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Comparing The Flea And To His Coy Mistress

937 Words4 Pages

The human psyche is the most interesting because of how deeply we can feel about topics. In these two poems, the authors, John Donne and Andrew Marvell are in their own personal hells of emotional turmoil. Both men lost loved ones, assuming the loved ones are lovers or wives. Though they both experience the same loss they express it in their writing as two different things. The complexity of the human psyche is portrayed in “The Flea” by John Donne and “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell as the two male poets, driven by the loss of a lover, describe their past love and now current despair without their companions. In “The Flea” the speaker describes a flea in great detail and its relationship to his late lover. It seems at first glance …show more content…

Andrew Marvell takes a biblical point of view in his grief of loss. He mentions the flood that Noah was in and the conversion of Jew which according to the bible will occur just before the end of the world, “Love you ten years before the flood, And you should, if you please, refuse Till the conversion of the Jews” (Marvell 8-10). There is a progression in the poem to the love and nurture that went into the vegetable of their love representing the care and growth in their relationship, “My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires and more slow” (Marvell 11-12). Eventually there is an image of a chariot coming to take her away. This represents her death and how sudden this occurred. There is also a representation of “hell” which is conveyed with the mention of fire. This entire poem has underlying tones of Christianity. Marvell obviously has a strong emotional connection to the Christian faith and is trying to use it with the biblical references to explain his love’s death. The constant back and forth he had with himself about faith and religion was so much for him that he dwelled on the religious aspect. To him, his love was so pure, so innocent, he did not want to believe that she could just die so suddenly. His God could not be that cruel in his mind. Now in respect to the both, the poems have metaphors for their lost loved

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