Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

¶ … Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot. Specifically, it will examine the approaches to love and courtship in the poems. Both these poems discuss love and but in very different ways. Marvell's work is incredibly romantic and loving, while Eliot's work is darker and more difficult to understand. Clearly, love means very different things to these two poets, and that is why they approach it with such diverse results.

Reading these poems helps show that while a theme can be universal, how a poet writes about it can be very personal and unique. Love and courtship are very common themes in poetry, and these two poems show just how differently two poets can view the same subject. Marvell's poem is lush and romantic, and everything most people would think of when they think of a romantic poem about love and courtship.

He writes, "My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow; / An hundred years should go to praise / Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze; / Two hundred to adore each breast, / But thirty thousand to the rest;" (Marvell). In contrast, Eliot's verse is about a man nearing the end of his life, and there seems little romantic or lovely about it. He looks back on his life, what it all meant and tries to make sense of it.

However, there are some memories of love and women he has loved. Eliot writes, "And I have known the arms already, known them all -- / Arms that are braceleted and white and bare / [But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!] / It is perfume from a dress / That makes me so digress? / Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl" (Eliot). He remembers the women in his life fondly, and he remembers their perfume, their graceful arms, and their actions.

He is a man looking back with sentimental fondness on the women he knew and loved, while Marvell's poem shows a man who is not looking back at all, but is right in the middle of falling in love with his "coy mistress." That is perhaps the biggest difference between these two poems.

One is about a man who has loved and knows the joys and pain of love, while the other is about a man who is right in the middle of love, and is only experiencing the joy and the wonder it brings, especially when it is new and exciting. It is clear the two men in the poems have quite different approaches to love and courtship too.

Marvel's characters is impetuous and eager to explore his mistress and their love before they die, while Eliot's character is much more relaxed and at home with his love. He speaks of waking up next to his love in the afternoon. Eliot writes, "And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! / Smoothed by long fingers, / Asleep.. tired.. Or it malingers, / Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. / Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, / Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?" (Eliot).

However, there is always something dark and mysterious lingering under the surface in Eliot's poem, and it seems to get in the way of any enjoyment the character has for love and for his life. This darkness is the poem is the suggestion of death, which Eliot's character contemplates throughout the poem. In fact, the last lines of the poem refer to death.

Eliot writes, "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown" (Eliot). Eliot's character knows his life is ending, and love and courtship are far behind him. Marvell's character also contemplates death. Marvell writes, "Time's winged chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie / Deserts of vast eternity.

/ 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" (Marvell). However, his idea of death seems removed and far away, while Eliot's is much closer and far more real. Both men realize their own mortality and know they will not live forever, but they approach it differently.

Marvell uses it, as a younger man would, to try to get his mistress into bed, while Eliot uses it as a means to look back on a life and the loves of that life. The poems actually contain similar messages, but they convey those messages in very different ways. Reading these two poems together is helpful because they show that different poets can handle the same theme in very different ways. Love seems like a universal theme in poetry, music, and literature.

No one has the same experiences in love as another person, and so, every person's outlook.