“To His Coy Mistress” Pt. 4

Transcript: 5.05 Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” Pt. 4

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Key Terms:

• polysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More / manyness
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Part Four

 

Marvell as Sculpture

We’re in a bit of a negotiation now, you and me. Somehow I want to satisfy you that I’ve offered a thorough overview (true, just an overview) of Marvell’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress.” But to get there, we still have a great deal in front of us. 

As much as we’ve discussed, from philosophy to sexism to ancient and poetical England history, from close readings of images to broader takes on levels of ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More, some of the most significant questions are still before us. 

• We need to ask questions about how this polysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More thing works, this “many meanings at once” thing, and what good that does us, if any.
• We need to dig far more into the male psyche which produced the speaker of this poem and its author
• We also need to circle back to our Mistress, the target–or object–of the poem, to see how we might better understand her as receiver of the speaker’s message.
• But for that matter, we also need to wonder if the poem is actually for her. And if it isn’t, who is it for?  
• And that will leave us with that question I posed some time ago: what are we expected to do with a poem like this? And should we?

I already know that in some ways I will fail you today. I don’t stand a prayer of accomplishing this, of nailing down some take-aways for you. Which is kind of odd, considering that I myself taught this poem to my students for several years: so what did I give them in fewer class minutes than you and I have already spent together with it?

Yes, this is a negotiation. For as much as we’ve already explored, I’m betting you feel much as I do, in some state of confusion, of indeterminacy. What are we concluding here? So, I’m going to risk making some kind of promise: before we’re done today, I will offer you some kind of conclusion, some sense of closure for us. But I have to warn you ahead of time: I’m only doing it for our–that’s for you and for me–for our sense of well-being. 

But I also have to make an admission with that promise: We stand no chance here at all of saying all that could be said of these, well, 40-odd lines of poetry. 

Picture the poem for a moment as a sculpture, perhaps of Marvell himself. I kind of like that idea, yeah. Picture Andrew Marvell as a statue, a sculpted poet, forever held on this single pedestal. This statue, we’ll say, is Andrew Marvell, but it is also the poem before us. To appreciate any sculpture, we might stand and examine it, but ultimately, you know, we’d have to walk around it, wouldn’t we? Look at it from different angles? Once or twice, assuming that there are no guide ropes or museum guards preventing us, we’d step up and look at a detail more closely, wonder at how the feat of a crease in a robe or bend of elbow was accomplished. But ultimately, we’d step back again, admiring that detail now in the wholeness of the sculpture, but also looking at the shadows and light as they play upon its textures. That may even, if we thought much about it, cause us to wonder at the lighting that is provided our statue, the time of day if it’s a window, the placement of the figure against other artworks around it. 

Notice something about our behavior now. Every time we turn our attention to something different–the lighting, the fold, the angle demanded of the pedestal, the perspective from the side rather than the front–every time we consider this, we are blinded a bit to the rest. I can’t see the heel of his lifted boot when I approach him from the front; I can’t see the condescension in the eyes from the back. I can’t see the surfaces turned to the ceiling at all. 

Now suppose we conducted this exercise today, but then again we came to look at it next winter. Would we have the same experience? Suppose we came at age 15 and again at age 35, then again at 65? Suppose that at some point in those intervening years the artwork positioned around the sculpture had also changed. Suppose once that you are viewing the sculpture alone but then later you are with a group admiring it. Which group? (Hopefully not that guy over there coughing all the time.) 

You get it, yeah? The meaning of the work is in the work, says T. S. Eliot. He didn’t want to consider all of these other external factors–reader, context, author history–partly because they threatened what he considered an objective reading of the poem’s greatness. Eliot was more thorough than most critics, but he considered only this singular approach. We have a harder time doing that, don’t we? We want to get the whole picture, not miss a clue which might reveal. Oh, and one more variation while we’re at it: let’s not forget that what we are observing in our sculpture is not actually Andrew Marvell, of course, but one artist’s vision of him made forever stone, forever locked in place. 

You and I, looking at this sculpture, can barely stand still while we try to take it all in. What makes us think that the poem and poet are standing still, then?

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and today’s a bit of a long one: we’re doubling down on uncertainty and working to wrap up our talk on Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.”

Manyness (PolysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More)

Above our sculpture of Andrew Marvell is a banner; critic Donald Hall says it reads “Both at Once.” In our scene, I have actually climbed on a ladder and spraypainted over the word ‘both’ to replace it with “All,” “All at Once.” Hall was writing largely of Marvell’s politics and ironies: Was he sincere or sarcastic in that speech about the Royalist minister of parliament last week? Both at once. 

But my take upon the poem is that new lines of sight offer new combinations, new connections. And each time we approach a great poem, we automatically approach with a new line of sight. I can pretty much guarantee that if you had read Marvell’s poem before listening to me, you could not help but read it again with some slightly new angle on it, perhaps a new question. But my point today, too, is that by making our metaphorical sculpture both poet and poem, we also recognize that literature can (and maybe should?) mirror the complexity of humanity. 

It sometimes disheartened me when my students would finally ask, “Well, yes, but what exactly does it mean?” and expect me to offer them an interpretation that would satisfy the multiple choice test. As if I could sum each of them up with an answer like, “C. You’re a 16 year old with 71% idealist tendencies and a retro penchant for Dragon Ball Z.” I was disheartened when they asked, but I was not at all surprised. After all, that’s always been the nature of schooling and testing, of employment promotions and horoscopes. If I wasn’t going to give them an answer, well then, they’d just go look it up online. 

Such is our resistance to polysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More, the idea that a poem can and will have multiple meanings at once, even contradictory ones, and that this is as it should be. Now, I don’t mean by this many different interpretations offered by different people. That happens, too, but this can sometimes be explained by those different angles on the sculpture: you’re not wrong, but you’re maybe missing some key pieces that would show you something different. That statue’s eyes say one thing, but the crook of a smile seems to say something else, and that bend in the knee suggests the smile is less assured than it seems. I’m talking about that “All at Once” banner. PolysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More, this “manyness,” is us, is human, is my unwillingness to go out with my friends one night and my regret that I don’t get out more the next morning. Hypocrisy? Contradictory? Of course. But that’s who we are. We carry jumbles of contradictory nonsense in us. 

What I believe is most significant about art in this way–and now suddenly I’m speaking of all art, from music to literature to sculpture to dance and to sand painting and clean tagging–what is most significant is that, when a quick motivational poster or handy aphorism doesn’t quite cut it–think “Just Hang In There” or “You are Enough”–When those things don’t quite satisfy, real art: honest, difficult, contradictory, disquieting, tactile, dynamic, intelligent and human, does the job. 

So we could talk about the meaning of “To His Coy Mistress” as a sort of closed inquiry: “Give us the final answer.” And the moment we do that, we walk away, move on to the next thing on our To Do List, but it would be a lie, a reduction of art to a “To Do” list, a task to complete, no different from this quarter’s progress report or the meme which captured this moment’s political opinion. A snap judgment or final conclusion of a poet or a poem is a lie. 

Well, I’ve strayed a bit from polysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More, but not too far. The pragmatism of closed interpretations of poetry is clear enough. My students, after all, had a biology class in 40 minutes; they needed to wrap this up. Does Marvell believe in EpicureanA philosophy of simple and sensual pleasure as a goal of lif... More carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More or not? Yes or no? Is he forwarding, ironically, a Christian message of virtue and afterlife? Is he frustrated, even desperate, to thwart them both? Does that answer change when you read the poem later?  I still remember the young male, his name was Adam, who one year mocked Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man through the better part of eight weeks, calling the black protagonist a whiner. More, though, I remember him tracking me down about six years later, now emerging into his own career, to tell me that he was personally living the experiences of that novel. 

Is the meaning of the work in the text or in the reader, then? 

And was the poem written when Marvell was fairly secluded in a garden of Appleton House or when he was emerging into politics to play parliament with the boys? When he was 20 years old or 37? When he was still sympathetic to the Royalists or when he began tutoring Cromwell’s son?

Is the meaning of the work in the text or with the author? And if we asked Marvell at the time if he knew the “total” meaning of the work, could even he tell us?

Neither of these are questions for today alone, of course. But I do want to turn to these two issues in more earnest. Not the larger historical context, the painting of wars and plagues around Marvell’s world, but what we might learn from the people themselves, the dynamic between the speaker and his audience.

Constructed Speakers and Constructed Authors

We’ve already made a clear connection–that ironic distance thing, between author and speaker. That is, we know fairly confidently that Andrew Marvell is quite separate from the dude attempting the seduction in the poem. Said dude is fairly gross, perhaps a bit obsessed with death, employs every cliche of the carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More Cavalier poets of the day (but poorly), and is completely illogical in his belligerent urgency to take advantage of this younger woman. Marvell, meanwhile, has created a satirical scene in these exaggerated lines, and so is making fun of all these topics even while posing a fairly complex philosophical question about time, mortality, and even Christian faith. All this we’ve already accomplished.

I’d like to go a bit further still, now, this time examining a bit more the exact problems of our speaker, the dynamics of the poem here with our silent coy Lady, and then broaden, slide over to his nibs the author.

Failed Seductions

We have to wonder, don’t we, what this klutz of a seducer hopes to accomplish. And I’d like to suppose one of two scenarios. Either one, he has no intention of seducing her at all but is about to take her sexually regardless of her answer, this poem being simply the pro-forma excuse, the expected tradition of courtly poetry that he is barely giving lip service to. Frankly, I find this interpretation unenlightening and unlikely. Marvell has no need at all to offer us the poem in this way, if the scene he is creating is actually an empty prelude to rape. 

The other choice, though, suggests something more interesting. It supposes that the woman, the coy mistress, has the right to say “No” and that this answer will be respected. It’s true that the power dynamics of a speaker who is likely older, more educated, perhaps even politically well-connected, and male, make her refusal quite difficult. In this sense, maybe he is only forming a terrible seduction poem to test just how ludicrous he can be and see if his privilege will let him get away with it. It’s more a game to him than an actual seduction.

Still, the point remains: She can say “No,” and he will move on, at least for now. We’ll speak more of our lady in a moment, but it’s the speaker I’m interested in. If he understands that she might refuse, why offer such a morbid poem of lewd suggestion? 

Wouldn’t this strategy more likely get him a refusal? This means that he is either really really stupid, or he expects to be refused. How clever can he be, after all, when he tells her to cast aside her virtue while reminding her of death, judgment, heaven, and hell? 

The fact is, failed logic and grotesque imagery are more likely to get him a failed seduction. The possibility is, he doesn’t actually expect to–or even want to–succeed. Remember how he approaches it: he begins with a more idyllic and subtle kind of voyeurism, looking at her “parts” for years and centuries. But soon afterwards, he moves on to innuendo, vaults and worms and basically necrophilia. Since this is not yet bad enough, he finally moves openly to aggressiveness: those moist secret dream gardens in the first stanza are now “youthful hues” and “instant pores” of desire; the poem begins in private spaces and then demands open, public, wanton behavior. Yes, it’s true that boys and men have been issuing the Nike slogan of “Just do it” forever, and in a wide range of subtlety and vulgarity. But these lines are absurdly repulsive. 

Why would he want to fail? He’s obviously clever enough–just look at all those wonderful turns of philosophical imagery–he’s clever enough to accomplish a better poem for her. He has desire, but seeks to evade, to avoid success. To assist us some, I’m going to hop over to Marvell’s poem “The Definition of Love,” where he writes in part,

“My love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis for object strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.”

“Despair upon impossibility.” For Marvell, does this greatest love come from despair? From a DESIRE for love more than a SUCCESS at love, from a desire which can never be realized, impossible? Once consummated, of course, it becomes, perhaps something else entirely, something like the chomping “birds of prey” in the final stanza. (Sidebar: In his poem “The Unfortunate Lover,” Marvell also has birds which eat him, and he links that desire to despair again.) But if that desire is never fulfilled, it cannot either be tainted. Now let’s be clear, we’re not talking about Platonic love here, something Marvell quite understood. He’s talking about outright desire, romantic and sexual, which is thwarted. Therefore, in order to attain this perfect love, he must desire, but he must not win. He says as much in the poem, doesn’t he? “You shall refuse until the conversion of the Jews.” Forever. As Geoff Boucher writes, “To His Coy Mistress” isn’t a rose of a love poem at all, but a skull. 

Susceptible to desire, yet unable or unwilling to act, like a perverse Hamlet. This is a bit of a twisted psychology, if so, isn’t it? The guy has some serious issues, perhaps with love, perhaps with women. Our speaker, obsessed with youth and innocence (after all, he could have chosen a woman of more experience), obsessed with the brazen violation of that youth and innocence, is at the same time ready–even by design–to see himself rejected. And so he can escape responsibility, accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More, for any such sin, all while convincing himself that he has loved as powerfully and purely as any man. And, if he truly believed there was no afterlife, why should he be concerned with the sin of violation at all? But he seems to be. 

It’s not a large jump to think now of our young Lady Fairfax, who you will remember was Marvell’s early teen student at Appleton. Marvell admired her, to be sure. He wrote other poems where she appears outright. If Marvell desired her (a fairly large “if,” perhaps), this idea of fantasizing a thwarted or impossible love isn’t difficult with her as its object. The aging tutor seeks to seduce the young woman in the home and gardens of her own father: you can almost sense the apprehension and urgency to avoid discovery. Well. . . We don’t know for certain when Marvell wrote the poem–it might well have been as early as his tutoring of her–or maybe some years afterwards. But whether Mary Fairfax fits the chronology or not, it is highly unlikely this was ever presented to her. And how could it be, grotesque little poem that it is? 

Now, I’m not convinced that our traveling down these roads has enough evidence to make it stick. But it does raise another interesting question: how far into the speaker or even author psychology can I travel in literature? Remember, our sculpture of Marvell is as much human as it is poem. And we already have some ideas of what our speaker may be struggling with.

Okay. But perhaps there are other ways still to explain our speaker’s desire to fail. The first is that our speaker is himself parroting the traditional love poem even while he parodies it. In other words, he is doing what is expected of males to do towards attractive females, even though he doesn’t desire her–because his desires go elsewhere. 

Remember earlier that I explained how Marvell was friends with John Milton, even saved him politically once or twice? It so happens that among the criticisms thrown at Marvell politically were the titles, “Milton the stallion and Marvell the gelding.” Critics Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker have suggested that perhaps those critics were on to something. They call “To His Coy Mistress” a kind of defensive camouflage for Marvell to protect his own homoeroticism. Yes, he desires, they argue, but not for women. The poem is written as a decoy to be passed around to make Marvell seem manly (and what is more manly than pedophilia, I guess), but also as a lure amongst the men who read it. Marvell’s politics, they argue, are delicate, ambiguous, and mirrored in his poetry. Marvell, for his time, was not a “full man;” I mean he had little money, no land, no children, no surviving parents. He was incomplete, living a life of dependency. . . Who can guess what he sought, what the speakers of his poems seek, but his day’s ideas of machismo echo around him.

Okay. Let’s step back for a minute, shall we? Because a couple of things have happened as we wandered through all of this. We have, perhaps too casually, equated Marvell with his speaker. That’s bad form. On the other hand, isn’t the speaker a creation of the author, even a “safe place” for the author’s less desirable qualities to emerge more openly? A place where a confession might be made, but then the author can safely step back and say, “Not me! It’s the speaker doing that!” Ah, there’s that ironic distance again. That’s what Zwicker and Hirst mean by both decoy and lure, then. It’s there to be found, but not enough to hold our author accountable.

A final possibility is worth mentioning, that possibility an explanation for why our speaker wants to seduce but also to fail. Marvell wrote another poem in Latin, translated as “Upon a Eunuch; A poet. Fragment.” Here is one translation of that poem, where the speaker addresses the eunuch:

Deem not that thou art barren, though, forlorn,
Thou plunge no sickle in the virgin corn,
And, mateless, hast no part in our sweet curse.
Fame shall be ever pregnant by thy verse;
The vocal Sisters nine thou shalt embrace,
And Echo nurse thy words, a tuneful race.

To save us some time, Marvell says here that it is sad that the eunuch cannot have sex or children as men do.  But he should not worry, for he will still be famous and his fame will spread (like children of his own?) because of this poem Marvell puts him in, which the mythical Echo will spread. 

In other words, a failed seduction or an impossible love (like a eunuch’s or Marvell’s or our “Coy Mistress” speaker) is still fine because poetry emerges from it. And both our speaker and poet got that poem, regardless of the love result. In “Coy Mistress,” he attempts to persuade her by suggesting that life itself does not endure:  “Thy beauty shall no more be found, / Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound / My echoing song,” this from the mouth of a speaker who isn’t expecting a “Yes,” anyway.

I mentioned this possibility before, and it fits well with the metaphysical poet’s choice of subject. In the end, the surface content of the poem is not its point; the seduction is only a means to a larger philosophical goal. So having our speaker fail with such poorly-reasoned and offensive words becomes part of the satire against those playboy cavalier poet-types. 

This is also not an uncommon poetic strategy. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” makes the point that the youth should not worry about growing old because “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”  If our Coy Mistress is a kind of Muse (Marvell’s own bachelor life perhaps heterosexually thwarted or impossible) then the seduction is created in order to birth this metaphysical child, a different kind of potency.

So which is it? Which of these many speakers and motivations are we left with? A speaker hellbent to take our lady regardless? One who is testing his own absurd rhetoric and privileged male power? One who psychologically actually rejects the possibility of success? And if so, is it because he has so idealized love that he cannot see it made carnal? Or one who offers the biggest risk of a failed seduction of a girl under the eyes of a nearby convent at Appleton? Or one who fails because he masks his queer desire for men? Or one who simply does all this as an exercise in philosophy and the act of writing poetry?  And of all these choices, how close does Marvell align? And when?

Silence in Response

But if we are uncertain of our speaker, perhaps we can be more certain of the audience. I’ve already spoken about the “coy mistress” a bit earlier. The mistress is likely the term for a woman of some status, though younger than our speaker. The youth imagery in the poem is attached only to her. The “coy” part is more difficult, though I made a point that coyness is perhaps a careful strategy of women to navigate the difficult political paths women must when powerful men turn their attentions. 

Too, coyness as in “silent” or “proper” is also virtue, albeit Christian virtue which the speaker disdains. But Marvell’s contemporary Thomas Randolph also wrote a poem about a coy mistress soon before Marvell did. He says to Cupid:

‘Give me a mistress in whose looks to joy,
And such a mistress [Love] as will be coy,
Not easily won, though to be won in time;
That from her niceness I may store my rhyme.’

Here again we have not only a possible source for the title of Marvell’s poem, but another idea that poets write of thwarted desire, the deferral of answer, to itself inspire good poetry.

Well. What else can we know about our mistress?  She is absent from the poem; she is silent, given no words. And no reply. For Marvell, what she answers is irrelevant to the poem, else he would include it. Marvell wants our attention on our speaker, or at least upon the speaker’s verbal dominance. 

And we can say a great deal about the speaker’s understanding of her. We presume she is fairly intelligent or educated, again marking her status, else why work with all the references to Catullus and Horace and Greek mythology and all? Wasted effort if he doesn’t think she will understand it. Despite his verbal gymnastics with all that, though, she has been, up to now, coy. 

I’ve already described the verbal assault on her body. And note that it is her body that is the focus here, not his (which does not appear in the poem). He looks at all her parts, he excites himself over her glowing skin and pores and “willing soul,” but for all of that her body is something to be consumed, and violently “tear our pleasures with rough strife.” Why so violent?

Another trope of Renaissance poetry is to equate a woman’s body with a fortress that is assaulted. Eww.

I mentioned that coyness was political strategy. And we already know that our speaker was prepared for and had to be ready to accept a “No” answer. Let me suggest, too, that this poem therefore demonstrates not merely the victim status of politically marginalized women, but also their power. Here, the woman must be pleaded with. Yes, our speaker flatters her and even threatens her, but that can also be because he is afraid of her. 

She has already said “No” to him before–hence she is now coy. She is close, but she is unattainable. He pleads again. But the feminine in this poem does not say “Yes.” Neither does she say “No” again. She is silent. And perhaps the silence she is given in this poem is her power. Look how the absence of an answer makes our speaker appear: yes, he satirized love poetry and her, but he also mocks himself; he’s pathetic, peevish, in his attempts to scare her into sex. How could she reject him? He’s like an Incel, a child in relationships, grossly equating her coyness both to her virtue and to his expectation that she become a whore. Elevate and then subvert; Idealize and subvert. . . the toxic immaturity and inadequacy of it. . . . 

Philosophically, too, our speaker is a failure in his ambition of her. His argued goal is to have such intense love-making that they might avoid (or at least slow) the approach of age and death. He wants to engage in an act which is pro-creative, something which reinforces nature’s pattern of birth-life-procreation-death. Breaking into her vault does not get him to eternity at all (that vault would end up in a tomb last time I looked), but it will affirm that he is on the course towards mortality by playing the biological game. He may want to seize the chastity (that would be carpe pudicitia) as a virtue, but the very seizing of it erases its value, much like his entire argument does. Marvell’s speaker is seduced into the very mortal act of seducing.

There is one more possible reading of our mistress which I want to include, and that’s that she is in on the entire joke. Read the poem for a moment with this in mind, that the two of them have already engaged each other, and he is composing the poem as a snarky amusement for her to laugh at his absurd witticisms. 

Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

I admit it’s an amusing possibility, this way, though I also think that many of the lines do not play nearly as well in this “mistress conspirator” interpretation.

But you (and me, too, probably) are not fully convinced of this “power of women” reading of the poem. Yes, it’s certainly possible that our speaker is a sniveling imp and pretty pathetic in his toxic masculinity and predatory aspirations. But it’s hard to reason that the silent woman is not being preyed upon nonetheless.

So this is why I’d like to have us consider some still other possibilities. The first is that this poem was not written for a woman at all.

The poem is clever, elusive, ambiguous, and sometimes grotesquely fun. He says, “Now let us sport us while we may,” a phrase which smacks of hedonism. The word “sport” still means much the same as it does today, that it is not to be taken too seriously. It will be a frolic. More, the vulgarity of the poem certainly makes little sense in being directed to a woman; it’s more like locker room talk.  Locker room talk. 

Imagine the poem as a poetic boast amongst the lads. “What did you say to her? You did not!” Tawdry and exaggerated, but educated as males were, we could see the poem as a masculine boast. “Check out my sexual and poetic prowess!” I said earlier that the poem was never published, but that does not mean that it was not passed around the circles of men in Marvell’s company. His companion Thomas Stanley had a literary circle in the 1640s where this sort of thing was frequently done, a private group of sympathetic intellectuals of all kinds of political persuasions, and Marvell joined it. Ah, yes, the Company of Men. 

And what’s crazy to me is that it has survived for 350 years afterwards, largely amongst educated males who keep forwarding it as a poem worthy of reading and debate. Now that’s one hell of a seduction. (I did mention that this poem was a mirror, yes?)

So who is the object of our poem? A woman who is in on the joke? Or one being victimized over and over again? Or one who is carefully navigating the circumstances as best she can? Or one who actually recognizes the power she has over him? Or a young Mary Fairfax who will never read the poem or know it was written about her? Or is it to none of these but to other men in Marvell’s circle, written as an exercise in poetic technique? Perhaps none of these and no audience at all, but a psychological venting by its author upon the political and philosophical nonsense of those around him? 

Was Marvell a Royalist or republican? A Whig or tolerationist? A poet of desire or a Platonist? A Christian or an epicureanA philosophy of simple and sensual pleasure as a goal of lif... More? Who was he and what did he imagine himself to be? And when?

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A Many-Hearted Sculpture

My students learned something about me fairly early in every semester. Whenever I posed a question of choices they should challenge the question, not accept its premises. Accepting the choices as offered places us on the horns of a dilemma, where no matter what we choose, we get gored by one horn of the other. Instead, I taught them to slip between the horns of the bull, to find other choices, or to accept all of them willingly and discover something from their simultaneity, their synthesis. 

Must the speaker of a poem be a singular character with a singular motive? Could the speaker be multiple? Could it be Marvell and not-Marvell? Could he be con artist and the one duped? The ironic speaker of limited perspective and one canny in the seductive traps offered? This “and” also creates polysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More, yes? 

A caution, for we may have another flaw in our approach, and I am often as guilty of it as any. We imagine when we make accusations of characters or authors that they are singular figures, that their intellectual or emotional lives are somehow simple, static, unchanging. As if there is a single Marvell or Milton or Helen of Troy or Shakespeare or Abraham Lincoln who is forever this icon of whatever virtues and sins we ascribe to them. 

We know it’s nonsense. We know artists and philosophers who go through different “periods” or evolutions in their thought: Nietzsche, Picasso, Van Gogh, Miles Davis. We know historical figures who did great things but had personal vices, weaknesses, moments of doubt, tempers: George Washington, Thomas Edison, Nikolai Tesla, Julius Caesar, Edgar Allan Poe. 

But at the same time, we make of these artists and their works sculptures, statues, stone objects that must be absolute and unchanging in their meaning, even while we, the viewers come back over and over and find ourselves mesmerized anew by something completely different. 

There is Marvell the man at a particular place and moment, and a slightly revised Marvell when he moves off to another location in another circumstance. There is Steve the Teacher who wore a particular persona in front of teenagers in the classroom; and then there is Steve the person who struggled keeping up with housework, ate so poorly that it led to an early cardiac condition, and who kept waiting for everything to “open up” so he could finally see who he’d turn into. We’ll call the difference Steve the person and the Self-Imagined Ideal Steve (which I’m still waiting to meet, but I think of him . . . just over there, I think. . . if you wait long enough). How much of each of these personas, and in what years and places, leak onto a page every now and then to form a poem or story? Surely there was Marvell the man and the Self-Imagined Marvell; there was Marvell the lonely and Marvell the politician, Marvell the scholar and Marvell the desperate. 

Marvell’s most common strategy in the world was to defend against extreme or absolute positions. Much of his poetry is in dialogue form, his politics in reasoned ironies, his religion in resisting dogma and authority in favor of reason and tolerance. He understood words well, obviously, and what he writes across all genres demonstrates language which reveals and obscures at the same time. One critic calls him “double-hearted,” and I can believe it; aren’t we all many-hearted? 

Yes, “To His Coy Mistress” is a dirty little seduction poem, but to claim only this misses the great weight of it. Our broken speaker, illogical and dishonest, is a parody of the politics, poets, and classical epicureanA philosophy of simple and sensual pleasure as a goal of lif... More philosophy he espouses, all while challenging the nature of mortality and of Christian faith. We do not know, precisely, who he speaks to, but we are fairly certain he knows he will be rejected, or that he fears this, and so may be guilty of self-sabotage for any number of reasons. And so he, and his poet author, choose routes of ambiguity. Marvell the poet makes no claims to any virtue or principle; he simply aims at the ones which do not satisfy. Perhaps he has no answers, but attacks what he knows to be ill-considered. 

Did writing this way give him satisfaction? We can’t know. His poems were not published during his lifetime; but after his death, a woman who identified herself as his wife “Mary Marvell” brought to public attention his journals containing the poems. There is little to no record of any marriage, but she was born Mary Palmer and served also as Marvell’s housekeeper. 

AccountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More to Our Talk

In his novel  A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway offers a scene of what Lt. Henry and Catherine believe may be their last time together. Henry says, “’But at my back I always hear Times winged chariot hurrying near.’” He senses his impending death, but his reference to Marvell is more than this. Henry in the novel is already questioning his spirituality, recognizing that his morality is not rooted to his physical sensuality. He says he feels “trapped biologically” by his appetites, but recognizes that there is more. We could say, if we were lazy, that Henry senses death, and then move on. Allusions don’t work this way. And Hemingway understands much of this thicker argument, this failed EpicureanA philosophy of simple and sensual pleasure as a goal of lif... More argument against the anxiety of mortality, even while Catherine moves closer to embracing it. 

But he goes further still. Henry is reminded of those lines because he hears the sounds of car horns honking. It’s an obscure thing to have there. But we have from T. S. Eliot’s poem, The Wasteland:

But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring.

Hemingway’s characters are simple, innocent people; and Hemingway’s prose is sparse, almost barren. And yet, beneath them in this scene, Hemingway draws two complex allusions, of arguments serious, profound, experienced, subtle. 

 I bring this up mostly to show you that the dialogue continues, and with it the complexity of the arguments over the ages. Is Catherine Marvell’s speaker and Henry the mistress of virtue? Or is there a shifting evolution between them? We get precious little time to wonder, but the moment is there, Hemingway reminding us despite all objections to the contrary that he is no mere storyteller. 

Poet Annie Finch responds to Marvell with 

“The Grave’s not just the body’s curse;
no skeleton can pen a verse!
So while this numbered World we see,
let’s sweeten Time with poetry,

A.D. Hope does something similar:

“Coy mistress”, sir? Who gave you leave
To wear my heart upon your sleeve?
Or to imply, as sure you do,
I had no other choice than you
And must remain upon the shelf
Unless I should bestir myself?

And others, too:  Robert Penn Warren, Ursula K. Le Guin, William S. Burroughs, Terry Pratchet, Philip Roth, Virginia Woolf, Archibald MacLeish, Primo Levi, and Arthur C. Clarke either quote, reference, allude toward, or directly write about Marvell. Even Stephen King quotes from “To His Coy Mistress” in Pet Sematary.

Okay, cool. But what does this have to do with me? you ask. What am I going to do with all of this?

Heck, what are you asking me for? But if you’ve listened this far (and geez, good on you if you did!), we may begin to understand that Marvell’s poem is an exemplar for this idea of literary dialogue through the ages, from Horace and perhaps before him to ancient Egypt right up to yesterday at about 4:30 pm, and continued right now as we talk here. But when we talk about Marvell’s poem, we aren’t simply talking about Marvell’s poem: we wrestle with its ideas, its merits, its assaultive surfaces but the underlying political and gender questions they reveal, its ironic arguments for carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More but the refusal of its author to offer a substitute, its satirical form but also the attachment to these forms and the contemporaries with whom the poet negotiates, the insecurities of its speaker, but also the psychological challenges a landless and maybe loveless man surrounded by toxic rhetoric must surely feel. 

The poem is marvelous in its construction, yes, but so are thousands of others. What “To His Coy Mistress” does in its construction is offer us a door to these larger talks, to participate in what others have been doing for literally millennia. 

In part, this is why I taught it. It was a powerful avenue for my high school and college students to discover poetic ideas. It comes first with the kind of sexual hook and poisonous relationship that they love to engage. I would ask, “Is this a love poem?” and watch them go. Second, that hook was often strong enough to get them past their aversion to older poetry, the thick language. They’d discover that a) they actually could read it with a little effort, and b) that such language came packed with these qualities of revealing and obscuring. These successes alone, that poetry was equally a space for argument and flag-planting, ironyA "deflection of expectation," where words, situation, or pe... More and uncertainty, were enough. We could move on to other difficult poets more easily.

But, depending upon their interest and where their own experiences placed them in or outside the poem, we could address Marvell’s metaphysical questions. Why shouldn’t she accept his seduction? What is our speaker’s view of the world? Of what life is for? These questions spurred their thinking about our living morals against our ideas of death, and to wondering at our speaker’s own internal conflicts, his psychology. 

Only then would I move us to questions of tone and theme. And while I’ll talk about these things more later, this was an easier poem for them to recognize that a speaker’s tone–the attitude the speaker has–is never a simple word. “Horny” is not an acceptable answer, nor is “desperate.” No single word covers it, so from this I could ask of my students to always find the human complication inside the attitude: always give me the conflicted human when discussing tone. 

Later, we could see where Marvell’s themes emerged through history and into today.

And this is why I still read Marvell now, and partly why I began with him for this Literary Nomads journey. Yes, some of us listening may choose never to return to “Coy Mistress,” and I can respect the choice. Those of us as teachers may look for other poems which accomplish the same with less . . . controversial sexual environments. 

Choosing Marvell does not allow us to ignore those charged talks. We can’t rightly say, “Well, sure, it’s a bit sexist BUT it also offers some deep philosophy about time.” Other poems offer these same questions without the sensual bits. No, choosing Marvell means that the surface scene, even if metaphor for philosophy, must be engaged: What do we do about the inevitable decay of flesh? Are sex, beauty, and desire only for the young? Only for young women? Then what double- or triple-standards are even now at work on young women and how do they operate? What does Marvell’s speaker look like today? And why the change? Is courtship still a requirement for love and desire at all? Is the Nike slogan (and others like it) a good philosophy to sell or is it problematic? And for young men, where are you in this poem? How do you know?

I think these questions hold us accountable both to the richness of Marvell’s poem and to the themes which are still present around us. How we are authored and argued, objectified and consumed. How we must respond to or engage these elements of social language which work upon us. If I see myself even partly in Marvell’s speaker, it’s critical I confront it, for everyone’s sake; Marvell thinks so, too. If these questions are important to us, so is the poem. 

But it’s also true that we ourselves live in charged spaces these days. Not all of us can have critical conversations easily or openly, and for teachers, not every classroom is ready or suited to these talks. I worked with my students for several weeks to measure their readiness before I put “Coy Mistress” before them, and some years I chose not to include it. We make choices. The only choice we should not make, I think, is to read the poem and not have these difficult talks. 

I also know, as do many of you, that the world moves too fast and is occupied with other things. What value anything from centuries ago?  Wordsworth, another guy over 200 years ago, said, “The world is too much with us, late and soon./ Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”  No time for sonnets, though. But if anything, for me, all the more reason to plant a flag here, mark our territory–personal, impassioned, political, pedagogical–as a space for pause, for questions that otherwise we may never give ourselves time to consider beyond that meme or thirty second video too quickly swiped away. I feel discomfiture doing anything else. 

No, my flag, and yours I hope, is in this slower and broader inquiry, into the spaces–uncomfortable or not–that language takes us. Whether or not that includes Andrew Marvell is up to each of us, but you and I will carry him with us a bit further yet as we explore new spaces in the episodes ahead.

For the rest of the world, we know that his fame fades now, once again. But let’s not see it as overly tragic. Marvell is a human. His poetry wrestles with that humanness. And time moves forward, the sun will not stand still. We get ourselves sometimes too caught up in heavy arguments about what deserves to be read, deserves to be taught, deserves to be remembered. Literature and history are not cold statues. Perhaps we need to consider that forgetting is also part of what it means to be human.

I’d love to know your thoughts on this poem and what we’ve said about it these past few weeks. What questions do you have? What did I miss? Where am I still an idiot? Drop me a line at the email in today’s Show Notes. 

And afterwards, go read something.

Closing / Outro

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Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.