To corner or trick the maiden into saying "Yes". Though both arguements are supurb, Marvell's has a nicer, refined style to it. In "To His Coy Mistress" and "The Flea", there is an exemplification of just how crafty men can be during the hunt. The speakers, in both poems, makes a "modest" but declinable offer for sex to their maiden of choice. And, upon rejection, each male begins a fluent yet rhetoric arguments on why the maiden should accept his simple offer of passion.
Of course that is conducive to the time but it also says something about the validity of the message of the poem. In synopsis the flea, blood and death of the flea are all used as metaphors for sex, the exchange of life force (a very important thing) within the act of sex (represented as something as insignificant as a flea) and then orgasm, which can feel important and significant for a period of time but is really only as important as the death of a flea. The speaker in this poem hopes to convince his lady to sleep with him by trivializing sex and comparing it to something as insignificant as a flea. Meanwhile I say lady, screw the speaker and the flea you would get more of a commitment from a machine than a guy as afraid of human contact as this one.
Andrew Marvell, a contemporary of Donne, who also wrote seduction poems. Donne’s “The Flea” and Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” both have seduction techniques, yet the degree of success is different. The degree of success each seducer has can be judged by looking at the rhetoric, imagery and emotional appeals in “The Flea” and “To His Coy Mistress.” The seducer of “The Flea” makes use of different arguments to convince the woman to have sex. One argument is that the blood of both him and his lover has mingled inside a flea, because it has bit them both. He tells her that nothing has befallen her that there is not “A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead” (The Flea, 6).
Although Marvell may not be able to stop time, their lovemaking can make time run from the fury of their passion. Marvell attempts to persuade his conquest with a focus on death through the imagery of ashes and time. “Then worms shall try/That long-preserved virginity, And your quaint honor turn to dust,” (Marvell 28-29). This exaggerated image is used to encourage the young mistress to give her virginity rather than see the silliness in seen worms as a threat to her out of date female genitals in her grave. His pleas fall on deaf ears as we do not hear from the side of the woman.
His wording in this poem tries to convince this lady that their blood has already mingle in this flea, so they should just make love. However, the woman he is trying to seduce thought he is out of his mind and kills the flea. The reader can see that he is trying to make excuses to make love to her. Donne keeps saying that their love making will not be looked down upon, which it will. Donne says in the poem, “A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead, / Yet this enjoys before it woo, / And pampered swells with one blood made of two, / And this, alas, is more than we would do”
“Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess” contain features of obsessive love. In my essay, I would like to pay particular attention to unrequited love because it shows how the women in the poems are seen as a possession, which the men must rightfully have. I will also look at aspects of obsessive love. “To His Coy Mistress” is not generally positioned in this type of love as the poem does not really contain obsessive love, but in my opinion it can be placed in the category as the speaker is pressuring the girl into having sex with him and he wants her to sleep with him now. He is being seen as obsessive and wanting things his way, immediately.
Much debate has arisen over the years about the moral suitability of taking part in sexual intercourse before being married to your true love. In John Donne's “The Flea” this topic is brought up when the speaker of the poem is trying to convince his addressee to partake in sexual intercourse with him although they are not married, by showing her that the act would be no more sinful or shameful than the bite of a flea. He uses the flea as a conceit in three main ways: first, after they have both been bitten, the flea now represents their union by the mixing of bodily fluids. Second, the flea represents innocence and the potential child they may bear together. Finally, he tries to prove that once she yields to his seduction she will have lost no more honour than when she killed the flea.
On the surface, John Donne’s poem “The Flea” dramatizes the conflict between two people on the issue of premarital sex, however, under the surface, the poem uses religious imagery to seduce the woman into having sex. The speaker in this poem is a man, who is strategically trying to convince a woman to have premarital sex with him through the conceit based on a flea, however, the coy lady has thus far yielded to his lustful desires. The speaker’s argument has the form of logic, which contradicts to its outrageous content. In the first stanza, the speaker wants his beloved lady to observe a flea and not think of anything else as he delivers his argument. A flea bites the speaker and his beloved causing their blood to mix, which, according to the narrator, is the same as having sex and creating a child.
Although I would like to believe that this poem is about platonic love it is my opinion that Shakespeare is trying to ensure a sexual relationship with this woman, because he already has a wife. In "The Flea" the poet addresses the woman directly. The poem, unlike "Shall I Compare Thee" is set inside in a bedroom, which shows just how close they already are to having sex! In "Shall I Compare Thee" the poet's ulterior motive is much more subtle then in "The Flea", in fact in "The Flea" the subject of the poem is about Donne trying to seduce the woman into having sex with him, even thought they are not married and it says that "parents grudge" their relationship. The poems have two different tones "Shall I Compare Thee" is all about eternal love and "The Flea" is about immediate love.
While “To His Coy Mistress” might appear at first sight to be a poem of seduction, it is really a dramatic meditation on the fact that we live constrained by “world and time,” and a prescription for what to do about it. The first stanza sets the tone of mockery. The speaker uses metaphors, hyperboles, irony and imagery to seduce his coy mistress. He begins his poem of seduction with an insult: “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime.” He calls her a criminal for being so reluctant when they are constrained by world and time. To him, it is a misconduct to not jump right into his arms when they have so little time to live.