NON-AFRICAN POETRY Examine the theme of rejected love in Marvel's "To His Coy Mistress".

Answer Details

Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" is a metaphysical carpe diem poem in which the speaker urges a reluctant lady to yield to his love. The "rejection" in the poem is the mistress's coyness, her holding back of love, and the whole argument is the speaker's response to this rejection: a persuasive attempt to overcome it before time destroys them both.

The situation of rejected love

• The lady's coyness is a form of refusal. She delays and withholds, treating the speaker's desire as something to be resisted rather than returned.
• The speaker frames his entire argument around this reluctance, so the theme of rejected or postponed love drives the poem's three-part structure.

First movement: if there were endless time

• The speaker concedes that if time were infinite, her coyness would be "no crime." He would spend "a hundred years" praising her eyes and forehead, "two hundred to adore each breast."
• The exaggerated, hyperbolic imagery mockingly grants her wish for delay, showing that in an ideal world her rejection could be tolerated.

Second movement: the pressure of time and death

• The tone darkens: "But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near." Time is the enemy of love.
• The grim images of "deserts of vast eternity," the grave where "worms shall try / That long-preserved virginity," and beauty turning to dust warn that continued rejection leads only to loss. Love refused now is love destroyed by death.

Third movement: seize the day

• The speaker urges immediate union: "Now let us sport us while we may," and calls them to devour time "like amorous birds of prey."
• The energetic images of the "ball" of strength and "tearing pleasures through the iron gates of life" argue that active love can triumph over time even if it cannot stop it.

Conclusion. The theme of rejected love shapes the poem as a sustained argument against refusal. The mistress's coyness represents love denied or delayed, and the speaker answers it with wit, hyperbole and the sober reminder of death to persuade her that love postponed is love wasted. Marvell thus turns a lover's rejection into a brilliant meditation on time, desire and mortality.