Читать реферат по английскому: "To His Coy Mistress Beneath The Romance" Страница 2

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Framing this urgency is an underlying fear, not of death itself because, as he says, “the grave’s a fine and private place,” but of a need for others to “embrace” and understand his artistic voice posthumously. He envisions with horror that his “echoing song” of ideas and words will simply “turn to dust” and “into ashes all my lust,” underscoring the fear that his ideas will perish if he can not fashion them into a timeless medium. Marvel relates the exigency of actually conquering his coquettish mistress and performing the act of writing, justifying his intention to end the process of lusting after the desired object- perhaps the attainment of consummate expression- in order to immortalize his soul through writing.

The third division reflects Marvel’s passionate, yet logical, confrontation with the petulant nature of his writing and demanding that it yield to his mastery. Although under ideal conditions, a writer can always spend more time wooing and courting his writing just as a admirer can endlessly praise his desired object, the constraint of time necessitate compromise. While Marvel acknowledges his “slow-chapped power,” he argues that one must relate what “thy willing soul transpires” before “our time devours.” If one considers the poem within a scientific context even, “the youthful hue” which “sits on thy skin like morning dew” takes on an ominous tone of times continuos and cyclical progression. Dew is the condensation of water, which occurs during the beginning of each day and is the temperature at which not enough energy exists in the air to promote evaporation. Perhaps Marvel is hinting at the relationship between man and his decreased state of energy with the progression of each day. Ultimately time ensures the cyclical will overcome the man, but he can affirm life by controlling the day through writing.

Writing becomes a courtship that involves hunter-like aggressiveness. Ideas sit “at every pore with instant fires,” but they must be captured “like amorous birds of prey” before the “instant fires are extinguished.” The hunting process becomes a metaphorical representation of the intellectual exercises sought by metaphysical writers. Poetry manifests the immortal soul because, although his body will eventually decay, his mistress, poetry, is free from “the iron gates of life,” creating the further subject/object distinction between the poet and his work. The hunter pleas with his writing to merge with his will so the earlier distinction between himself and his lover (writing) can unite in mutual achievement: “Let us roll all our strength, and all/ Our sweetness, up into one ball.” Marvel “will make him [time] run” and achieve victory over time when he is able to “stand still” and transform his ideas into a lasting form.

The sexual level of “To His Coy Mistress” is so apparent as to suggest that Marvel, a man who loved intellectual games, is advancing a more complex message. One of the hallmarks of metaphysical poets is the practice of metaphysical conceit, which is a figure of speech that employs unconventional and paradoxical images. Marvel engages in the challenging task of relating the struggles of a writer trying to direct his energy and ideas into a concrete format to the attempts of a lover trying to convince another to engage in sexual relations. The syllogistic framework of the poem seems to support the implausibility of such a relationship, but Marvel succeeds with his logical progression in formulating a unique perspective of a writer’s plight. By constantly shifting its pace, the poem redefines the conception of time, asking one to consider how an artist must control his medium within time’s constraints. The audience feels itself being gently introduced to the endless possibilities of the exploration of ideas just before entering a race against time to understand the frustration, fear and the ultimate explosion of excitement accompanying the writing experience. Marvel succeeds in validating the metaphysical tenets of prose, but only if the audience is clever enough to read beneath the romance.

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