The poems I am analysing are ‘To his Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell and ‘Sonnet 60’ by William Shakespeare. Both of the poems have similar views on time and both believe that it cannot be stopped and that beauty is destroyed by time. In both poems time is personified and imagery is taken from the natural world to resemble time.
The first poem is ‘To his Coy Mistress’. It has a very sophisticated structure and uses a syllogistic argument. It is split in to three main stanzas the first being ‘If’, the second ‘But’ and the last ‘Therefore’. The first stanza is all about what the speaker and his mistress could do if they had all the time in the world. They would be able to sit by the ‘Indian Ganges side/Shoudst rubies find’. The Indian Ganges is a way to show time passing as river are often used to do this. The Ganges …show more content…
It starts with the ‘nativity’ being sunrise and birth, then onto it ‘being crown’ at the prime of its life and then the sun battling the moon in his ‘glory fight’ to stay alive. In this way it describes life and how you cannot escape death, which is the same in the other poem as the speaker says ‘though we cannot make our sun stand still’. The third part is about natural beauty and how it diminishes over time, which is the same concept as in ‘To his Coy Mistress’. Shakespeare says that time ‘transfix[es] the flourish’ of beauty. Both poems also personify time as something eating away at you, in ‘Sonnet 60’ time ‘feeds on the rarities of nature’ and ‘In his Coy Mistress’ they languish ‘In his slow-chapped power’. Also in ‘Sonnet 60’ the speaker compares death to the Grimm Reaper and the image of him ending lives with his scythe. In the last two lines he says that writing defeats time and that her beauty will stay alive in poem. The poem is in Iambic Pentameter and so moves at great speed, therefore the form reflect the matter. Overall the poet believes that ‘Ars longa, vita brevis’ (Art is long, life is
The first poem is ‘To his Coy Mistress’. It has a very sophisticated structure and uses a syllogistic argument. It is split in to three main stanzas the first being ‘If’, the second ‘But’ and the last ‘Therefore’. The first stanza is all about what the speaker and his mistress could do if they had all the time in the world. They would be able to sit by the ‘Indian Ganges side/Shoudst rubies find’. The Indian Ganges is a way to show time passing as river are often used to do this. The Ganges …show more content…
It starts with the ‘nativity’ being sunrise and birth, then onto it ‘being crown’ at the prime of its life and then the sun battling the moon in his ‘glory fight’ to stay alive. In this way it describes life and how you cannot escape death, which is the same in the other poem as the speaker says ‘though we cannot make our sun stand still’. The third part is about natural beauty and how it diminishes over time, which is the same concept as in ‘To his Coy Mistress’. Shakespeare says that time ‘transfix[es] the flourish’ of beauty. Both poems also personify time as something eating away at you, in ‘Sonnet 60’ time ‘feeds on the rarities of nature’ and ‘In his Coy Mistress’ they languish ‘In his slow-chapped power’. Also in ‘Sonnet 60’ the speaker compares death to the Grimm Reaper and the image of him ending lives with his scythe. In the last two lines he says that writing defeats time and that her beauty will stay alive in poem. The poem is in Iambic Pentameter and so moves at great speed, therefore the form reflect the matter. Overall the poet believes that ‘Ars longa, vita brevis’ (Art is long, life is