To the 16th Century and Back: My Review of Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall'

‘Wolf Hall’ is a dazzling, bewitching insight into the richly textured world of Tudor England, revolving around Henry VIII and his relentless quest to provide a male heir for his country and make Anne Boleyn his bride. This novel does not seek to inform the reader about the religious and social turmoil of the time; in fact, previous knowledge of this period is needed to sustain the reader through the intricate plot, with a character list that spreads five pages alone. Mantel rewrites Tudor history through the keen eyes of Thomas Cromwell, who is cast as the book’s protagonist. We follow him on his journey from the abused son of a blacksmith to the loyal servant of Cardinal Wolsey, a character who lives on in Cromwell’s mind long after his death, to a trusted advisor of the king and the confidante of Anne Boleyn.

            Mantel’s narrative style is remarkable, akin to a constant stream of Cromwell’s consciousness, yet she uses only ‘he’ to refer to his thoughts. This proximity to the character achieves an impressive feat: Cromwell is rehabilitated, for his human side is depicted as well as his ruthless ambition. However, this does make it hard to decipher who is speaking, and it took me a while to tune into the frequency of her prose. Nevertheless, this idiosyncrasy is forgotten in the vivid, unique imagery that illuminates her work, and a fluid enjambement that completely engrosses the reader. She is a self-confessed addict to colons, which are ubiquitous in her prose.

            The use of the present tense creates immediacy; however, ‘Wolf Hall’ is so sumptuous with minute, meticulous details, that they act almost as speed bumps, forcing the reader to adopt a slow reading pace to fully appreciate the cornucopia of historical embellishments: from the stench of the privy to the texture of the king’s clothes, from a delicate description of Thomas More’s turkey carpet to a graphic depiction of the gruesome burning of a heretic, whose ‘chains retained the remnants of flesh, sucking and clinging’. No expense is spared: Mantel’s England is a filthy, bloody affair. The detail found is a testament to the length of the book, as Mantel takes 650 pages to move her reader through a relatively short time span. For me, reading it was a labour of love: you emerge from the 16^th Century after half an hour to find that you have read perhaps only ten pages of the book. In a review of the sequel, ‘Bring Up The Bodies’, Nicole Shulman wrote in the Spectator that, ‘in her [Mantel’s] historical fiction, the rubble of research is ground to a dust so fine that it settles into every phrase, every glance and gesture, so that we seem really to see through eyes that opened on the late 15th Century.’

            ‘Wolf Hall’ is also pervaded by the spirits of Cromwell’s past, affording it a strange, dream-like quality. This is a characteristic of many of Mantel’s books, and her state of mind is understandable after reading her aptly-named autobiography, ‘Giving Up The Ghost’. She has been haunted throughout her life by the child that she could never have; the figures of his dead wife and children linger in Cromwell’s mind as well. One description encapsulates this: ‘he doesn’t believe that the dead come back; but that doesn’t stop him from feeling the brush of their fingertips, wingtips, against his shoulder. Since last night they have been less individual forms and faces than a solid, aggregated mass, their flesh slapping and jostling together, their texture dense like sea creatures, their faces sick with an undersea sheen’.

            To comb through ‘Wolf Hall’s dense forest of language would take too long, and I feel I cannot do it justice in text; such powerful, compelling words deserve to be savoured in their original form. This book and, I assume, its sequel, were thoroughly deserving of the Man Booker prize; it remains to be seen whether the culmination to her Tudor trilogy is duly rewarded, or if she has inherited a poisoned chalice. One thing is certain: her writing is unlike anything I have ever experienced, and she is arguably our finest living writer.

Has Mankind Learned Anything From History?

This article was featured on the blog of 'It's History Podcasts' in August 2013: http://itshistorypodcasts.com/blog/2013/8/22/remembering-the-past-has-mankind-learnt-anything-from-history#.UhkVaDnU6FI

History is the study of mankind and its development through the ages. An awareness of the past is essential in order to provide a perspective on the problems of the present, and to understand people and societies which have been built on the foundations of our history. However, man does not always apply this knowledge to situations, condemning himself to repeat the mistakes of previous generations. George Bernard Shaw said ‘We learn from history that we learn nothing from history’: there is much truth to be found in this statement. History is saturated with bloody wars and struggles for power, many of which could have been avoided had the instigators considered the past.

            In contrast, Lord Macaulay declared that ‘The history of England is emphatically the history of progress’: our country has evolved and grown, advancing in all areas of civilisation, and such developments could not have been made without considering mistakes made along the way.  There are countless instances where people have reflected on past errors and resolved that they will not recur. For example, shipbuilders will never again assume that a boat is unsinkable after the infamous disaster of Titanic in 1912, where 1514 people died due to a lack of lifeboats. 

            Perhaps the most frequently-repeated occurrence throughout history is war. Despite the devastating consequences, man’s greed for power and inability to live harmoniously with his fellows has led to countless conflicts. Ironically, World War I was known as ‘the war to end all wars’, as it was one of the most shattering conflicts ever recorded, triggering the collapse of three major empires. However, World War II broke out just twenty one years later. This was the deadliest and most widespread conflict in history, with around 60 million fatalities and the only use of nuclear weapons in a war. Nuclear warfare was threatened in the Cold War between America and Russia, and there are many lessons to be gained from these periods, which should be studied carefully to prevent future generations from making the same errors.  One hopes that the implications of deploying nuclear weapons, and the devastation wreaked by the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, will leave a long-lasting legacy, deterring countries from considering nuclear warfare as an acceptable weapon. North Korea and Iran in particular should pay heed to this.

            Religious genocides have occurred since antiquity, and are a common theme throughout history. Overall, more than 6 million Jews were believed to have died in the Holocaust, of which approximately 1.5 million were children. Despite the atrocities committed against the Jews during this time, after they had endured centuries of persecution from races such as the Assyrians, Egyptians, Romans and French, it did not end mass killings under the pretext of religion. For example, there is the ongoing violence in Sudan and Tibet, and the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans in the late 20th century. It could be said that being human is the potential to do good and evil, and therefore, although most look back and vow never to repeat the brutalities of the past, there will always be those who disregard this with a warped viewpoint on the moral way in which to treat others.

            Following the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, religious violence escalated between the Shi’a and Sunni branches of Islam to the point of a civil war that still continues today. Iraq comprises 65% Shi’as, although dispute first arose when the Sunnis disagreed over their status as a minority. The Shi’as have suffered direct persecution at the hands of a Sunni government since 1932, especially under the reign of Saddam Hussein. The two sects have now fallen into a cycle of revenge killings, with the Sunni’s preferred methods being car bombs and suicide bombers in contrast to the Shi’as’ death squads. There is a colourful historical backdrop to the relations between Sunni and Shi’as: since Mohammed’s death there have been many clashes between the two, often influenced by the political landscape of the time. Instead of accepting that such conflict between branches of religions ends only in bloodshed, these dissidents create renewed terror and violence, and do not embrace their theological differences, but inflict terrorism on the rest of the population. They are so blind to the error of their prejudices that they do not see the mistakes of past generations and try to make amends: instead they pursue their desire for superiority.

            The French were beaten in the first Indochina conflict, ending in 1954, but this did not prevent the US Army from being defeated by North Vietnamese troops and their Communist allies in the following years. America did not recognise that attempting to beat the enemy on its home soil was futile, and again, this crucial factor has been overlooked in the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

            In his latest book, ‘Playing the Great Game: Britain, War and Politics in Afghanistan since 1839’, Dr. Edmund Yorke explores the tension between the political and military forces. Yorke argues that unnecessary political interference or negligence of military operations has consistently contributed to serious failures in Britain’s policy towards Afghanistan over the past 170 years. He highlights the same political and military errors that have occurred throughout the four major Anglo-Afghan wars of 1839-‘42, 1878-‘80, 1919 and the continuing conflict today. Brigadier Ed Butler, Commander of the British Forces wrote, ‘If only his book had been available in 2001 and was required reading for all government ministers, officials and senior officers’. This is a reflection of how invading armies are often doomed to repeat the same mistakes, due to the incompetence and ignorance of their leaders. There are many parallels to be found in today’s conflict in Afghanistan and previous wars, and it may be time to find a political solution to avoid any more fatalities.

Proposing that all men should share the same opinions and live peacefully together is an unrealistic demand. Wars have shaped the world in which we live, and will continue to do so: by nature, man is a belligerent species. Seeing bloodshed may teach people that fighting each other is wrong, but it will not stop them from going to war to fight for their beliefs.  It is therefore unrealistic to expect mankind always to learn from its mistakes, as conflict between people is inevitable. It is the evolution of warfare that demonstrates whether man has actually learned from his past.

            Conflict between the Church and monarchy is also a recurrent theme. In 1170, Archbishop Thomas Becket was brutally murdered by the knights of his former friend, King Henry II, in a culmination to a bitter quarrel that had been raging for several years. To pay penance for Becket’s murder, Henry dropped his plans for greater control over the Church and in 1174 walked barefoot through Canterbury and was whipped for his sins. Unfortunately, Henry’s son John did not learn from his father’s experience, and argued with the Pope, causing him to be excommunicated. It is not surprising that the Magna Carta of 1215 contained a clause stating that the Church should be free to obey the Pope above the monarch.

            The Church was certainly one of the most powerful and influential forces in Medieval England. When the Pope forbade Henry VIII from divorcing his first wife Catherine of Aragon, Henry reacted by declaring that the Pope no longer held divine authority in England, and founded his own church, the Church of England. This led to the dissolution of the monasteries, which had significant social impacts. Although the consequences are not as severe, the Church and the state still clash, most recently with the Anglican and Roman Christian Churches in Britain rejecting the coalition government’s plans to legalise same sex marriage.

            King John was a notoriously bad king: one monk wrote of him, ‘Hell is defiled by the fouler presence of John’. He plotted the downfall of his own brother, Richard I, betrayed his father, and quarrelled so bitterly with the Pope over the next Archbishop of Canterbury that he was excommunicated, and an Interdict was passed over England and Wales. During his 17-year reign he lost most of the land held in France. Determined to regain this, he taxed and fined his subjects heavily, imprisoning them when they could not pay their debts. When he invaded France in 1214, his army was crushed by Phillip II at the Battle of Bouvines, meaning that all his taxes had been wasted in an unsuccessful war effort. This angered his barons so greatly that they forced him to agree to a set of rules, the Magna Carta, decreeing how the country should be governed. This was a cornerstone of democracy, and the start of a monarch’s power being limited. His subjects had seen the consequences of power corrupting a king, and to this day, there are checks and balances in place to ensure no power becomes too great in Britain.

            Democracy has evolved from the Ancient Greeks, coming from two Greek words: ‘demos’, meaning people, and ‘kratia’, meaning rule. Many modern democracies have come into being after the population of a country rose up against its leaders with a common aim of altering the way in which its country is governed. After the English Revolution, Parliament became gradually more important, although this power still changed over the years, allowing middle-class, then working-class men to vote, and eventually permitting women to vote on equal terms with men in 1928. After the American Revolution, when thirteen American colonies declared themselves independent of Britain, a constitution ensured that no part of their new federal and state system could become too powerful. Although in the short term the French Revolution did not work, the French managed to establish a democratic republic in 1871. These revolutions demonstrate to mankind that ultimately the population of a country must be content, as they are the foundations of the nation. The Arab Spring is a recent series of uprisings in the Arab world. These have led to the deposing of the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen, with civil uprisings in Syria and Bahrain. The subsequent violence these rebellions and protests have triggered could have been avoided if a more tolerable regime had been used in the countries.

           

            Countries could learn from Britain’s mistakes in the 20th Century: many democratic systems were set up in ex-colonies, with Parliaments responsible to the Queen. These systems have not fared so well, and many Commonwealth countries have become dictatorships. The governing of a country is a precarious task, as people will always have conflicting views. By taking into account the successes and failings of past methods, disquiet can be limited to minimum. For example, Margaret Thatcher would have done well to pay heed to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. There was excessive taxation to pay for the Hundred Years’ War, which was not of common concern, and a poll tax was introduced. This was one of the main factors that contributed to the rebelling of up to 100,000 people who marched on London and demanded audiences with Richard II. Although the revolt was a failure in the short term, in the long term, many of its aims were achieved. This included the abolition of poll taxes. If Mrs Thatcher had paid more attention to this period in history, she might not have faced riots after introducing the controversial Community Charge in 1990.

            The hypothesis of eternal recurrence, developed by Friedrich Nietzche, theorises history as being beyond our control.  It states that since the probability of our existence occurring is finite, and time and space are infinite, then our existence will repeat an endless amount of times. If this is the case, it suggests that all patterns and similar events through history will recur repeatedly, despite attempts to prevent this.  If this theory were true, then even if mankind were to learn from every error that has happened, any improvements would be in vain as all events will inevitably happen again.

            I believe that the statement ‘Mankind has learned nothing from history’ is too indistinct a generalisation of mankind to represent the billions of individual opinions and wills of people: there will be those who strive to extract all the lessons they can from history and there will also be those who follow their own beliefs, irrespective of those before them.  People’s perspective on life is also constantly changing, moulded by their environment, and it is therefore unrealistic to apply the standards of the present to events in the past.  History cannot predict what will happen in the future. Historians can try to find patterns that correspond with historical evidence, but, unlike the certainty and precision of scientific laws, these can be used only as guidelines.

            Isaiah Berlin’s August Compte Lecture, later published under the title ‘Historical Inevitability’, argues that human beings’ capacity to make moral decisions makes them unique. However, the historian, E.H. Carr, believed that impersonal forces such as greed defined human behaviour.  To assert the inevitability of past events, as Carr did, was to forsake moral obligation for our own present actions. However, the two were united in the fact that historians always look for meaning and pattern in the past: they investigate causes in order to explain what happened. Carr argued that ‘what distinguishes the historian is the proposition that one thing led to another. Secondly, while historical events were of course set in motion by the individual wills, whether of ‘great men’ or ordinary people, the historian must go behind the individual wills and inquire into the reasons which made the individuals will and act as they did, and study the ‘factors’ or ‘forces’ which explain individual behaviour.’ This compelling case suggests that if we perhaps paid more attention to the work of historians, devastating historic recurrence could be avoided.  As as the German scholar and philosopher, Friedrich von Schlegel observed, ‘The historian is a prophet looking backwards.’

'Wind' by Ted Hughes- Analysis

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,

Winds stampeding the fields under the window

Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky

The hills had new places, and wind wielded

Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,

Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as

The coal-house door. Once I looked up -

Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes

The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,

At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;

The wind flung a magpie away and a black-

Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note

That any second would shatter it. Now deep

In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip

Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,

And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,

Seeing the window tremble to come in,

Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons

Ted Hughes

Biography:

Often referred to as one of the greatest 20th century poets, Ted Hughes was born in Yorkshire in 1930. He began to write his first poems aged 15, before winning a scholarship to study English at Cambridge, although he switched to Archaeology and Anthropology in his third year there. His first published poem appeared in 1954, the year of his graduation, and his first book of poems, 'Hawk in the Rain', was published in 1957. The previous year he had met the American poet, Sylvia Plath, and they were married in four months. Over the next 41 years he would write over 90 books, winning numerous prizes and fellowships, and was appointed England's poet laureate in 1984, with his love of nature a key influence in his work. However, his personal life was less successful. His marriage to Sylvia Plath was a turbulent one, and they separated after seven years. She committed suicide in 1963, gassing herself in her kitchen a year after their separation, and many held Hughes responsible as a result of his affair with Assia Wevill. Six years later, Wevill killed herself and their four-year old daughter, Shura. His reputation was marred by these tragedies, and it was with great surprise that the literary world received 'Birthday Letters' in 1998, the year of his death from cancer. This volume was dedicated to Sylvia Plath, and paints a tender portrait of every aspect of his relationship with her. The intensity and beauty of his language is breathtaking, and every poem I have read contains fresh, striking imagery that perfectly encapsulates its subject.

Analysis:

‘Wind’ is one of Ted Hughes’ most formidable poems, showing an entirely different aspect to this element. Unlike many other poets such as John Clare (‘A Morning Breeze’), Hughes is not concerned with describing the beauty and serenity of a balmy breeze; his aim is solely to communicate the relentless, godly strength and power of the wind that he knows from stormy days on the moors of the Pennines, using pathetic fallacy as the main device to describe both the wind and its victims.

            
            In the first of six four-line stanzas, Hughes describes the tempestuous night that has passed. The opening line is both simple but striking, comparing a solid house to a flimsy boat that has been tossed and smashed in a sea gale, with the words ‘far out’ and ‘all night’ suggesting the house is marooned in isolation. Like terrified, panicked animals, the woods have been ‘crashing through darkness’ while the hills are ‘booming’ with the thunderous sound of the wind. Personification is used to convey its almighty, dangerous power: it was ‘stampeding the fields’ while the land was futilely ‘floundering’ in the ‘blinding wet’.  The oceanic metaphor continues, conjuring up an image of a night mastered by the storm that rages through the dark. However, the beginning of the second verse is misleading: ‘till day rose’ indicates that finally the storm is over, whereas, in fact, the ensuing chaos is almost more intense, undiluted by the rain that saturates the first four lines.

            
            No longer black, the sky has now adopted the unnatural, ominous colour of orange, and as a consequence of the previous night, the ‘hills had new places’: the wind is so powerful that it has the ability to alter the very landscape it rules. It is also armed and ready to do battle with the earth again with renewed vigour, demonstrated by the martial image ‘wind wielded blade-light.’ Imagining the wind as an Anglo-Saxon warrior, Hughes shows that it has harnessed the power of light to its weaponry, and conveys a crazed frenzy. It is as though the wind even has a face, with the ‘black and emerald’ the colours of its pupil and iris. However, they are ‘luminous’, and the light from its wild face is ‘flexing like the lens of a mad eye’: a surreal concept conveying brilliantly the strange light and unpredictability in the aftermath of a storm. 

           
            The third stanza opens with the line, ‘at noon, I scaled along the house side’, as Hughes continues with the metaphor of the house as a boat.  Inching along the wall for protection, he reaches ‘as far as the coal house door’; by starting a new line after ‘as far as’, Hughes creates an exaggerated climax before recording the small distance that he actually managed to navigate. This first-person perspective is most effective in conveying the poet’s vulnerability. Hunched and stooped, he dares to look up just once, and immediately the balls of his eyes feel ‘dented’ by the ‘brunt wind’. This shocking sensory image of an eyeball being violently assaulted by a hard object conveys the brute force of the wind. The internal rhyme of ‘dented’ and ‘tent’ adds to the harsh, metallic feel of the verse, continuing with ‘the tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope’. Not only is the physical shape of the curved landscape depicted, this metaphorical image of movement shows the inescapable wind as being almost within the earth, its formidable power nearly snapping the ropes that anchor the hills to the ground.

            
            In the literal and figurative ‘the fields quivering’, Hughes shows not only the rippling appearance of the land, but personifies it as well: previously, the fields were stampeded by the wind, now they tremble in submission and distress. The sky too is mastered by the wind, with an arresting description of the shape of the horizon as a ‘grimace’, wincing in fear and pain. This is followed by the onomatopoeic, ‘bang and vanish with a flap’: such is the nature of these words that they demand to be read quickly and suddenly, demonstrating the unpredictable state of the land at the merciless hands of the wind, and the upheaval and tension it causes. With careless ease, the wind ‘flung a magpie away’: it is personified as it hurls a bird as thoughtlessly as a human might a discarded object.  ‘Flung’ also indicates a temper.  In contrast to the rapid pace of this stanza, the reader is then forced to slow down with the monosyllabic ‘black-back gull bent like an iron bar slowly’, which links closely with the image being described, as the assonantal rhythm mirrors the meaning. Material is of no consequence to the wind, as it easily alters the shape of both metal and earth, and nature is helpless in the face of the wind’s demented onslaught.

            
            ‘The house’ is deliberately placed in the stanza above the rest of its sentence to create impact for the opening of the next verse, as it matches the harsh assonance of sounds of ‘iron’ and ‘slowly’. It also sits alone, perilously exposed. The wind has now reached a frequency so powerful that it could shatter Hughes’ home like ‘a fine green goblet’, showing that compared to the wind, mere bricks and mortar are extremely delicate and fragile. The wind has again reached inside its subjects: before, it threatened to burst from within the hills; now, it howls inside the house at a frequency that could shatter glass. There is a sense of urgency and tension in the words  ‘any second would shatter it’, with Hughes and his house now in immediate danger.

            
            Despite the reassurance of being ‘deep in chairs’ by a ‘great fire’, this is no match for the wind, and Hughes and his family are uneasy and unsettled by its presence. It has invaded their minds, for they ‘cannot entertain book, though, or each other.’ Instead, they sit brooding, watching the fire while they ‘feel the roots of the house move’. There is no security to be found, and again, the house is in danger of being hurled away, and shifts to rearrange its position in the earth. The windows not only tremble with the force of the wind that hammers them, but are personified as afraid, desperate to seek shelter within the walls of the house. In the concluding lines, they hear the ‘stones cry out under the horizons’: even the prehistoric stones are weeping in desperation at the cruel havoc caused by the wind.

            
            Hughes uses enjambement to create fluidity much like the flow of the wind, although there is no regular rhyme pattern, showing that its inexhaustible energy cannot be limited. Hughes portrays how its sheer elemental force masters the land, sky, light, fire and stones in an assault of sense images which reflect its immeasurable rage. However, the tone is not one of criticism, but of awe at its power. He also highlights the insignificance of man compared to such strength, with the personification serving to blur the line between nature and humanity, as all are helpless in the face of the wind. 

'To His Coy Mistress' by Andrew Marvell- Analysis

To His Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, Lady, were no crime.

We would sit down and think which way

To walk and pass our long love's day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges' side

Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the Flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires, and more slow;

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast;

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart;

For, Lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear

Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found,

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song: then worms shall try

That long preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust:

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour

Than languish in his slow-chapt power.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Andrew Marvell

Biography:

Andrew Marvell was an English metaphysical poet born in March 1621 in Winestead, Yorkshire, the son of a clergyman. Educated at the Hull Grammar School, he was accepted into Trinity College Cambridge in 1633, where he published his first poems, written in Latin and Greek, before receiving his BA in 1639. In the ensuing years, he is said to have travelled extensively in Europe, before becoming the tutor of Mary Fairfax, the daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax. At their Yorkshire residence, Nun Appleton House, he wrote many of his non-satirical poems, such as ‘Upon Appleton House’, as well as ‘To His Coy Mistress’.

            In 1653 he struck up a friendship with fellow poet, John Milton, and tutored Oliver Cromwell’s nephew, William Dutton, before being appointed Assistant Latin Secretary to the Council of State in 1657. In 1659, he was elected as MP for Hull, a post he retained until his death. During the final twenty years of his life, he participated in political activities and published political pamphlets and satires before his death in August 1678.

Analysis:

‘To His Coy Mistress’ takes the form of an eloquent appeal to a mistress, challenging her to succumb to the temptation of engaging in sexual activity. Using Horace’s ‘carpe diem’ as his main theme, Marvell argues that they should remember the fleeting nature of life, and seize the moment in all their youth to make love before they die.  ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is a metaphysical poem, embellished with some telling characteristics of such works, including wit and far-fetched, unique metaphors and similes. In this unconventional declaration of love, and proposition of sex, Marvell also meditates on the wider significance of the passing of time, and conveys a clear message that one should live for the present.

           

Marvell presents his argument logically in three separate verses. In the first stanza, he elaborates on a scenario that would exist if their love did not know the boundaries of time and space. He begins by introducing this idea in his first two lines: ‘Had we but world enough, and time/This coyness, lady, were no crime.’ He makes the point that they do not have unlimited time to wait for sex. Therefore, this woman’s coyness is verging on criminal. Using hyperbole and cunning flattery, and employing the conditional tense, Marvell then continues to depict the situation of limitless time. With such a luxury, he would court and pursue his mistress for eternity, beginning to love her ‘ten years before the Flood’. She could deny his affections until ‘the conversion of the Jews’, referring to Jesus’s return at the end of the world. These religious metaphors convey the infinite time scale Marvell wishes they possessed, but never can. He continues to toy with his mistress’s emotions, telling her that even physical separation and distance would not diminish his love. She could search for rubies by the Ganges, a glorified and exotic image that is juxtaposed with his placement by the Humber, dull and boring in comparison, where he does nothing but complain. This contrast is designed to inspire pity in the woman. An impression of the eternity for which Marvell yearns is conveyed by a series of time periods, each more extreme than the next, and showing the enormity of what he desires. He would spend ‘an hundred years’ alone just praising her eyes and forehead, ‘two hundred to adore each breast’, and dedicates ‘thirty thousand to the rest’. In one of the most striking and original comparisons of the poem, Marvell audaciously compares his love to a ‘vegetable’. Instead of choosing a safer simile, such as a rose, he chooses a vegetable to symbolise his emotions, which represents the natural, slow ripening of his love until it is ‘vaster than empires’, a line which is again adorned with exaggeration.

           

From the very beginning of the second verse, Marvell wrenches us back to reality, with the authorial pointer of ‘But’ hinting at the content of what is to follow. He talks of how he always hears ‘Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’: by personifying Time wielding this force, a sense of being hounded and pursued by the ticking tyrant of Time is created. His love growing ‘vaster than empires’ becomes ‘deserts of vast eternity’ stretching before them: a desolate, barren image. Appealing to his mistress’s vanity, he tells her that her ‘beauty shall no more be found’ in the ‘marble vault’ where she will lie once she is dead. Using gruesome and detailed imagery, Marvell warns her that worms will burrow into her until she is reduced to a skeleton, and offers her the choice between worms taking her virginity when she is a corpse, or experiencing the passion of sex with her lover now. He gently mocks her ‘quaint honour’: her antiquated, ridiculous hold on her virginity, and tells her that this will be of no consequence when she is dead, for she will ‘turn to dust’. He cleverly rhymes ‘dust’ with ‘lust’ to emphasise what a terrible fate it would be to go to the grave a virgin. The final couplet is wryly amusing and ironic, for Marvell speculates that ‘the grave’s a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace’. This is a humorous finish to a morbid verse, as he writes as though he possesses an element of doubt regarding the sexual activity of skeletons. It is impossible for them to love, and so his mistress should seize the opportunity to make love to him while she is still alive.

           

The final stanza combines his two previous arguments, and Marvell begins to pursue another angle with renewed vigour. Having flattered and terrified his lover, he seeks to inspire and infect her with his urgency: he employs ‘now’ three times in twice as many lines in an attempt to galvanise her into making love. In the passion of their youth, he encourages her to relent (‘thy willing soul transpires/At every pore with instant fires’) and goes on to conjure up an arresting simile, comparing them to ‘am’rous birds of prey’. This image is laden with contrast: ‘am’rous’ implies gentle love, but birds of prey are savage and cruel animals. This hints at his wild, desperate lust, and echoes lines from Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Lovesong’ such as ‘she bit him she gnawed him she sucked/She wanted him complete inside her’ and ‘their deep cries crawled over the floors/Like an animal dragging a great trap’. Furthermore, the spirit of Marvell’s poem is captured by another line in ‘Lovesong’: ‘he wanted all future to cease.’

Marvell boldly continues to challenge his lover to ‘devour’ time with him: if they make love, then they will be able to conquer time, instead of yielding to its ‘slow-chapp’d power’. This is an exhilarating notion, as the reader has previously been informed of humanity’s incapacity in the face of time. In a combination of pain and indulgence, Marvell tempts her to ‘tear our pleasures with rough strife’, a violent thought, reinforced with the use of the word ‘iron’ to describe the ‘gates of life’. In the conclusive couplet to his argument, Marvell uses the sun as an emblem of time, which is a fitting image as it is often used to indicate the time of day, and is constantly moving and changing position. He ends on a philosophical note: if they cannot make time stand still for them, then they can at least try to defy it without fear, in the comfort of their passionate love.

The stylistic three-stanza argument employed by Marvell presents his persuasive case logically and clearly. Rhyming couplets are used, creating a graceful lyricism. Assonance and alliteration are also present in the first verse, in lines such as ‘long love’s day’, designed to captivate the reader by the portrayal of an ideal universe. However, alliteration does not resurface until the final two lines: ‘our sun/Stand still’, making this final point more memorable. Although there is an obvious iambic tetrametre throughout the poem, Marvell uses punctuation to influence the rhythm and pace of the poem, and to match the content it describes. In the first verse, the short sentences are frequently interrupted by commas and colons, mirroring the slow romancing that he imagines, and creating a gently sensual rhythm. In the second verse, the rhythm subtly begins to speed up, until the climax of his thoughts is expressed in the final section. The words rush from him, reflecting his urgency, and the hurried rhythm alludes to the pressing situation.

            In my opinion, this poem is not only an appeal to a mistress to sleep with him, but an elaboration on the ephemeral nature of mortality, and a plea to seize the moment. Marvell deftly weaves solemn seriousness with ironically comical black humour. He aims to convince his lover that she should shed her inhibitions and make love to him by showing her repulsive images of death, for time literally flies (‘Time’s winged chariot’) and she can never experience passion once she is dead. This poem resonates with me, especially the final couplet: we underestimate how precious time is and take it for granted, naïve to the fact that there are many who desire only an extra day to live. We should live life to the full, and its alarming brevity should serve only to spur us on.