ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ANDREW MARVELL
In fact, “To his Coy Mistress” has been so often celebrated for its combination
of smooth surface and logical rigor that it is easy to forget that it differs from its
principal Catullan prototype in English, Jonson’s “Song to Celia,” primarily
because of the grand scale on which wooing is imagined. Only a single additional
syllable per line distinguishes Marvell’s sinewy octosyllabics from Jonson’s
“beheaded” tetrameter, but space and time in “Coy Mistress” are matters of
perspective, not meter, and, familiar as the beginning has become, Marvell’s
casual assimilation of epic into lyric remains little short of breath-taking:
Had we but World enough, and Time,
This coyness Lady were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long Loves Day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges side
Should’st Rubies find: I by the Tide
Of Humber would complain.
In Marvell’s playful reverie, there is no need to worry, as there is in Jonson, about
fooling a few household spies. Domesticity has little place in an argument that
moves from India to England, from the antediluvian to the end of time; and
whereas Cowley will employ the familiar arithmetic-of-love in order to indicate
how long he can survive on a sigh or a look in “My Dyet,”
On a Sigh of Pity I a year can live,
One Tear will keep me twenty at least,
Fifty a gentle Look will give;
An Hundred years on one kind word I’ll feast:
A thousand more will added be,
If you an Inclination have for me;
And all beyond is vast Eternity,
counting in “Coy Mistress,” with its languid pauses and quantum surges,
expresses a connoisseur’s hunger. So close and yet so far, we might imagine
Marvell saying of Cowley, as he works his way artfully across time’s horizon and
then down the lady’s body:
I would
Love you ten years before the Flood:
And you should if you please refuse
Till the Conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable Love should grow
Vaster then Empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine Eyes, and on thy Forehead Gaze.
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