To His Coy Mistress
by Andrew Marvell
"Had we but world enough, and time,/
This coyness, lady, were no crime."
(1-2)
Through the eyes of the speaker, the world does not provide enough time for his lady lover to be coy and not have sex with him; therefore, this a crime. Throughout the rest of this poem, this lusty lover tries to persuade his mistress into having a sexual relationship with him. This was originally a Carpe Diem poem which means "seize the day" and in this poem, that message is exactly what the speaker is trying to communicate to his mistress.
The denotation and connotation in this poem is used quite frequently in order to stress the importance of having sex before time runs out. In line 24, "Deserts of vast eternity" is referring to death. He is stating that the only that lies ahead of them is death and so they must take advantage of their prime and have sex before it is too late. In line 22, "Time's winged chariot hurrying near" is emphasizing that life's a race against time. In this line, chariot represents a race or war even, meaning time is their enemy. "The grave's a fine and private place,/ But none, I think, do there embrace" (32-33) these two lines mean a complexity of things but in simple terms, the grave here means marriage and in the speaker's eyes, this means no sex. Finally, in line 39, "...like amorous birds of prey" is referring to two lovers attacking each other. There is a handful of figurative language throughout this poem as well.
The figurative language used in this poem confirms the idea that the speaker is only interested in sex and not anything more. In line 11 "My vegetable love should grow" is overall a bad and sleazy pick up line. Vegetables take a long time to grow and then they rot. Instead of using this word, the speaker should have used fire which is passionate or a tree because it means that their love would last forever because they would establish roots. In like 31 "The grave's a fine and private place" is metaphor for death but also, it proves that the speaker views old age and death as the same thing. An examples of a simile is used in line 24, "Sits on thy skin like a morning dew." Overall, To His Coy Mistress is a poem of lust and the lines men will say in order to obtain sex with a woman.
It's interesting that you think the grave represents marriage...isn't it possible that he just means there's no fun in the grave--i.e. after physical death? In this case, the grave would be a synecdoche, not a symbol.
ReplyDeleteThe examples of "denotation and connotation" that you cite are actually symbols and metaphors...perhaps we need to discuss this difference again in class.