What is the theme in the poem to his coy mistress?

Answer 1

This poem is describing a man's thoughts about his love and wishes. He wants to take things slow and just "dally" around, but they cannot. Time is of the essence so to speak. The theme of the poem is to sieze the day. The tone can be described as intimate, passionate, contemplating, lyrical, and solemn.

Answer 2

Time

Time is clearly the most important issue bothering the speaker of "To His Coy Mistress"; the subject spans the entire length of the piece, from the first line to the forty-sixth. The most obvious relationship to time here is that this work is a traditional carpe diem poem, which means that it encourages the listener to "seize the day" - to make the most of today and not put off action until tomorrow. In this particular case, the speaker is addressing a woman with whom he wants to have sex. He uses the threat of what time will do to her "quaint honor" and "long-preserved virginity" to convince her to give both up to him before they decay. A psychological interpretation - looking beneath the surface of the speaker's claims to see intentions that he himself is not aware of - might find the situation to be the reverse of what it seems: instead of using the idea of time to get the sex he desires, he might be using sex to push away his own awareness of time's passing. The first section of the poem, lines 1 through 20, describes an idyllic fantasy of how the speaker would behave if time had no effect, while the second part (lines 21-32) presents time's effects in the most gruesome terms conceivable. In the last section, the speaker concocts a scheme to battle time's passage with a cannonball made up of "our sweetness." This tactic hints at desperation. It may be that he is overly anxious to take the woman's virginity and will therefore spin any elaborate hoax for which she might fall. Modern psychology, though, particularly the work of Carl Jung, might say that the fear of death the speaker stirs up is not just a ruse to weaken her defenses, it is a real fear, his fear. The poem's last image, of making the sun (representing time) run, indicates a need for distraction that applies as easily to this speaker's forty-six-line plea as it does to the person he is trying to convince.

Love and Passion

"To His Coy Mistress" begins as a declaration of the speaker's love, but, by its end, it makes the assumption that the woman being addressed is as passionate as the speaker. He declares his love in fantastic, larger-than-life terms in the first twenty lines, because he is describing an admittedly unreal situation: his love would grow to span continents and stretch from the beginning of time to the end, he tells her, if only it could. Readers can recognize a slight touch of irony in the way that he pretends to be frustrated with reality for not allowing his wildly elaborate "proof" of love. After frightening the woman in the middle section of the poem, with visions of what will happen that are much worse than what he would like to happen, the speaker presumes her to be as lustful as he is. There is a clear turning point in lines 31 and 32, where he presumes her agreement in his sarcasm of isolation - he could list any number of things that people do not do in the grave, but his use of the double meaning of "embrace" (none embrace the grave and none embrace each other in the grave) takes for granted that embracing is the thing to do. The last part of the poem speaks from a conspiratorial "we" stance about how they can, together, fight life's limits with sex, most overtly in the couplet "And tear our pleasures with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life."

Beauty

The woman's concern for her beauty, her vanity, is the tool that the speaker of this poem tries to use to make time's passage a threat to her. His initial flattery of her beauty is abstract, with no mention of her physical attributes at all, but only exaggerated, hyperbolic declarations of his love. In line 13, his admiration for the woman subtly shifts to praise for the parts of her he can see: her forehead, her eyes, both her breasts and "the rest." Before his inventory becomes too leering, though, he ends it with her heart, an unseen place where the physical and the spiritual come together. In line 25, he uses the impending loss of her beauty as something of a threat, as he reminds her of the ravages of death and decay and how they will destroy what she is trying to preserve by retaining her virginity.

Death

The middle section of the poem, lines 21 to 32, applies the philosophical concept of time passing to the biological reality of life. Some of the imagery used to capture the idea of death is common and familiar - the marble vault, the grave, and the dust and ashes are all details that have been used before to represent the body's fate after death. The image of worms ravaging the corpse, however, is notably rough in this context; it is a little more vivid and disgusting than the speaker's thoughtful carpe diem warning deserves. it is a tactile image, invoking the sense of touch, while the other images are visual, and, because it belongs to one of the less-used senses, it is more potent. At the same time that the poem is most graphic about death, it is also most direct about what the speaker's intent actually is: the sarcastic use of "quaint" and "long-preserved" within a context of absolute death makes it clear that honor and virginity are the central targets of his argument.

Topics for Further Study

• Write a modern-day dialogue between Andrew Marvell and a girl who he is trying to pick up, including all of the arguments he uses in this poem and her counterarguments.
• Find one of the other poems written about the same time as this one that has the same theme, such as Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love," Ben Jonson's "Song: To Celia," or Robert Herrick's "To The Virgins, To Make the Most of Time." Describe your impression of each of the two poets. Who do you think would be more successful with his poem? Which one would you rather know? Why?
• This is a fairly long poem, especially for one that is about how little time we have on earth. Could the poet have made his point more quickly without losing anything crucial?

Answer 3

The main theme of Marvell's To His Coy Mistress is the one traditionally called 'carpe diem': be happy today, because we are all a long time dead.

'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may' [Herrick] is probably the most famous English carpe diem poem. The message was even more urgent when so many people died young of incurable diseases, epidemics, or accidents.

Answer 4

To seize the day.

Answer 5

whats tha tone