[In the following essay, Miller analyzes similarities between Simic's poem “Cabbage,” Andrew Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress,” and John Donne's “The Flea.”]

Charles Simic's recent book Gods and Devils, itself a kind of Dantean parody, contains poems that displace a number of other literary myths. One poem, “Cabbage,” for example, comes nicely into focus when we see its subtle parody of two well-known seventeenth-century carpe diem love poems: Andrew Marvell's “To My Coy Mistress” and John Donne's “The Flea.”

The “mistress” of Simic's poem is about to “chop the head” of cabbage “in half,” just as the mistress in Donne's poem prepares to kill a flea. The cabbage is Simic's emblem for love, like Donne's conceit, but also brings to mind the “vegetable love” of Marvell's poem. Simic's narrator makes “her reconsider” just as Donne “stays” his mistress's hand, temporarily. Simic's poem reduces the rhetorical seduction, so elaborate in both Donne and Marvell, to only one line: “‘Cabbage symbolizes mysterious love.’” Simic's line, however, is still “a line,” and appropriately cavalier in its formal and hyperbolic tone and in its allusion to Charles Fourier, not exactly a cavalier lover, but a late-eighteenth-century French socialist. Yet Fourier is a fitting hero for Simic's late-twentieth-century cavalier, who wishes to impress upon a woman the mysteries of love and other “strange and wonderful things” still associated with the “mad” French. Of course, his language would be veiled in “romantic suggestiveness” rather than mock argumentation. In fact, Simic's contemporary lover trusts actions more than words, and his attempted seduction shifts quickly from the rhetorical to a physical attempt to seize the day (although with gentlemanly restraint): “Whereupon I kissed the back of her neck / Ever so gently.”

At the end, Simic's narrator cannot suggest (as Marvell's does) rolling “all our strength and all / Our sweetness into one ball. …” Nor does Simic's displaced cavalier “win the argument”; he will not have his way. The love emblem—the globe-like cabbage head—(like Donne's flea, with whose “blood of innocence” his mistress “purpled” her nail) is destroyed: “… she cut the cabbage in two / With a single stroke of her knife.” Again, actions speak louder than words in Simic's poem, and unlike Marvell's “coy” mistress or Donne's, who has the “tables” of the argument turned upon her, Simic's woman succeeds in whimsically cutting the dramatic moment short and exposing the real substance of the narrator's intentions.