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Analysis Of Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress

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Love or Lust? Poets are famous for their sweet love poems, or better yet lust poems. Poetry has a way of making even the worst stories sound lovely. The way the words roll off your tongue can fool even the smartest off readers. The hidden meanings are buried within the literary devices that poets use. In Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” there are plenty of hidden messages buried in the literary devices, but before we start digging in the lines of the poem let us think about what is going on in the poem to be able to fully understand the meaning.
The poem is about a man trying to sway a woman into having a sexual relationship with him. The poet also does not give the reader a specific time in history that the poem is taking …show more content…

The “conversion of the Jews” is a hyperbole that reflects his endless live for his mistress. He uses these allusions to the biblical times to express his feelings to his mistress. The speaker uses the idea of time to describe how much time she deserves to be adored by saying: An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and thy forehead gaze,
Two hundred years for each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest.
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart. (Marvell 13-18).
He uses a hyperbole here because he knows that it is not possible for a person to live for thousands of years. After telling his mistress that if time was endless he would use all of it to adore her he converts the pleading into an expression of how time is not endless and how their time will eventually run out. Then at the end of his pleading he asks to live in the moment and make me best of what time they have left by sleeping together. Now, let us dig deeper into the poem by uncovering the tone of the poem, better yet the tones.
In “To His Coy Mistress” the tone seems to change. In the beginning the tone is romantic with a hint of sarcasm behind it. The speaker is describing how long he will love this woman by describing through thousands of years. Even though he knows that they will not have thousands of years, this is where the sarcasm comes into play. In the second part of the poem the speaker’s tone turns into a rushed tone. The speaker

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