Andrew Marvell was an English politician and a metaphysical poet. Marvell’s first poems were written in Greek and Latin and were published when he was still studying at the Cambridge for his degree.
Marvell’s style of writing is known as more than a technical accomplishment, it is tentatively designated as wit, a tough reasonableness, beneath the slight lyric grace.
During his stay at the Nun Appleton House, where he used to write his poetry and served as a tutor to the daughter of the Lord General Thomas Fairfax, is when he wrote thin best poem, ‘To His Coy Mistress’. This poem combines an old poetic conceit with a typical vibrant imagery and easy command of rhyming couplets.
In this poem, it shows that the poem is narrated by a nameless man, who does not reveal any details about himself to a nameless woman. In the first stanza, the poet says that if they had more time and space, her coyness would have been a crime. He explains that, how he wished he had more time to spend with her. If he had the time, he would be admiring her, complementing her. How they could spend time, by talking about various topics and mostly of love among themselves. How he could focus on each part of her body and how he would spend time to get to her heart, which he values among all parts of her body.
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In the second stanza, he tries to explain about how life reaches the old age and if desires are not accomplished during the youth, then while being in the coffin, the worms would take away her virginity and he would also lose all his desires. He says in the last lines of the stanza that the grave is a fine and quiet place, but nobody embraces over there. All are alone with their lost and unfulfilled desires and wishes in life.
Therefore, he says that when we are still young now, like the birds in the sky, let us mate and enjoy ourselves. Let us find time for ourselves and enjoy by dinning with wine and cheese and like the birds, mate and have fun and spend all our life with joy. No matter what, we cannot withhold time nor time withhold us, therefore even if we mate or not, the sun will rise again tomorrow and the days will past till our ends and then also, but we will be left back with our desires unfulfilled.
In this poem, the poet is mainly focusing on the physical beauty of the body and the pleasures that he could attain by being with a virgin and if not finding the time to enjoy the pleasure now, when they are in youth, then when life ends and when being in coffin, we may regret of the time gone by is what the poet is trying to express through his poem.
In Short, every moment in life should be valued, treasured and enjoyed as nothing is going to comeback and nothing is going to stop for the beginning of another day.