a specimen of metaphysical poetry.