To His Coy Mistress Essay: Use of Sound -- His Coy Mistress Essays

Use of hold out in To His demure Mistress          At first glance, Andrew Marvels poem To His Coy Mistress is a fairly typical carpe diem poem, in which the speaker tells his sexual love that they should seize the day and have sex now instead of delayment until they are married. Today, the speakers speech may seem sexist in its carriage toward women and irresponsible in its attitude toward the coy mistress (the speaker doesnt formulate how he would seize the day if the woman became pregnant, for example). Still, if we look beyond the throttle perspective of the speaker himself, we can see that Marvell is making a direction about how all of us (regardless of gender or involvement in bloods) should savor the pleasures of the moment. For the poet, there are two kinds of attitude toward the present (1) activities in the present are judged by their impact on the future, and (2) there is no future state--all activities occur in the present an d can only be enjoyed or evaluated by their impact at that moment. The mistress would like to postpone sex (theoretically until she and the speaker are married). The speaker wants to consummate their physical relationship now. Each viewpoint has its reasons, and certainly the woman in the poem would deadlock to lose practically from premarital sex. Marvell, however, isnt suggesting that unbridled lust is preferable to example or ethical restraint sex is the subject matter, not the newspaper of the poem. Marvells actual point here is that instead of dividing our lives or our values into mathematically neat but artificial categories of present and future, we should savor the unique experiences of individually present moment to convey this theme, the poet uses irre... ...g up and slowing down time, the speakers irregularities of time create a melody that substitutes the rough spondaic meter for the swimmingly regular iambic tetrameter. By the time they have read (aloud) the wide -cut poem, readers should be less concerned with the poems overall moral (or amoral) philosophizing than with its musicality. Marvell, after all, is writing a poem, not a work of philosophical system. His use and wherefore subversion of conventional rhyme, rhythm, and meter, create a music that opposes both philosophy and anti-philosophy. Life, these irregularities remind us, exists in the here and now, not on the neatly divided clock or calendar. We cannot reserve the fact that life is followed by death, nor should we filtrate to do so through fantasizing about the future, but we can control each moment that we are alive each irregular, spontaneous, surprising moment.