Pages

5 Nov: "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell

5 comments:

  1. He speaks well of the the justification of lust he desires of this mistress. The whole poem I kept waiting for a sort of guilt, or regret, as usually comes in such position, and yet there was none except the guilt of waiting to act. There was decision...positive advantage of time.

    We always hear belief of the extension of love through and beyond the grave. I wonder what gives this author the opposing? That love will die? There is a different sense of urgency here...does the urgency that comes with such a lust differ from that he feels in his other relationship. Can both wives and mistresses die with the grave or only the one not taken advantage of?

    How did this fit in with the book you read? Was the neauroscientist, too, in love, in lust? Questioning love after death? Wanting to take advantage of the time he had for a relationship, or "thing"?

    I laughed at "vegetable love"...how oddly unique a description.

    And "amorous birds of prey"...oh doesn't it feel so sometimes! Preying on each other...

    What did you make of the last sentence? I didn't like it. A betrayal of life somehow....?

    ReplyDelete
  2. What if you read it as a joke? He it again sarcastically if you didn't yet.

    The hyperbole with time is great. Before the creation and after the conversion of the Jews (forever?). Then the quantities of the flattering is ridiculous. Flatter someone's eye for 60 seconds and see what happens. Then in the second section, time will end. "If we had..." Then it like let's just bang because we don't have enough time for all that excessive flattery from the first sections.

    "then worms shall try
    That long-preserved virginity,
    And your quaint honour turn to dust,
    And into ashes all my lust;"

    This is probably the funniest part, or creepiest. We need to have sex before you die a virgin and worms get your vagina and my lust dies.

    He acts like she wants it, coyness. She wants to be seduced and flatter (if not, this is such a misogynistic poem). Is he making a joke of the game of dating? Is she a powerful mistress? Is the joke poem showing that he knows her game and he is playing with her too?

    The poem sounds good. The pacing, rhyme, and language are all well developed. I like the poem. I read it as a powerful mistress alluring the poet and he writes her a funny joke poem.

    I don't remember the reference from the book. Probably had to do with the death reference? Maybe this one,

    "And tear our pleasures with rough strife
    Through the iron gates of life:
    Thus, though we cannot make our sun
    Stand still, yet we will make him run."

    This gets back to a theme from the book. Living life. Making the best of our time. Live life while we have life.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oh my word! Your response made me read this one entirely different. Especially the part about how the man wrote it and the woman allured...
    And how animal instinct still prevailed in the end!!! And the worms....wow....

    ReplyDelete
  4. Reading poems through a "sexual" viewpoint is sometimes so much more entertaining. It reminds you how this world came to be...sexuality is EVERYWHERE!!! And the way things continue...it has to be seductive and coy and devious and pure. All of the good and bad and naughty and beautiful all rolled into one. Maybe all poems are ultimately about sex!!!

    ReplyDelete
  5. We should try to write a poem called absolutely nothing about sex

    ReplyDelete