Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress"

Andrew Marvell is loosely affiliated with the Metaphysical school of poetry, much noted for the wit and novelty of their "conceits" (or figurative language), and his poem "To His Coy Mistress" accordingly adopts a series of different rhetorical figures -- fixed within a tightly rhymed tetrameter stanza -- which attempt to place great rhetorical flourish on what is a simple request on the part of the poet begging his girlfriend to lay aside her reservations and engage in coitus. The poem is written in three verse paragraphs, which lay out three different stages of this love poem which illustrates the Classical topos of "carpe diem," the Horatian exhortation to enjoy life's pleasures in the face of inevitable mortality. I hope to show that over the course of these three paragraphs, Marvell employs tonal shifts which accompany three different views of time, as part of his...
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