Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”

Andrew Marvell’s speaker in “To His Coy Mistress” summons Petrarchan convention, a poetic approach originating in the fourteenth century in which a male lover uses exaggerated metaphors to appeal to his female beloved. Yet Marvell alludes to such excessive—and disempowering—pining only to challenge this tradition of unrequited love. Instead of respectful adulation, he offers lustful invitation; rather than anticipating refusal, he assumes sexual dominion over the eponymous “mistress.” The poem is as much a celebration of his rhetorical mastery as it is of his physical conquest. Through his verbal artistry, the speaker—perhaps a figure of the poet Marvell himself—manipulates his female subject, rendering her both as his idealized beloved and, eventually, as his vision of impending death. In the course of his invitation, he portrays her as alternately desirous and repulsive, but ultimately he identifies the female body itself as a loathsome symbol of human decay.

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