Comparing Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress and Herrick’s To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Marriage is an important part of life of many modern societies. The institution of marriage was formed many centuries ago. While some of its aspects vary based on specific country or community, but the core is often the same – by contracting a marriage, both sides undertake specific commitments. Specifically, they promise to care about children that already exist or will appear in the family; or to be faithful to the partner. There is a serious problem with the second issue. Adultery is an event that was often mentioned by popular literature sources including the Bible. The poetry is not an exception. James Dickey and Anne Sexton focused on the topic in their poems “Adultery” and “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife” respectively. Authors described the theme from different points of view. Dickey highlights the considerable age of the practice and treats it as an inevitable evil. The adultery existed, exist and will continue to exist in the community. Sexton looks at the problem from the female point of view; her poem is written from the

Love can be whatever one makes it out to be. From basic science to a complex philosophical or mystical idea. A person’s own unique experiences with love make it a concept that is so widely perceived and interpreted. Throughout her piece, Selections from Love 2.0 Barbara Fredrickson tries to broaden her audience’s understanding to a new idea of love. Overall, she claims that love is a biological need. The claim that longevity and quality of life might have lots to do with not only ‘clean air and nutritious food’ but also ‘your supply of love’ are accurate to a certain extent. A constant supply of love is needed for a better quality of life but it is not necessarily needed to live a long life. If the claim is taken to be true, then a weak supply of love would result in a person just existing and not living life to their fullest or connecting to other human beings; therefore, they would be incomplete without it.

“‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all” (Miriam-Webster 253). This quote has been used for centuries as both persuasion in favor of loving and also as comfort in times of heartbreak and loss. However, is this statement completely true, or does it offer false hope to anguishing lovers? In fact, are the rules and costs of loving and being loved so great that in fact it is actually better to never have loved at all? When pondering these questions, one must first consider the rules of loving and being loved to determine the physical, emotional, and psychological costs they entail. In order to do so, one could use Andreas Capellanus’ The Art of Courtly Love as a guideline for the rules of love.

The Uncommon Idea of Love In “The Radical Idea of Marrying for Love” by Stephanie Coontz, a college professor, author, and historian on the subject of marriage, the history of marriage and the idea of love was discussed. Coontz covered marriage from many times periods and many countries, such as Greece, France, and Chinese. She also touched on the idea of love and marrying because of it. Her main idea was, “But only rarely in history has love been seen as the main reason for getting married” (4).

Love is perhaps one of the most contested issues in the world. No one has a precise definition of what love really should look or feel like. Most people have resorted to use their own experiences in love to effectively derive its true meaning. Through these experiences, philosophers have argued that the definition of love varies greatly depending on whether it was given by a man or a woman. This is however not the case. As proven by the narratives of Beauvoir and Sartre, the definitions of love derived from the experiences of both men and women are quite similar. Consequentially, Beauvoir’s account of the woman in love sheds important light on Sartre’s conflicting thought about love. By first highlighting the concepts of love as stated by Beauvoir, this text seeks to establish how Beauvoir’s account of love lays a vital foundation for Sartre’s.

The poem, “sex without love” by Sharon Olds portrays the issues in the society today. Casual sex is on the rise and Olds is puzzled how one can have sex without loving the other partner. She states, “How do they do it, the ones who make love without sex?” (Line 1). She, however, describes sex with beautiful imagery of dancers, making it appealing but the eventual feeling of loneliness is inevitable. Olds choice of words, imagery, and symbolism throughout her texts is contrasting; sex without love is possible but is exemplified as a selfish empty act if love is absent.

Keep, likewise, mine! There are none in this land that know me. Breathe not to any human soul that thou didst ever call me husband!” (Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter 73) and according to the bible, “...whosoever shall put away his wife, saving for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adultery: and

Herrick was born on August 1591. In his life spam he had seen the English Civil War. It was fought between the Royalists who supported Charles I and the Roundheads that supported the Parliament. Herrick was a Christian priest for the reason that he tells women to get married. “Then be not coy, but use your time And while ye may, go marry” (Herrick). Ketteler explains,“It’s no coincidence that Herrick served as a parish priest”(Ketteler 334). He tells young women to go marry which signifies that he was a priest. He wants women to get married at a young age because everyday that passes you are getting a day older so, marry while you are young before it's too late to get married. Perkins also says. “He urges them to marry before they lose their virginity” (Perkins 237). Herrick believes in not having sex until marriage which, signifies that he was religious. Herrick mentions “heaven” in the poem which proves that he was religious and beliefs in the after-life. Herrick become known for his poetry and his work was recognized by King Charles I. In His Poetry, he uses the theme of carpe diem which consists of the topics such as: life is short, youth is a short period of time, and beauty fades. Carpe diem is the concept of living life in the moment and to not think much of what is to come in the future. The message is to not waste your time thinking about what your going to do later on in your lifetime but to rather act upon your life in the present.

Love can do crazy things to many individuals; making them crazy or mad, dying from a possible broken heart, or even killing themselves or someone else. During the Middle Ages, love was termed as chivalry or noble love, and then romantic love in the Nineteenth Century of Romanticism. I will discover and show how it changed during the periods of literature with the materials we have studied in this class.

In this paper I will compare the approach to marriage in the works “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer and “The Flea” by John Donne; in both cases it is a means to an end: in the first the old woman wants to get “the thing that most of all Women desire” and in the second the lover seeks “How little which his lover (thou) deniest him (me)” and uses an allusion to marriage to achieve this.

Sex and lust have changed greatly over time, especially since the late 1600s. In the poem, “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell the relationship between sex and time is rather passionate, but shifts as Marvell metaphorically describes time. The horrifying tone put on the metaphors, allusions, and the hyperboles play an important role in the understanding of Marvell’s meaning on sex and lust of the speaker’s lady over time. The idea that each sex act shortened someone’s life has come a long way. On the other hand it is believed that the message Marvell was trying to address was how the cold lady threatened the speakers love for her. Another idea is that the poem is based on death, and how everything will one day die, rather than the passionate approach. I will prove how these 2 ideas are wrong.

It was not in fashion to write poems to one’s wife. It could even be debated whether love could ever have a place in marriage; the typical situation in which a ‘courtly lover’ found himself was to be plunged in a secret, an illicit, and even an adulterous passion for some seemingly unattainable and pedestalized lady… the most beautiful of absolute disasters, an agony as much desired as bemoaned … This was not in theory the attitude of a husband to his wife. It was for a husband to command, for a wife to obey (12).

One of the poem’s main premises as to why having sex is superior to making love is that the participants are not giving in to a “false Messiah” (15). People who claim to be in love or fawn over their sexual partners are missing the true point of the intimate act. The notion of a false Messiah, which is love and affection, argues that love is not a true savior for people, and it is more of an imposter of happiness. The poem states that when people extract love from the act of sex, each person does not mistakenly love the mediator of satisfaction, but instead focus on praising the true “God”. If one spends so much time admiring a person, he or she will ultimately be disappointed or lose time with the real goal of sex. In the words of the poem, to be attached to the person one is having sex with would mean to “mistake the lover for their own pleasure” (17). He or she would then fail in their endeavors to reach true satisfaction.

love” makes evident Chaucer’s skewed views of love and marriage with underlying tones of misogyny. He expresses these views throughout the work, however, the theme of love and sex is most evident in the sub-stories of The Wife of Bath and The Miller’s Tale.

“The minister’s son in his conceited impotence violates Tess more cruelly than her sensual lover” Discuss.