To His Coy Mistress Essay: The Carpe Diem Motif -- His Coy Mistress Es

The Carpe Diem Motif in To His Coy Mistress   Seize the day. For cavalier poets, there seemed to be little else they found nearly as interesting write about than the carpe diem concept. The form of carpe diem poetry is generally consistent, almost to the point of being predictable. Though Andrew Marvell worked with the said(prenominal) concepts, his modifications to them were well-considered. In To His Coy Mistress, Marvell makes use of allusion, metaphor, and gallant imagery in order to convey a mood of majestic endurance and innovatively explicate the carpe diem motif.   Previous carpe diem poems (such as those written by Robert Herrick at the same time period) often took an apostrophic form and style which stressed the temporality of early days. The logical extension was to urge the recipient of the poem to take advantage of that youth to further her relationship with the narrator. They were often dark and melancholy in theme, underneath a light exterior of euphony an d springtime images (perhaps to urge consideration of the wintertime to come).   Marvell chooses not to employ many of these techniques in the opening of To His Coy Mistress. Instead, his images and tools stress how he wishes his love to be- tranquil and drawn out. Rather than beginning with a digest on the concept of death, he opens the poem with the lines, Had we but world enough, and time / This coyness, lady, were no crime (ll. 1-2) He will later take on the harness of the carpe diem poem, but his focus will then be on the grandeur and passion of love, rather than its instability.   To begin to slow the passage of time in his poem, Marvell makes quote to past and future events on a grand scale. His allusions to religious scriptur... ...it becomes easy to say death is coming, so we should love without any particular impact hobo the thought. Now, by contrasting the alternative to love caught in time, Marvell demonifies time to be a tyrant, slowly killing us all. He then states that an escape from and order of fighting against time is to love with a passion and defy his aging effect (ll. 40-46).   By rethinking the carpe diem theme, Andrew Marvell makes his point more effectively than many other poets works with the same ideas. Using the methods described above, he makes the ideal scene of timelessness more concrete, so that when it is swept away the alternative seems all the more excite and imperative. In this way he recreates a feature of real life- death is imperative, but trivialities can often make it seem distant. Invariably, however, it will greet us all.