To His Coy Mistress (Masterplots, Revised Second Edition)

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In “To His Coy Mistress,” his most famous poem, Andrew Marvell follows many of the conventions of the carpe diem (Latin for “seize the day”) theme in poetry. This type of poem dates from ancient times and was made popular in English in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by such writers as Sir Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe, and Robert Herrick. In such poems, typically, the speaker is an eager male lover lamenting the brevity of life in order to persuade his female listener to yield to his sexual advances. Thus a carpe...

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