NON-AFRICAN POETRY Discuss in detail, three images employed in "To His Coy Mistress"?

Answer Details

Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress is a witty seduction poem whose argument is carried by a series of powerful images. The speaker urges his hesitant beloved to yield to love now, and he builds his case through vivid pictures of vast time, of death and decay, and of energetic passion. Three of these images are especially memorable.

1. The image of boundless time and space. In the opening movement the speaker imagines what their courtship could be if only they had "world enough, and time". He pictures himself loving her by the exotic Ganges while she refuses by the English Humber, and declares that his "vegetable love" would grow "vaster than empires and more slow", praising her for hundreds and even thousands of years. This hyperbolic image of endless, slowly ripening love flatters the mistress while gently mocking the leisurely pace her coyness would demand. It establishes the ideal against which the harsh reality of the second movement will strike.

2. The image of time as a pursuing chariot and of the grave. The mood darkens with the famous lines that at his back he "always hear[s] time's winged chariot hurrying near", while before him stretch the "deserts of vast eternity". Time is personified as a relentless charioteer, and eternity as an empty, lifeless desert. This is followed by a chilling picture of the tomb: her beauty will be lost, worms will "try" her long-preserved virginity, her "quaint honour" will "turn to dust", and his desire to "ashes". These grim images of death and physical decay press the argument that beauty and chastity are worthless once life is over, and so urge immediate love.

3. The image of vigorous, devouring passion. The final movement bursts with images of energy. The lovers are urged to behave like "amorous birds of prey" that "devour" time rather than languish in its "slow-chapped power". They should roll all their "strength" and "sweetness up into one ball" and tear their pleasures "with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life". These violent, athletic images of seizing and consuming life turn love-making into a triumphant act of defiance against time, and they close the poem with a surge of passionate urgency.

Conclusion. Marvell moves his argument from flattering vastness, through the terror of death, to fierce action. The three images, of limitless time, of the pursuing chariot and the grave, and of devouring passion, together dramatise the poem's carpe diem theme: because time is short and death certain, the lovers must seize their pleasure now.