Thursday, February 28, 2013
To His Coy Mistress
I thought that the speaker of Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress was the one who was really being coy! He kind of makes fun of his mistress for holding out on him, for keeping her virginity. To him, her chastity is equivalent to her being "coy". He spends most of his time on the cheerful topic of death, and how we are all destined to grow old and die. He makes his mistress feel great about herself when he basically says she'll just get uglier as time goes on. He summarizes, however, that "while the youthful hue sits on [her] skin like morning dew" (Marvell, 804), they should just have sex now. The speaker doesn't want to wait, because time is ticking, and he wants to 'experience' his mistress now! A modern-day summary of this poem could be "YOLO: you only live once". That's the message the speaker is sending to the woman. He's kind of a pig! The way he sees it, they're not getting any younger, so she might as well stop playing hard-to-get, and do it with him that moment!
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