Essay Comparing Marvell's Flea And To His Coy Mistress

Since the dawn of civilized society, men have been attempting to persuade women into intimate relationships. Only in the last hundred years has a woman’s purity stopped being directly correlated to her value as person, and only in the last fifty years, though still stigmatized by some, have women been able to enjoy the pleasure of sex without the commitment of marriage and not have the act be a life ruining choice. While today we might attribute this to the woman’s rights movement, and rightly so, we cannot forget those who spoke out against the absurdity that women would become tainted or somehow harmed by consensual love. Done’s poem “The Flea” and Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” made subtle arguments in favor of a woman’s right to …show more content…
It is not the pursuit of love or the art of seduction that is his issue, but merely the time that is lost taking such a slow pace. “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 love’s day.” His suggestion of how he would court her reflects well enough he knows how to go about it. “An hundred years should go to …show more content…
“Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity.” Instead they should “tear our pleasures with rough strife Through the iron gates of life” and enjoy their youth and their