'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.

'Death of A Naturalist' by Seamus Heaney- Analysis

Death of A Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart

Of the townland; green and heavy headed

Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.

Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.

Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles

Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.

There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,

But best of all was the warm thick slobber

Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water

In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring

I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied

Specks to range on window-sills at home,

On shelves at school, and wait and watch until

The fattening dots burst into nimble-

Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how

The daddy frog was called a bullfrog

And how he croaked and how the mammy frog

Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was

Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too

For they were yellow in the sun and brown

In rain.

Then one hot day when fields were rank

With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs

Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges

To a coarse croaking that I had not heard

Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.

Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked

On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:

The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat

Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.

I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings

Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew

That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Seamus Heaney

Biography:

Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet born in 1939, and is the eldest of nine children. Growing up on a farm, a theme that permeates much of his work, his adolescence was blighted by the tragic death of his 4 year-old brother Christopher in a road accident. This is reflected in several of his poems, including the poignant ‘Mid-Term Break’. He also faced the issue of being a Catholic in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland. After graduating from Queen’s College, Belfast, with a First Class Honours degree in English Language and Literature, his poetry came to public attention with the publication of the critically acclaimed volume ‘Death of a Naturalist’ in 1966. By the end of 1979, he had published a further five volumes, and was appointed as the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University for five years. In 1995, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for ‘works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth’. After suffering a stroke in 2006, he published his twelfth collection, ‘Human Chain’ in 2010, and continues to work today.

Analysis:

‘Death of a Naturalist’ is both a description of Heaney’s experience with nature as a boy, and a metaphor for the loss of his childhood innocence, as he looks back wistfully at his youthful naivety. He is fascinated by the frogspawn and tadpoles of the flax-dam’, but becomes repulsed by a horde of croaking frogs in their maturity. It is similar to another of Heaney’s works, ‘Blackberry-Picking’ in subject and style, as both centre on the change in Heaney’s attitude to the natural world, scaling the heights of pleasure before a crucial mood-swing to plumb the depths of revulsion.

            The poem opens with a vivid, yet ambivalent description of a flax-dam that ‘festers in the heart of the townland’, much like a putrefying core would. He notes this, but is not disgusted by it, as he knows of the jewels of frogspawn that are concealed within. Using assonantal para-rhyme in the alliterative phrase ‘green and heavy headed flax had rotted there’, he harnesses their slow, substantial sounds to convey the decaying atmosphere. This is further enhanced by description of flax as being ‘weighted down by huge sods’, while the flax-dam is personified as it ‘sweltered in the punishing sun’.  Using pathetic fallacy to portray the sun, the poet imagines it as an oppressive, brutal ruler, and this authorial nudge hints at the negative mood swing that is to come. Appealing now to our sense of hearing, he employs striking auditory imagery such as the oxymoronic ‘gargled delicately’, before describing the bluebottles as weaving ‘a strong gauze of sound around the smell’. He achieves the effect of creating pleasant connotations of light, gentle fabric from a revolting source. The noise of the bluebottles is hazy anyway, but so intense is their presence at the flax dam that their dense sound has become embodied in a material.

            In a typical feature of Heaney’s narrative, he goes into character and adopts the voice of his boyhood self: a pure, untainted vessel, unaware of the monstrosities that are soon to corrupt his mind and alter his perception of nature. Beginning with the tinkling phrase ‘dragon-flies, spotted butterflies’, he captures the sense of wonder using childish expressions such as ‘best of all’. Heaney as a child imagines the frogspawn as ‘warm thick slobber’, the onomatopoeia subtly encapsulating the gelatinous texture of its subject. In two long, uninterrupted sentences, comprising unsophisticated clauses linked by ‘and’, he skilfully imitates his innocent enthusiasm, using enjambement to emphasize this. There is no description, only a simple, almost nostalgic recitation of his actions: he ‘would fill jampotfuls of the jellied specks’, before beginning to ‘wait and watch’ until at last, to his delight, the ‘fattening dots burst into nimble-swimming tadpoles’.

He relates how his teacher has taught them about the lifecycle of a frog, proudly demonstrating his knowledge about how the ‘daddy frog was called a bullfrog, and how he croaked’ (an premonition of what he will later experience) and how ‘the mammy frog laid hundreds of little eggs’, taking on the role of a keen naturalist. This awe is emphasised by the start of a new line for the word ‘frogspawn’, before an interest verging on scientific is expressed through the idea of forecasting the weather by the colours of frogs. However, the first section ends abruptly with the words ‘in rain’, indicating a forthcoming negative change.

            Even the opening word, ‘then’ signals a change in thought, an omen of what is to follow. The line ‘one hot day when fields were rank’ almost imitates the sound of marching footsteps, as we are introduced to the ‘angry frogs’ that have ‘invaded the flax-dam’. Throughout the remainder of the poem, a martial theme is apparent, demonstrated by ideas such as ‘poised like mud grenades’, ‘great slime kings’ and ‘gathered there for vengeance’: to Heaney, these animals appear like belligerent warlords, determined to retaliate over the earlier theft of their frogspawn. They have already conquered the air, which is ‘thick with a bass chorus’, a masculine threat contrasting both with Miss Walls’s gently portrayal of the frogs, and the gauze before. Using the striking simile, ‘their loose necks pulsed like sails’, he depicts their grotesque animation, showing to the reader how shockingly alive they appeared to him. In the concluding line, even the frogspawn itself is nightmarishly endowed in the imagination of the child. Previously, he had peacefully collected the frogspawn; now, he fears that if he dips his hand into the water, the ‘spawn would clutch it’: a monstrous image that must have served to terrify the young Heaney. Indeed, he then ‘sickened, turned, and ran’,  leaving the beasts behind. These lines echo ones from another of his poems, ‘An Advancement of Learning’ (‘my throat sickened so quickly that I turned down the path in a cold sweat’), which is also concerned with the less appealing side of nature, in this instance, rats.

            The reader sympathises with his disgust at the surprising scene that he is confronted by, and Heaney uses lavishly indelicate onomatopoeia such as the deliberately crude ‘cocked on sods’, and ‘slap and plop’, which are compared to ‘obscene threats’: to him, this assault on the flax-dam is both explicitly offensive and hideously nauseating. This is also indicated by his choice of words for the action and sound of their heads, which are described as ‘farting’, another rude, indecent comparison. There are also religious undertones, as the infestation of frogs appears almost to be a Biblical plague from the time of Moses.

            ‘Death of a Naturalist’ takes the form of two contrasting parts, set out in blank verse: the first section conveys his enchantment with nature; the second demonstrates his disillusionment, as he begins to see the frogs not as his playful allies, but as a menace. The previous security the poet feels changes into threat, mirroring the transition of the tadpoles into frogs, and his own self-development. The loss of innocence is a consequence of growing up, but mars a previously blissful existence, and ironically, it is the very abundance of nature that kills the budding naturalist within Heaney.

'Afterwards' by Thomas Hardy- Analysis

Afterwards

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,

And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,

'He was a man who used to notice such things'?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,

The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight

Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,

'To him this must have been a familiar sight.'

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,

When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,

One may say, 'He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,

But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.'

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,

Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees

Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,

'He was one who had an eye for such mysteries'?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom

And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,

Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,

'He hears it not now, but used to notice such things'?

Thomas Hardy

Biography:

Thomas Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton near Dorchester in 1840. Throughout his childhood, he developed a deep love of learning, and loved music, as well as showing as showing a great interest for nature and wildlife. He was encouraged to write poetry from a young age.

           

            He became an apprentice architect aged 16, and began to send poems to periodicals. Although his true affection was for poetry, he started to write novels in order to provide for himself financially. Some of his most well-known books include ‘Far From The Madding Crowd’, ‘Tess of the D’Ubervilles’, ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ and ‘The Return of the Native’, all set in a fictional Wessex, with imagined places representing real towns and areas: for example, Sherborne is known as Sherton Abbas.

           

            Most of his poetry was published in the last thirty years of his life. His oeuvre includes remorseful, tormented elegies for his dead wife, to whom he paid little attention while she was alive, but in whom he found a unique seam of inspiration after her death. Many of his poems are therefore saturated with longing and nostalgia, powerfully rendered by vivid imagery. Other frequent themes included the relationship between Man and Nature, the fickleness of Fate, and Time and Change. He died peacefully in January 1928, and his body was interred in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, while his heart was buried in Stinsford churchyard in his beloved county of Dorset.

Analysis:

In this economic poem of reflection, Hardy muses upon the transience of life, writing movingly on his own mortality. The very title alludes to his demise, although Hardy chooses never to use the word ‘Death’, instead replacing it with euphemisms such as ‘stilled at last’. Humbled by his impending death, Hardy fills the poem with melancholy and bittersweet imagery.

            In each of his five four-line stanzas, characterised by his flowing lyricism, Hardy considers his death at different times of the year, and imagines how he would wish to be remembered by his contemporaries. The poem opens with the personification of the Present closing its back gate (‘postern’) on his ‘tremulous stay’: his own death, and the use of the adjective ‘tremulous’ suggests the fleeting frailty of life. However, he imagines it as a gentle passing, and never mentions any notion of a violent death throughout the poem. He then proceeds to consider what his neighbours would think if he died in May. He represents May as butterfly, flapping its ‘glad green leaves like wings’, which are ‘delicate-filmed as new-spun silk’. The rhythm of ‘new-spun silk’ and smooth flow of ‘delicate-filmed’ are redolent of the content that they describe. Furthermore, ‘glad, green leaves’ has connotations of a verdant spring day, adding to the contrast between this fresh, new season, and Hardy’s death. Nature progresses without him, and he wonders whether his neighbours would comment on his vivid appreciation of the world.

            In the second verse, he imagines his death on a dusky autumnal evening. In an indication of his fondness for making up words, he uses the invented ‘dewfall-hawk’ as a bird that flies through the twilight (Hardy’s ‘dewfall-hawk’ represents a nightjar). The phrase ‘an eyelid’s soundless blink’, describing the bird’s flight, conveys a sense of mystical stillness and re-enforces the silence, as a blink makes no noise anyway, while the use of the metaphysical word ‘shades’ subtly expresses the different lights of the barren landscape. In the alliterative phrase, ‘wind-warped upland thorn’, Hardy suggests that the wind there has bent the bushes, and again concludes by considering what might be said of him. In many ways, this verse is reminiscent of another of Hardy’s poems, ‘A Darkling Thrush’. Both contain images of nature and bleak moors, refer to Hardy’s habit of walking along heathland, and ‘wind-warped upland thorn’ echoes lines such as ‘tangled bine-stems scored the sky’.

            In the third stanza, Hardy muses on the thoughts of his friends if he were to die at night. The evocative description ‘mothy and warm’ encapsulates a summer’s furry darkness exactly, and his death is again contrasted against a backdrop of vitality and energy. This is heightened when he describes a hedgehog’s crossing of the lawn: the animal ‘travels furtively’, the word ‘travels’ implying that it is a long journey, and ‘furtively’ indicating that it must be made under the cover of darkness, which hints at the hedgehog’s vulnerability. While he lives, Hardy is determined to help these ‘innocent creatures’, but in a regretful last line, he wonders if his neighbours will remember his deeds.

            In the penultimate verse, the reader is again introduced to the possibility of death at night, but Hardy is dealing with winter now. His friends are ‘watching the full-starred heavens’, and winter is personified as seeing these stars as well. By choosing the verb ‘rise’, a subtle indication of a thought rising like the moon is created.

            In the closing stanza of ‘Afterwards’, Hardy leaves the field of seasons and envisages his own funeral. The opening to the conclusion, ‘my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom’ is an effective auditory–image, and resonates strongly with the beginning of Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Graveyard’: ‘the curfew tolls the knell of parting day’. Once a breeze has briefly interrupted the ‘outrollings’ of his funeral bell, it continues, heard more loudly than before like a ‘new bell’s boom’. This alliterative phrase clearly conveys the sound of the ringing, and is again made to subtly juxtapose the death of Hardy with the rebirth and renewal of another thing.

            Each quatrain in the poem follows a clear A B A B rhyme pattern, but due to the unpredictable amount of syllables in each line, there is no rigid rhythm. A lyrical ambience is maintained throughout the poem, but Hardy, an unsurpassed master of rhythm, is not to be underestimated. The very absence of an obvious meter leads to the lines being stretched out, infusing the poem with a solemn, funereal mood. He uses alliteration effectively, such as ‘comes crossing’ and ‘glad green’, and employs several hyphenated adjectives: ‘delicate-filmed’, ‘full-starred’ and ‘wind-warped’. By narrating the poem from the first-person, he achieves a close intimacy with the reader.

            Hardy was a man imbued with nostalgia. This elegiac poem confirms my previous view of him as a ‘time-torn man’ (the apt description used by his biographer, Claire Tomalin), as he is again reflecting upon his death. To use his own words, ‘poetry is emotion caught in measure’, and he certainly captures this in ‘Afterwards’. However, in the face of his own demise, he expresses no wish for comfort, nor desire for immortality: only a hope that he will be remembered for his observation of the natural world. Hardy deeply regretted the passing of Time, and this is communicated in many of his poems. For example, in ‘The House of Hospitalities’, he commences with a richly positive vignette of his past, which is starkly contrasted to his depiction of his dark, lonely existence as an old man. In ‘Afterwards’, I hear this regretful, voice of longing again, and see death as a release from his sorrowful old age. This is confirmed by the closing lines of ‘The House of Hospitalities’, which read ‘I see forms of old friends talking, Who smile on me’. In this ethereal, bittersweet expression, we see that he has no living friends anymore, and so death to him may be liberating. It is certainly not a thing to fear, for in ‘Afterwards’, he never speaks with horror of his own death, instead choosing to muse calmly on it, as for him, it seems ‘a thing for weeping, that Now, not Then, held reign’.