Abstract This paper compares Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" to Robert Herrick's ?Corinna's Going A-Maying.? It contains examinations of both speakers, their intentions, their desires, and their rhetorical approaches/seduction strategies. It also explores possible differences between the speakers? mistresses, the addressees, and the ways in which the speakers? words reveal their respective perceptions of their mistresses. It shows how, although both speakers focus on the same basic themes (seizing the day and the transience of life), the vast differences in their rhetorical approaches and linguistic choices reveal different perceived obstacles to their goal (seduction) and different hesitations on the part of their mistresses.
From the Paper "Both Marvell and Herrick's speakers believe in seizing the day and making the most out of life; they recognize its impermanence and therefore wish to fulfill their desires in the present, likening human existence to fleeting nature. After explaining to his mistress that he would love her eternally but that their time is limited, Marvell's speaker insists: "Now therefore, while the youthful hue/Sits on thy skin like morning dew" (33-34) they should submit to their desires. This description emphasizes the transience of his mistress's youth by likening her young skin to morning dew, which appears only briefly at dawn and vanishes in the full light of day. He continues: "Now let us sport us while we may,/And now, like amorous birds of prey,/Rather at once our time devour/Than languish in his slow-chapped power" (36-40)."
Abstract This paper examines Jonathan Swift's poems "The Lady's Dressing Room" and "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed", works which might inspire, from their nauseating subject matter, more than a mere blush to rise out of one's body. It looks at how both poems glory in the grotesque impurity inherent to humanity, and particularly to feminine humanity, which were apparently conceived as mutually exclusive. It also discusses how Swift employs nauseatingly graphic descriptions of women in his poetry not to denigrate women, but to mock a literary and social tradition that would place women in only one of two categories: that of the angel and that of the whore.
From the Paper "These categorizations of angel and monster become problematic in "The Lady's Dressing Room" and "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed" for several reasons, the first one being the unrelenting focus Swift puts on the physicality of both the women in the poems, which is obviously incompatible with the image of the angel. What makes these poems so interesting in juxtaposition is that they both scrutinize women to the same degree. In "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed", Corinna is most certainly not a lady; she is from its first lines established as the angel's antithesis, the whore. Unlike Celia, whose social status as a Lady makes her already quite angelic, Corinna is evidently of a low social class; there is no Betty to help her with her dressing. Instead, Corinna has only a bevy of stray animals who desert her "in a parodic reversal of the usual community of servants who attend to the dressing ritual" (Nussbaum 110). "
