To His Coy Mistress: The Urgency of Love in Marvel’s Poem

Despite the change in tone, the theme of seizing the day remains but with another minor distortion in the last stanza.
The last fourteen lines revolve around the metaphores of ’amorous birds of prey’ and the ’ball’ made out of ’sweetness’ and lastly the ’iron gates of life’ that symbolizes the boundaries of life, the forthcoming promise of death. The common notion in these lyrical tools is the reshaping of the carpe diem principle. Instead of simply stating that they should make use of the time it is given to the lovers, Marvel brings his subjective time perception theory into his argumentation. In this construct the lovers are portrayed as not part of the traditional time-flow but creatures, either birds of prey that devour time as described in the lines ’ And now, like amorous birds of prey, rather at once our time devour’ or mythical phoenixes (Carroll, 1959) that are above the concept of death and can reborn after death. The ’sweetnes ball’ besides the ’ thy willing soul transpires / at every pore with instanrt fires’ is a reference to their love being a phoenix bird, that is similar to Jesus in the regard of coming back to life after death. With this argument Marvel found another workaround of death and another use for the carpe diem principle by reversing the meaning of death into nothngness.


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