To His Coy Mistress Underneath the Romance
To His Coy Mistress: Underneath the Romance Few would argue that on the surface level of Andrew Marvel’s “To His Coy Mistress,” the speaker is a lover advancing a conventional ‘carpe diem’ line of thought. ... The title captures the tension through the separation of the subject and the object with the description of writing as “His Coy Mistress. ... This explains Marvel’s urgent call for his mistress to promptly yield to his desires. ... Marvel relates the necessity of actually conquering his flirtatious mistress and performing the act of writing, justifying his intention to end the process of lusting after the desired object- perhaps the attainment of complete expression- in order to immortalize his soul through writing. ... Poetry manifests the immortal soul because, although his body will eventually decay, his mistress, poetry, is free from “the iron gates of life,” creating the further subject/object distinction between the poet and his work. ... The sexual level of “To His Coy Mistress” is so apparent as to suggest that Marvel, a man who loved intellectual games, is advancing a more complex message. ... Marvel succeeds in validating the metaphysical tenets of prose, but only if the audience is clever enough to read beneath the romance.