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Marvell to His Mistress: Carpe Diem!
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.
Marvell's piece is structured as a poem but flows as a classical argument. He uses the three stanzas to address the issues of time, love, and sex. In doing so, he creates his own standpoint and satirizes his audience in the process. Using appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos; logical reasoning; and even a hint of the Rogerian technique - Marvell proves that acting now is essential. 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 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.
This idea, however, is flee...
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...vell proves this throughout the poem. The satire exists in the expectation that love has to occur before sex. He is almost taunting those who want to wait that long, showing them that their plans are futile and they're only wasting the short time they're given.
Because this classical argument is in poem-form, the order is non-conventional. The claim lies in the theme of the final stanza. After two prior stanzas of intro, evidence, and refutation; readers see just what Marvell was trying to prove. Whether the reader sees the satire or not may depend on the readers themselves. Those who see this poem may not realize they're guilty of believing that the love and patience in stanza one exist. The presentation of this argument works because it seems sweet at first glance, logical when looked at again, and satirical when looked at against the views of the society.
In the fourth stanza, line one to three the female has an upper hand in this relationship. In line four to seven the male feels uplifted by the deeds of the female and chooses to change himself for the
In this stanza there is a question asked to the question reveals that the girl is puzzled about the lord is after her. This suggests that she is aware that he has different motives, rather than love and romance. This also shows that she knows the compliment is false and just a way of seducing her into bed. The second stanza is where the great lord isn’t so “great” anymore. He lured and tricked her into going to his palace home.
The. Maybe it is a genuine love poem to his mistress, sort of. offer of a way of life. Both concepts, though, underline the point. simplistic romanticism of the poem.
“Let’s face it, I have been momentary,” in this line the narrator is clearly stating that she knows she is nothing more than sex (Sexton 349). The narrator understands that the man she has more than lust for is in love with his wife who has been “melted carefully” for him. The narrator in this poem is just a slutty mistress who doesn’t really care whose life she messes up. She is being selfish in the sense that she doesn’t really care that a man is only using her for sex. She doesn’t care that she is only temporary and soon after this affair ends the man would’ve have found a new mistress or decided to be faithful to his wife (which I doubt). The narrator doesn’t describe needing to be faithful to someone else showing that she doesn’t understand the pain she is actually causing. Where as, the man is only physically involved with the narrator. Because she knows he will always love his wife and his fidelity will be with his wife and his children, even though, he is not faithful (Sexton 350). Although in this situation it doesn’t seem so clean cut as to why the affair began, but for all we know it could be a girl trying to feel loved. Meaning that, she has the affair because she knows for a short amount of time when they are having sex she can feel important enough to a man, even being just a
Using this choice of words like “then worms shall try” and “…turn to dust”, the speaker essentially tells his mistress that there will be consequences if she does not engage with him. He believes his wit will gain control over his mistress, and her “coyness” will inevitably disappear. In his mind, the repercussions are if she dies without having sex with him, the worms will take her virginity, which can be considered as phallic imagery. In the lines, the worms symbolically mirror the narrator’s male sexual organ. Marvell creates an interesting approach with this daring and disturbing language because the appealing strategy grasps the reader’s attention and explores the question of the extent a person will go to fulfill their sexual desires. While discussing this proposed tight-lipped subject, the tone of the narrator in “To His Coy Mistress” greatly differs from the narrator’s tone in “A Rose for Emily.” The readers can perceive that Marvell’s speaker is intelligent and informed in the sexual category because of his style and word choice. He creates a relaxed tone with his audience, which makes the readers feel comfortable, and he is very clear about what he writes. The direction of the arguments he makes is very undeviating because he goes straight into what he wants
The first stanza describes the depth of despair that the speaker is feeling, without further explanation on its causes. The short length of the lines add a sense of incompleteness and hesitance the speaker feels towards his/ her emotions. This is successful in sparking the interest of the readers, as it makes the readers wonder about the events that lead to these emotions. The second and third stanza describe the agony the speaker is in, and the long lines work to add a sense of longing and the outpouring emotion the speaker is struggling with. The last stanza, again structured with short lines, finally reveals the speaker 's innermost desire to "make love" to the person the speaker is in love
Throughout the entire poem, coyness is not regarded as an attractive behavior in the long term view of objective reality. Time is always of the essence, and death puts an end to all physical and emotional interactions between people. This is expressed in the line “that long-preserved virginity, and your quaint honor turn to dust, and into ashes all my lust” (Marvell). As time progresses, so does the process of decay, and this is what leads to the cycle of life and death. Marvell conveys both the biological and emotional need to propagate the concept of carpe diem, seizing the day and taking initiative in the face of time’s constant war against mortality.
The words carpe diem mean “seize the day” in Latin. It is a theme that has been used throughout the history of literature and has been a popular philosophy in teaching from the times of Socrates and Plato up to the modern English classroom. Carpe diem says to us that life isn’t something we have forever, and every passing moment is another opportunity to make the most out of the few precious years that we have left. In the poems “A Fine, a Private Place” by Diane Ackerman and “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell, carpe diem is the underlying theme that ties them together, yet there are still a few key differences throughout each of these two poems that shows two very different perspectives on how one goes about seizing their day.
Poets often times share their opinions through their poems. It is not always easily understood. Poets use metaphors, similes, and play with their words to show how they feel about a certain situation. In “Sex without Love” by Sharon Olds, a lot of this comes into play.
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.
Authors use poetry to creatively present attitudes and opinions. “A Man’s Requirements,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment” are two poems with distinct attitudes about love that contain different literary approaches. In both of the poems, love is addressed from a different perspective, producing the difference in expectation and presentation, but both suggest the women are subservient in the relationships.
First, Marvell creatively constructs the theme of “Carpe Diem” with the use of allusion within his poem. As an illustration of this point, in the first stanza it states, “I would love you ten years before the flood, and you should, if you please, refuse till the conversion of the Jews” (Marvell 7-10) over the span of two couplets. To explain, lines 7-8 state “ten years before the flood”. In this instance, the writer references the Biblical flood account involving Noah within the book of Genesis. So, the writer uses this as device to expound upon the idea of time and, in this instance, pre-time in the writer's mind. Likewise, in line 10 that states “till the conversion of the Jews”, the writer again writes in accordance with the Biblical narrative
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.
Andrew Marvell successfully writes about a delicate subject without coming off as dirty or disrespectful to the subject of sexuality. Each stanza carries a different way of looking at the same subject. The way Marvell speaks in the first stanza shows that he is not being impetuous, that he does love his mistress. He creates a sense of timelessness and then in the second stanza he sweeps that away and introduces death as frightening but unavoidable. He realizes how precious time is and is very effective in convincing his mistress of this fact as well. The last lines leave the reader with the image of this couple conquering and taking advantage of time by making the sun run. This poem would not be what it is without the detailed imagery, symbolism, and metaphors that Marvell applied to each stanza.
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...