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.

Critical Analyses of Henry Vaughan's poem THE RETREAT

Critical Analyses of Henry Vaughan's poem THE RETREAT

Introduction: The poems by which Vaughan is remembered are contained in Silex Scintillans, which appeared in two parts in 1650 and 1655 respectively. This is largely religious inspiration and its title is significant for the emblem on the title page that reveals its meaning to be a heart of flint burning and bleeding under the stroke of a thunder bolt and so throwing off sparks. It is of course the light of divinity.

 Vaughan is at his best when he deals with the themes of childhood and of communion with nature and with eternity. The poem in discussion The Retreat influenced Wordsworth in the composition of The Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early childhood. Vaughan’s Retreat is a religious lyric, a spiritual optimism. It is also a characteristic poem of the metaphysical school. Vaughan’s expression and imagery bear the marks of the metaphysical religious poem of Donne and Herbert.

A deep religious poem: Vaughan’s first love in his poem The Retreat is God. When he was still a child and had hardly made any progress into worldly existence, he could have a glimpse of God’s bright face whenever he looked back. But as the burden of worldly existence grew upon him, he lost the glimpse of the divine visage. Indeed, adulthood taken away that divine vision of childhood. This is the loss, the poet laments. In this critical situation Vaughan pleads to move backward because forward because forward movement in time leads to sin. The backward movement leads to innocence:

“Some men a forward motion love

But I by backward steps would move”.

Rhetorically, a paradox is a statement which apparently seems self-contradictory or absurd, but in reality carries a sound sense. Here, too, the poet makes a paradoxical statement that backward motion would be better for him. This is because forward motion is morally backward as it leads on to sin, on the other hand backward motion in time leads to innocence and so morally forward. ‘Retreat’ to the innocent days of childhood, when God was an ever-present reality to him, is his welcome note. The title word thus strikes the essence of the poem. The poet dislikes human or earthly existence i.e. ‘this place’ and ‘second race’ because on earth the soul is far removed from God. He wishes to retreat to heaven, the abode of God.

Glorification of the Childhood: We find the child as an ever idealized picture in The Retreat. As a defence of the poet we can say that the poem is a passionate lyric and no philosophical thesis and here is the account of the poet’s personal experiences and longing for the innocence and purity of childhood. The soul of in the human child which can perceive a faint heavenly glory in the natural beauty of the world, if stays too long in this world would forget their heavenly memory and the soul would be intoxicated into worldly affairs. Thus the child in his journey to innocence to experience corrupts himself. A grown up like poet wishes to retreat into the childhood innocence and it is possible when he would die and liberates his soul from the odds of worldly affairs:

‘And when this dust falls to the urn,

In that state I came, return’.

A metaphysical poem: The Retreat is full with short and suggestive conceits, homely images and compressed sentences essentially belong to metaphysical poetry. Even the poet expresses his devotional thought through extraordinary and straight forward imageries –

“But ah! My soul with too much stay

Is drunk and staggers in the way”.

Further the mystical ideas, childhood, God, innocence and the journey of soul – everything is so sincere and personal. Taken from homely affairs of life, they are well visualized. We can compare his compressions to an eminent Victorian artist Hopkins. For example, ‘angel infancy’, shoots of everlastingness’, ‘ancient track’, ‘glorious train’ etc adds the linguistic glamour in the poem.

Conclusion: Through the metaphysical network and religious conscience Vaughan’s The Retreat is thematically superb. As far as the syntax and rhyme-pattern is concerned, it finds a place of perfection in English verse. It is a gift of music, no doubt restrained, but full of melody and grace.