Love in Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116
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Often, Poets explores the theme of love through vivid descriptions of perfect yet irreconcilable love between the speakers and their lovers. However, although the love might be perfect, this technique faces many limitations for the speaker and their lovers to form a perfect love circle. This paper analysis Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress and how he explores the theme of love in comparison with William Shakespeare sonnet 116 using Paz’s Classification of love. Marvell is often included in the seventieth-century school of English metaphysical poets that also includes Robert Southwell, John Donne, Henry Vaughan, and Richard Crashaw, among others. He was also referred to as a changed political writer as some of his work illustrates a firm belief of a republican government as opposed to the principle of absolute monarchy. Although both William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 and Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress extensively cover the theme of love, discuss what love is and how it is expressed, the two poetic works emphasize the different meanings of love.
In his Octavio book, the bubble flame, he analysis three different categories of love that exist between partners, which include eroticism, sexuality, and love (Paz, 1996). According to him, sexuality is the biological and instinctive need to reproduce, and eroticism explains the pleasure and urge of the sexual act. He defines love as the attraction to the other person as a whole, which encompasses equal sharing of love between the soul and the body.
Andrew Marvell in To His Cy Mistress, is essentially arguing that everyone should enjoy their youth and vitality while they can as they will never live forever. To be more specific, they should enjoy physical and romantic love relationships while they are still young because sooner or later, they will all die. The poem conveys an enduring statement on love, and that is the main reason it is one of the most famous poems in the English Language. However, the million-dollar question is whether the message is valid in the contemporary world.
Although William Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 and Andrew Marvell’s poem To His Coy Mistress both pursue the theme of love, each poem analysis a kind of love that is divergent from the other, for example, To His Coy Mistress conforms to Paz’s second category of the love of eroticism (Gregory, 1978). On the other hand, Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 claims an alternative to the three categories of Paz (Raflis & Zai, 2018). The speaker in To His Coy Mistress craves for a woman whom he wants to convince to bed with him because they will not live for eternity. The speaker in Marvell’s poem claims he wants him and his mistress to tear their pleasures with rough strive as soon as possible while they still have a chance. The speakers seek to attain pleasure through intercourse and do not intend to produce offspring.
Although the speaker says that if he had all the time on the earth, he would spend thirty thousand years adoring every inch of her mistress, he probably claims this to try to woo the mistress to achieve his urge as first as possible. Gregory (1978) claims that the speaker knows that he does not have much time, and therefore he can say that without any need to prove. He is not driven by a natural desire to give rise to offspring nor possess an equal sharing of love with his mistress’s soul and body. He only desires to indulge in bliss through intercourse as first as possible to void his last from turning into ashes. Therefore, the love that the speaker holds for his lover falls under the second type of Paz’s of eroticism.
However, because in the first Stanza of To His Coy mistress, the speaker is concerned with the mistress as a whole and not only his pure erotic desire for her body is tempting to categorize the poem within Pal’s third category of love. Moreover, the speaker declares that he wishes his “Vegetable Love” love to grow slowly and be vaster than empires if he gets more time. He insists he will love the mistress as an entire person and spend a lavish amount of time with her. Nevertheless, the reader can not be sure whether the speaker is entirely truthful, for there exists no way for him to prove.
Additionally, the speaker wants to engage in intercourse like amorous birds of prey, and thus his aggressive tone suggests he is becoming impatient. This impatience means that the speaker is apprehensive about exploring the mistress’s body and not interested in anything else. Moreover, he is not only interested in her body, arguable he would attempt to frighten the mistress with crude images and the idea that if she does not give out her virginity soon, but she will also die a virgin (Gregory, 1978). Therefore, the reason that the speaker is not willing to wait for his love on the mistress to grow before intercourse; his love is purely erotic.
While To His Coy Mistress expresses Paz’s concept of eroticism, Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare does not fit into any of the outlined Paz’s categorization of love. In sonnet 116, the speaker describes the real marriage of the right minds as a kind of love that is solid and never shake (Raflis & Zai, 2018). This is because love bypasses the body, and it is based on the mind and transcends both eroticism and sexuality. In Sonnet 116, Shakespeare focuses on the love of the body, and although cheeks and lips will diminish with time, he asserts that his kind of eternal love will never end.
The sonnet posits lovers are no longer youthful and do not entail equal sharing between the soul and the body since, with time, the body begins to lose its attraction, and liveliness and souls bear it out even to the edge of the dome (Raflis & Zai, 2018). Nonetheless, while its lovers are youthful, the speaker describes love as a genuine connection between both the young, lively soul and body. He suggests that a couple’s ages, their body begins to lose their attraction and love between the partners is now more of the love between souls.
While Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 suggests that sincere love adoration cannot be altered with time, in contrast, the speaker in Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress his mistress to pursue sex immediately since there will never be enough time. Marvel illustrates eroticism while Shakespeare emphasizes a kind of love that Paz does not account for in his three categorizations of Double Flame. Instead, Shakespeare introduces a fourth category of love, the one that dwells between souls alone. In his kind of love, it can remain potent over time, as the attraction of the body declines with time, and the soul enriched more with love.
References
Gregory, M. (1978). Marvell’s ‘to his coy mistress’: The poem as a linguistic and social event. Poetics, 7(4), 351-362.
Marvell, A. (2016). ” To His Coy Mistress” and Other Poems. Courier Dover Publications.
Paz, O. (1996). The double flame: Love and eroticism. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Raflis, R., & Zai, J. R. (2018). Figurative Languages in William Shakespeare’s Poem: a Fairy Song, a Madrigal, Bridal Song, Dirge, and Sonnet 116. Jurnal Ilmiah Langue and Parole, 2(1), 53-58.
Shakespeare, W. (1991). Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds.. Nebraska Book Arts Center.