Life and Love after Death in Poetry

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the nature of life and human love after death as discussed by 17th century poets, Andrew Marvell and John Donne. The paper compares the imagery and messages presented by Donne in his poem, "Valediction Forbidding Mourning" and by Marvell in his poem, "To His Coy Mistress." The paper also compares the language that the poets use in conveying their messages.

From the Paper:

"Marvell's poem is addressed to a specific woman, a mistress unlike Donne's more vague, spiritual, androgynous and anonymous beloved. Marvell openly begs his coy mistress to come to bed with him--the poem begins as if he is rejecting a refusal she has just given him to do so. "Had we but world enough, and time, /This coyness, lady, were no crime." The poem then evolves in a series of hyperboles, or deliberately extreme statements, that make his appeal to his mistress humorous, rather than crassly sexual. To add to the humor of the poem, and to make the hyperbole even more delightfully absurd, Marvell uses religious references, like stating he "would Love you ten years before the Flood;" that he would wait for his beloved until "the conversion of the Jews," at the end of time, if it were not for his awareness that death awaits them both, and after death there is only a "desert" of "vast eternity.""

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