His Coy Mistress

729 Words2 Pages

“To His Coy Mistress” is a carpe-diem poem, but it reflects a restrictive nature. The speaker, a male lover persuading his mistress to have sex with him, fills his words with rhetorics and allusions to encourage her to ignore social norms of the 17th century. An examination of his language reveals that the speaker doesn’t seem to always mean what he says and that he also struggles with the restrictive norms he suggested that his mistress disregard. Thus, ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is a commentary on the different confinements one suffers in their life from societal standards, time, and from others.

The speaker comes from a position that makes him feel restricted. First, he feels confined among social expectations, specifically the culture that …show more content…

‘Time’ is personified as an antagonist that sets out to vanquish youth, beauty, and love, and the objective of the speaker is to avoid being caught in its chase. Thus, the pace and intensity of the poem’s language dramatically accelerates with every stanza: With the exaggeration of the erotic blazon, the poem opens up slowly, stretching for thousands of years until “the conversion of the Jews”. The pace dramatically shifts in the second stanza as soon as “time’s winged chariot” was mentioned; the narrative voice becomes paranoid with all the bad possibilities that could prevent him from getting laid. Finally, the third stanza becomes the final sprint as the speaker exuded the last bit of his passionate lust to offer his lover the final solution: sex, immediately. With fiery diction such as “instant fires”, “devour”, or “tear our pleasure with rough strife”, the voice of the speaker grows loud and rapid, as if screaming “RUN!” to the reader. We become caught up in the moment as the passion in the tone explodes, as if time really stops for an instance. Both explicitly through diction and implicitly through tone, the speaker successfully expresses the crunch of time descending upon the

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