One of the last seventeenth century metaphysical poets, Andrew Marvell is known for his complex and allusive poetry (Press 208). In “to His Coy Mistress,” Marvell incorporates his belief in Neo-Platonism by focusing on the idea of carpe diem, which means, “seize the day” (208). He focuses attention on the transience of life and the inevitability of death to emphasize the urgency that men have to persuade women to engage in the act of sexual intercourse (Masterplots II 2209). In taking the idea of carpe diem and incorporating his Neo-Platonism beliefs, Andrew Marvell uses “To His Coy Mistress” as a warning to women of the male attitude towards love and relationships.
It is understood that Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is an attempt to convince a woman to sleep with her lover, the narrator of the poem. The poem begins with the lover stating that if “world enough and time,” the woman’s crime would be acceptable, but what exactly is her crime? Is it a real crime? What makes it so terrible? The woman’s “crime” is no real crime at all; it is simply her refusal to engage in sexual intercourse with the narrator. The narrator portrays the woman’s coyness as “terrible” to insist that the coyness is unacceptable given his vast admiration for her and her body (Kelly 277). The narrator moves on to say that he would love her “ten years before the Flood.” Is he talking about the Biblical flood? The narrator is indeed speaking of the Biblical flood; he incorporates Noah’s flood to explain to his mistress how he would use the amount of time between this Biblical event and the end of time ( Adams 2209). He also states that she should is she pleases “refuse until the conversion of the Jews,” meaning that he would love her for all of time...
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...ness into one ball. What does he mean by that? Why would they roll their strength and sweetness into a ball? The “sweetness” and “strength” are used as symbols for a cannon in which the narrator uses to establish his triumphant victory in successfully persuading his mistress to give in to his wishes. He goes on saying they should vent their frustrations through the act of sex because “thus though we cannot make our sun stand still, we will make him run.” What does he mean we make our sun run but we cannot make it stand still? The allusion of the sun is used as the narrator’s vengeance against time, with him ultimately stating that instead of being controlled by time he will attempt to control it himself. His frustrations with time will be relieved as he and his mistress force the sun to race them, instead of giving in to the essence of time (Poetry for Students).
In the eighteenth century, the process of choosing a husband and marrying was not always beneficial to the woman. A myriad of factors prevented women from marrying a man that she herself loved. Additionally, the man that women in the eighteenth century did end up with certainly had the potential to be abusive. The attitudes of Charlotte Lennox and Anna Williams toward women’s desire for male companionship, as well as the politics of sexuality are very different. Although both Charlotte Lennox and Anna Williams express a desire for men in their poetry, Charlotte Lennox views the implications of this desire differently than Anna Williams. While Anna Williams views escaping the confines of marriage as a desirable thing, Charlotte Lennox’s greatest lament, as expressed by her poem “A Song,” is merely to have the freedom to love who she pleases. Although Charlotte Lennox has a more romantic view of men and love than Anna Williams, neither woman denies that need for companionship.
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.
During the 17th century the style of writing was changing from poems about death to ones whose subject was about living life to it’s fullest extent. This kind of writing was also known as carpe diem. Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell were two of the first carpe diem poets. Although their styles were similar their subjects differed.
Sexual relations between men and woman have created issues of life and death from the beginning of time. In most classic Western beliefs it began when Eve with the help of the Devil seduced Adam thus leading the downfall of humanity into an abyss of sin and hopelessness. This issue arises in all literature from Genesis, Chaucer and into modern day. Authors, clerks and writers of all types have aided stereotyping women throughout history and Geoffrey Chaucer is not an exception in most cases. However, in Chaucer's Wife of Bath we can find the beginnings of a new type of woman arising from the dark ages of the post-Roman era. And of course at the center of his character's struggle is sex. As this topic develops, we shall take a brief look into sex, women, the Middle Ages and Chaucer's Wife of Bath as an example of Middle Ages reflections.
In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the reader is treated to an enthralling story of a woman’s lifelong quest for happiness and love. Although this novel may be analyzed according to several critical lenses, I believe the perspectives afforded by French feminists Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray have been most useful in informing my interpretation of Hurston’s book. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous discusses a phenomenon she calls antilove that I have found helpful in defining the social hierarchy of women and relationships between them in the novel. In addition, Cixous addresses the idea of woman as caregiver, which can be illustrated through the character of Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God. On the other hand, Luce Irigaray discusses the different modes of sexual desire of men and women in her essay, “The Sex Which is Not One.” Many examples supporting and refuting her claims can be found in the novel. According to Cixous, the most heinous crime committed by men against women is the promotion of antilove. “Insidiously, violently, they have led [women] to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their virile needs” (1455). Their Eyes Were Watching God offers many examples of women in vicious contention with one another, usually involving or benefiting a man. Janie is confronted by the malice of her female neighbors in the very first chapter of the novel, as she arrives back in Eatonville after her adventure with Tea Cake. “The women took the faded shirt and muddy overalls and laid them away for remembrance. It was a weapon against her strength and if i...
Ever hear of the phrase “carpe diem”? It is a common Latin phrase meaning “seize the day” or in plain English, make the most of the time you have. This phrase is very well portrayed in Robert Herrick’s most popular poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”. Herrick was an established poet in the mid-1900’s who lacked ambition but wrote remarkable poems. He was a graduate from Cambridge University, which took him seven years to complete, and a member of Ben Jonson’s circle of young friends (Herrick 380). Herrick was later appointed a priest at the parish of Dean Prior, in Devonshire. He carried this title at Dean Prior until he died at the age of 83 (Herrick 380). His education, unique living style, and his friends, all greatly influenced his extraordinary poems. In Herrick’s poem he describes carpe diem by using vivid words and images and by connecting the meaning and theme to personal feelings.
Lady Fortune, in Philosophy’s words, is a “monster” who “seduces with the friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion” (Boethius, 22). She is the representation of all good and evil which can happen to a human being, seemingly, without warning. Fortu...
Mary Wroth alludes to mythology in her sonnet “In This Strange Labyrinth” to describe a woman’s confused struggle with love. The speaker of the poem is a woman stuck in a labyrinth, alluding to the original myth of Theseus and the Minotaur. The suggestion that love is not perfect and in fact painful was a revolutionary thing for a woman to write about in the Renaissance. Wroth uses the poem’s title and its relation to the myth, symbolism and poem structure to communicate her message about the tortures of love.
In the poem “To His Coy Mistress”, the speaker says, “Had we but world enough, and time…I would love you ten years before the Flood, and you should if you please refuse till the conversion of the Jews” (lines 1 and 7-10). The speaker is stating if they had all the time in the world, they would have no need to rush their love making. With all the time they would want he would love her from the very beginning until the very end. The speaker refers to the “Flood” (line 8) as the flood of Noah’s Arc in the Bible, which indicates he would love her from the beginning of time. Next, the speaker says, “Till the conversion of the Jews” (line 10), which would indicate the end of time. In the Bible, it is believed that when Christ comes back for his people the Jews will convert to Christianity. Therefore when Christ returns, that will be the end times. In conclusion, the speaker is saying if they had time from the beginning to the very end, his mistress is welcome to continue being shy. In contrary, the speaker and his coy mistress do not have that kind of time to spare, which is the reason he is trying to convince his wife to surrender her virginity.
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.
I shall endeavour to explore and analyse how women are presented in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and Duffy’s “Human Interest”.
There is a similar theme running through both of the poems, in which both mistresses are refusing to partake in sexual intercourse with both of the poets. The way in which both poets present their argument is quite different as Marvell is writing from a perspective from which he is depicting his mistress as being 'coy', and essentially, mean, in refusing him sex, and Donne is comparing the blood lost by a flea bite to the blood that would be united during sex. Marvell immediately makes clear his thoughts in the poem when he says, "Had we but world enough, and time/ This coyness, Lady were no crime", he is conveying the 'carpe diem' idea that there is not enough time for her to be 'coy' and refuse him sexual intercourse and he justifies this thought when he suggests when she is dead, in ?thy marble vault?, and ?worms shall try that long preserved virginity?. He is using the idea of worms crawling all over and in her corpse as a way of saying that the worms are going to take her virginity if she waits until death. Donne justifies his bid for her virginity in a much longer and more methodical way, he uses the idea of the flea taking her blood and mixing it with his, ?It suck?d me first, and now sucks thee?, and then...
Given the tragic outcomes of certain female characters (i.e., Desdemona and Juliet), sexuality must be promptly considered. Desdemona’s “jeopardized” fidelity ignites Othello’s murdering hands. Her sexuality controls him. In the same way, it might be argued that severe sexuality is the compulsion of Romeo and Juliet. Considering the brevity of their relationship, which implies the absence of shared memories and the absence of mutual and intimate knowledge, one may deduce that all they really can share is bodies. And it may be precisely their bodies that drive the entire relationship and tragedy. In Woman’s Part, Paula S. Berggren r...
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.
How can it be remotely possible to spend thirty thousand years on observing a woman’s body? It seems to me as if he is just telling her what she wants to hear as long as he gets what he wants- which is to get into bed with her. The fallacy is even more apparent once line 20 ends because the mood switches immediately from “loving” to a grotesque, dark tone. The speaker goes on about how if she doesn’t lose her “long preserv’d virginity” to him, then the only way she will lose it is in her grave to the worms crawling inside her. How can that be a portrayal of love? The mere thought of that is absolutely grim. What it really does is negate all of the sweet, exaggerated things he mentioned in the first third of the poem.