Stylistic Analysis Of Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress

This paper is essentially a stylistic analysis of Andrew Marvell’s famous poem “To His Coy Mistress”. This paper emphasizes the irrelevance of interpreting a literary text by isolating it from the biography of its author and the circumstances of its age. On this basis, the paper argues that the hedonistic speaker in Marvell’s poem does not express the poet’s views about the theme of physical love but represents the liberal materialistic attitudes of the Seventeenth century in England toward the male/female issues. Marvell’s real voice appears in the poem in the shape of the conservative religious allusions which run counter to the hedonistic motifs of the poem confusing theme and imagery and undermining the major argument of the poem. The paper illustrates that Marvell wears the mask of hedonism in an attempt to try his hands in the hedonistic theme or the contemporary carpe-diem motifs which are at odds with Marvell 's spiritual attitudes. This conclusion could not be reached without examining the available biographical and historical background of the poem. The paper also examines the text of the poem from stylistic, biographical and historical perspectives which were subordinated in traditional critical studies which targeted the text. As a whole, the

We would sit down, and think which way, to walk and pass our long love 's day, thou by the Indian Ganges side shouldst rubies find: I by the tide of Humber would complain. 1 would love you ten years before the flood, and you should, if you please, refuse. Till the conversion of the Jews. My vegetable love, should grow faster than empires and more slow; an hundred years should go to praise thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze, two hundred to adore each breast, But thirty thousand to the rest; an age at least to every part and the last age should show your heart for, lady, you deserve this state, nor would a love at lower rate, (80 -