To His Coy Mistress Analysis

Examine the view that Marvell presents love as entirely physical
Although the role of sexual intercourse within the context of love is heavily emphasized by Marvell in “To His Coy Mistress”, suggesting that the Carpe Diem poem presents love as solely physical is arguably hyperbolic. Marvell’s structural establishment of a perpetual hypothetical implicitly addresses the nature of romantic asexual love and presents it as something fundamentally positive. This is structurally established in the first verse through Marvell’s diction choice of “had we” and continually utilized until the twentieth line. A hypothetical context is essentially presented to the love interest addressed in the dramatic monologue, where the speaker and his lover have enough “World and Time” and her sexual

Ultimately, this is due to Marvell and the addressee lacking the time to pursue these endeavors. This becomes clear to the reader in verse 21, where Marvell metaphorically alludes to the Olympian deity Apollo, through the symbolic establishment of time’s “winged Charriot hurrying near”. Within the context of the poem, this metaphor ultimately introduces a sharp tonal shift between the hypothetical nature of the poem and the realism of the current situation. The shift in tone is further enforced by Marvell’s employment of the motif of death in line 27, where the grotesque imagery of worms essentially deflowering his lover in the grave establishes juxtaposing connotations to Marvell’s hypothetical promise to love his mistress until the end of time in verse 10. Furthermore, it reinforces the critical lack of time Marvell and the addressee have together as the lover will inevitably die, inherently providing an essential argument to the addressee to indulge in sexual intercourse with