To His Coy Mistress

To His Coy Mistress

         

            To His Coy Mistress took a lot of thought to get through. I had to read it a few times or more. But the more thought I put into it, the more understanding I got out of it, even though I still don’t understand it fully. I like how poetry does this to you. It stretches ideas so that they are not as clear as the rest of literature is. It has a message that has to be discovered.

            Coy means to be shy and reserved, so I believe that the narrator of the poem is speaking to his Lady to get her out of her shell, because their time to love is short. I may be wrong on my interpretation, but that was my thought process.

The author, Andrew Marvell, states “The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace” (p. 310) and then proceeds to say that before we end up in the grave and while we are in our youth we should “sport…while we may.” Ages go by and “beauty” slips away, so there should be a time in our lives where we should be making the most of it because we won’t be cuddling in our grave with our Love for eternity. Time is running short for all of us and while we are living we should Love before it dies.