BA #3

"To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell
(http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/coy.htm)

This is a poem that was written in 1681. It is a poem of a man who is promising this girl that if he had all the time in the world, he'd spend it with her. He explains all these things he'd do for her in a very sexual way. Then there's the turning point of the poem where he says that he doesn't really love her, he just wants sex from her. He continues to explain that he would love her forever, but time doesn't stop for anyone and she'll soon die and rot in a marble casket. In the third stanza of the poem, the man is pressuring her with the word "now" and uses it repeatedly along with images of lovers; suggesting that this is how he wants them to be.

I compared Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" with Michael Drayton's "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part" and I think that there are very subtle differences and similarities to these two poems. First, both men speak of love, and how they will lose their love because eventually they'll die. A difference I noticed first was the language in each poem. Marvell uses imagery often and references things that would make it hard to really understand what he was saying. But Drayton is very straight forward in his poem about the love he once had. Marvell made his love for her seem forced and rough, while Drayton's was full of sincere passion.