I have never been very good at understanding poetry beyond what the words say, and I can tell there is something more being said with this poem. In the first stanza, he is talking about how he is infatuated with a woman, and he believes he will never stop feeling this way. He talks of how much time he would spend to know different parts of her body. In the second stanza he talks about how time is always against us and that his lady will die soon. In this section he says, "My echoing song: then worms shall try/That long preserved virginity," which makes me think that he has never slept with this woman. If he has never slept with her, why is she his mistress? I thought mistresses were to please men who didn't care to do so with their wives. Lovers. Am I wrong? Is he saying something else here? The third stanza makes it seem as though the first two were written to convince her to sleep with him. He says that they should "sport" while they are still young, and make time slow down.
It's a very strange poem. The unfamiliar style of it makes me think of Lewis Carrol's The Jabberwocky. Even though Marvell doesn't make up words, it seems as though he makes up his own idea of a sentence. I hope I learn more about what is going on in this poem tomorrow during the discussion.
1 comment:
Kim, check to see when the poem was written (it is not contemporary). It also uses reordered sentences structures to fit the rhyme scheme. And in Marvell's period a mistress was a person whom he served, to whom he was devoted (as in the courtly lover serving his mistress). "Lovers" were also simply people who loved each other. This poem is indeed, as you deduced, a seduction poem. How does Marvell's poem connect with the introduction to the anthology?
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