Student Question
Compare and contrast the structures and tones of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love".
Quick answer:
The speakers in both poems are trying to woo a beloved to quickly go to bed with them. However, while Marlowe's speaker uses an enticing tone to evoke the beauties and pleasures of the pastoral life that his beloved will experience if she runs off with him, Marvell's speaker uses hyperbole and anxious imagery to create a feeling of urgency.
The male speakers of both poems use fanciful scenarios to try to get their beloveds to "seize the day" and go to bed with them.
Marlowe paints a picture, by using imagery, to try to persuade his beloved to run off with him. He envisions the two of them living an idyllic life in nature, where it is ever warm and springlike. He promises her:
beds of Roses
He will give her "coral clasps and amber studs" if comes and lives with him in a pastoral setting, where shepherds will sing and dance for her every May morning. This is an enticing world in which it will never be winter and all will be joyous.
Marvell uses hyperbole (exaggeration) and fearful imagery to try to persuade his beloved to go to bed with him. He says that if he had the time and space,...
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he would spend it praising her. For example, were there time, he would spend a hundred years praising her eyes, and two hundred praising each breast. However, he reminds her that life is short, so they should seize the day.
He also uses anxiety-evoking images of worms crawling through her as she lies in the tomb after death, as well as his famous image of the chariot to urge her into bed:
at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near
Compare and contrast the structure and tone of Marvell's and Marlowe's carpe diem poems.
Both poems are indeed about carpe diem in the realm of love. The speakers of both are impetuous, impassioned lovers trying to persuade the object of their affections in wasting no time to belong to one another. Both are also written in iambic tetrameter, with four iambs per line, so their structures are similar too. However, while Marlowe's poem is joyous (some have argued too naive and earnest), Marvell's is more concerned with the passage of time and the need to appreciate youth while it lasts.
"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" is all about the physical pleasures the shepherd promises his love. He invokes images such as beds of roses and nature to entice the lover. The nature images are meant to suggest a pastoral setting which is separate from the bustle and stress of a city. He is promising simple pleasures and true love, and as a result, its tone is passionate and joyful.
"To His Coy Mistress" is the far more urgent poem, its tone one of haste and near-desperation. The poet stresses to his reluctant beloved that they will not be young forever. One of the poem's most haunting images is that of the tomb:
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
The poet wants his beloved to realize that time does not stop and that they must consummate their love while youth is still theirs. He invokes the threat of death as a way of persuading the beloved to make up her mind at once.