November 29, 2015
Essay #5
“To His Coy Mistress” "To His Coy Mistress" is a very interesting poem written by, Andrew Marvell. The main plot of the poem is about this guy that tries to pick up a girl for the night. The poem does not tell about the setting I assumed that it is in a bar, because of the way he talked to her and that is where most guys go to pick women for the evening. The readers are seeing everything in the poem through the eyes of the guy, by doing this Marvell lets his readers have a look into his mind and what he is thinking. This helps to bring the reader into the poem. It allows them to get into his mind as the poem goes along. They begin to see the guy develop his words more and more until eventually by the third stanza he is pretty desperate. In the first stanza Marvell sets the tone, we see the guy begin to make a move on the women. He tell the mistress all these sweet lines about how he could spend eternity with her. For instance, he says on line 11, "My vegetable love should grow vaster than empires, and more slow...,” In these two lines he is trying to tell her how his love will grow deeper every time he will see her and how he will love her until the end of time. A few lines later he continues to talk about his everlasting love. He begins to divide his love up between her body parts. He promises to her that he will dedicate a hundred years to her eyes. Then he tells her that he would dedicate two hundred to each breasts. Here you begin to see how his mind begins to shift toward sex. He begins to shift his thoughts from her eyes to her body. He is very nonchalant about it. The guy is only out for one thing, and that is sex. He is trying to be smooth about it, but in the next stanza we begin to see his patience giving out. The second stanza we begin to see the guy's personality shift. He goes from being the person that you could spend eternity with to a person whose time is coming to an end fast. He says that time's chariot is hurrying near. This line sets the standard for the next stanza. This stanza is a little faster, and you can see that the guy does not put as much thought into what he is saying. He then proceeds to tell her that they have eternity to be together, but her beauty will not last forever. I am not a girl, but if I was, that guy would have just lost me. He is starting to become less and less patient. He then murmurs that the worms are going to take her virginity, which is followed up by him saying that his lust is going to go to the grave with her. Now he is becoming pretty desperate. He has lost all his patience and any dignity that he had as a man. Marvell should have wrote a continuation to this poem from the woman's point of view, because at this point in the poem she is trying to figure out how to get rid of this creep. In the third stanza the guy has lost all hope. He is now on the verge of total desperation. I picture him in this stanza down on his knees begging for her to go home with him. In this stanza he tells her straight up that their attraction is going to end one day, so they need to do it right now. The guy has lost all patience at this point. He is ready to go somewhere. He ends the stanza by saying that they cannot make the sun stand still, but they sure can make it run. This line wraps up the rest of the poem. In this line the guy tells her that the sun will be up soon, but we can make it run if we go now. Throughout this poem the guy loses his patience more and more, until eventually he is ready to go. His words go through a big change. They start out by being very compassionate at the beginning of the poem to being very anxious at the end. We do not know what happens at the end of this poem, Marvell leaves it to us to decide. I can say that the guy probably ended up alone that night.