Marvell’s poem To His Coy Mistressy Mistress
- “Had but world enough, and time…”
What would the speaker do?
Ans:
In Marvell’s poem To His Coy Mistress, the speaker argues that had they
had enough time and space at their disposal, they could wait for each other.
The lady could look for rubies by the river Ganges in India and the lover could sit and complain by
the river Humber in England.
He would have loved her from before the great biblical Deluge and she could go
on refusing him until the conversion of the Jews.
- How does the speaker propose to praise the beauty of the beloved, had he had enough time and space?
Ans:
In Marvell’s poem To His Coy Mistress, the speaker argues that had they
had enough time and space at their disposal, he would not insist on the
consummation of their love. Instead, he would spend a hundred year in praising
her eyes and gazing on her forehead. He would allot two hundred years for
adoring each of her breasts, and thirty thousand years for the rest of the
body. He declares that he would devote at least an age for each of her organs.
In that case, he would expect her to reveal her heart just before the end of
the world.
- Comment on the expression “vegetable love”.
Ans:
In Marvell’s time the phrase “vegetable love” was a philosophical term. Its context
was the Aristotelian doctrine of the three souls: the rational which in man
subsumes the other two; the sensitive which men and animals have in common; and
finally the lowest of the three vegetable souls, which is the only one that
plants possess, and which is the principle of generation and corruption or
augmentation and decay. Like ideal love, the first property of vegetables was
growth. The speaker means that, if he had thirty thousand years and more, his
love, denied the exercise of the senses but possessing the power of
augmentation, would increase vaster than empires—though like some trees slower
than empire to grow.
- “…I would
Love you ten years before the Flood”
What
incident does the speaker refer to here?
Ans:
The speaker here refers to the Great Deluge that destroyed the world soon after
the Creation and the Fall of man.
- Why does the speaker use the expression “till the conversion of the Jews”?
Ans:
It was a popular conception that the Jews would never be converted into
Christianity. The speaker in Marvell’s poem refers mockingly to the popular
notion of the impossibility of the Jews into Christianity as an impossible
event. But it should be remembered that it was believed also that the Jews
would be converted in 1656.
- What is meant by the phrase “iron gates of life”?
Ans:
Marvell has used the phrase philosophically. He follows the Neo-Platonic notion
which sees the body as the prison of life. In order to realize the true nature
of life and love, one must rise above the condition dictated by the physicality
of human beings. Marvell implies, following Plato, that in order to reach and
realize the spiritual one must proceed through the body.
- “Let us roll all our strength, and all,
Our sweetness, up into one Ball.”
What does the poet mean by the lines?
Ans:
The ‘Ball’ here refers to the cannon-ball, which was used for crushing through
the gates of a besieged city. During the Renaissance period the “fired cannon
ball” symbolized wisdom or prudence—wisdom, especially of the kind that
suggests a freedom from the operation of transient natural form. But for that
freedom, concentration of energy, that is, spiritual energy, like the gun
powder in the case of a cannon ball, is necessary in order to go outside the
influence of operation of time. In pleading to the mistress to be constituted
as a ball and fired, the speaker hints on the surface at a usual sexual
consummation of their love, but this really implies the harnessing of spiritual
energy in order to defy time.
- “Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.” What is the meaning of
these lines?
Ans: Here the poet
has transformed the conjoined ‘Ball’ into the sun of their own. Literally it
means what remains of his and his beloved’s time in this world. Consistent with
the Platonic form of the poem, Marvell is thinking of harnessing the spiritual
potential in order to give to it a meaningful release at a proper time. The
defiance is not in the fact that the functional property of time has been
retarded, but in the fact, which is more insulting to time’s capacity. The
lovers will make the sun run with more speed, but the passage of days achieved
by this will not have its effect on the permanence, which the prudent lovers
will have in their possessio
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