Sunday, October 10, 2010

To His Coy Mistress: one line

The couplet that stands out most from the text is "Now, therefore while the youthful hue//Sits on thy skin like morning dew." This is the transition from Marvell's convincing (or lying from my point of view) phase in the poem to the urging phase in the poem. It marks the end of the fear-mongering stanza and the beginning of the plan-of-action stanza. Marvell personifies "hue" and compares it to "dew", implying that she will only be young and beautiful for a fleeting moment. It's hard to take Marvell serious in these lines because of the fact that a lifetime is a long time and his urging to take advantage of the moment seems both immoral and misleading to a reader from this time period at least. Marvell creates fantastic poetry, but not a convincing argument.

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