Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Poetry analysis: To His Coy Mistress, by Andrew Marvell


Poetry analysis: To His Coy Mistress, by Andrew Marvell

Andrew Marvell's famous lyric "To His Coy Mistress" is a metaphysical poem.  Metaphysical poems are brief, intense meditations employing wit, irony and elaborate "conceits" or comparisons. Underlying the formal structures of rhyme, meter, and stanza is the poem's logic-based argument. In "To His Coy Mistress" the explicit argument (the speaker's request that the coy lady yield to his passion) is a whimsical statement bristling with humorous hyperbole but leading to a deadly serious argument about the shortness of life and the quick passage of libidinal pleasure.

The theme expressed in it is carpe diem or seize the day. Marvell's poem is usually excluded from secondary level textbooks because of its explicit sexuality, despite its author being a Puritan and the son of a Calvinist Anglican preacher.

This seduction poem is presented in the unromantic form of a logical syllogism. The opening "if" segment lacks that subordinating conjunction that is more elegantly presupposed by the subjunctive mood of "Had we but world enough and time." The mediate inference is presented in the second verse paragraph beginning with "But," and the deduction in the concluding stanza commencing with "Now therefore." Such strict adherence to logical argument befits the author who was an important political figure in the Cromwell protectorate in England.

Current readers of Marvell's poem are often upset to learn that the adjective "coy" at the time of writing had none of its modern suggestions of playful teasing or coquetry. In Marvell's day the word was a synonym for reluctant, modest, even disdainful. [Shorter Oxford English Dictionary]  In  "the mother tongue: English and how it got that way" [page 73], Bill Bryson points out that "'coy' and 'quiet' both have the same grandparent in the Latin 'quietus'."The lady addressed in the poem remains silent - reluctant to accede to the speaker's pleas because she wishes to maintain her "quaint Honour" or virginity. There is none of the dalliance or playing-hard-to-get that we usually assume with coyness.

Bryson also mentions how Marvell's term "quaint" was in Chaucer's The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale spelled "quainte" but also appears as "kent" and three other spelling variations. The variable spellings of today's unspeakable crudity "lie with  Chaucer or his copyists of both." [page 62].

In stanza one, the speaker/seducer makes concrete the abstractions of "Had we but world enough and time." Geographically, she might search for rubies on the shores of the Indian Ganges while he voices his unrequited desires by England's Humber River half way around the world from the object of his amorous desire. Temporally, he would sue for her affections beginning ten years before the Flood of Noah until the unanticipated "Conversion of the Jews." Read forever.

Moderns tend to read "My vegetable love" as a slow-growing carrot, turnip or the like. In the poet's day, "vegetable" would have signified the lowest of man's three souls. The uppermost was the rational, possessed only by humanity; then came the sensitive, shared by animals and involving motion and perception; then the vegetative, which, as with plant life, concerned itself with generation, augmentation, corruption, and decay. Were Marvell to hear vegetable love construed as a swelling cabbage or rutabaga, he would probably smile rather than protest.

Next comes an anti-Petrarchan segue. Petrarch and other writers of the courtly love tradition expounded in hyperbolic blazons  every physical feature of the love object: hair, brow, eyes, nose, teeth, voice, bosom, in descending order. Marvell's speaker says that he would happily follow in that tradition were it not for time and encroaching age, decrepitude, and accompanying sexual dysfunction. The lady is deserving of nothing less. We hear the unromantic terminology of investment and finance in

For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

Section two of the syllogism is enlivened by arresting imagery of sound and sight. "At my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near;/ And yonder all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity." The tone switches from earlier whimsicality to seriousness. There is nothing comical about

Thy Beauty shall no more be found
Nor, in thy marble Vault, shall sound
My echoing Song; then Worms shall try
That long preserv'd Virginity;
And your quaint Honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my Lust.

"Do it now. You're going to be dead a long time. Why bring a maidenhead to a coffin?" One need not comment on the phallicism of worms. It is interesting that churchman Marvell did not shun what today is considered at least an impropriety, but capitalized on the witty sexual double entendres.

This segment of the syllogism is memorably summarized by its ironic concluding couplet. It describes a location that offers seclusion, darkness, privacy, and security from observation or interruption by third parties. There is, however, one serious drawback.

The grave's a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Part three of the syllogism, stripped to its essentials, argues, "Now therefore, . . . let us sport us while we may."  The poet dresses that imperative with figurative language. Not just while we're young, but "While the youthful hew/ Sits on thy skin like morning dew." Let's have none of this "vegetable love"; let us rather couple fiercely like amorous hawks or eagles. Let us not be devoured by the slowly grinding molars of time and age, but do the devouring ourselves. Rather than the vast separation of the Ganges from the Humber, let us not merely unite but

. . .  roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough* the iron gates of life.                *through
More simply, let us love actively and passionately. Though we can't stop time's passage ("make our Sun/ Stand still"), we can make it fly by enjoying sexual fulfilment (we will make him run).

Although this analysis makes the poem sound like seduction motivated by sexual appetite, the copulatory activity is actually a symbol or metaphysical conceit for living life intensely and letting no opportunities slip by. Marvell, who never married, is not trying to emulate John Donne of the early "Jack the rake period." Presumably, this poet had no flesh and blood woman in mind for the coy mistress of the title. As stated earlier, the theme is carpe diem. All humanity, not just one woman, are adjured not to let opportunities slip past nor allow time, age, and creeping decrepitude to do their work on bored minds and inactive bodies.



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