Marvell’s Attitude to Love
Andrew Marvell
is the only puritan among the Metaphysical poets. He is a humanist, a wit and a
poet. In his attitude to love he belongs to the school of John Donne and like
Donne he gives importance to the intellectual elements such as witty conceits,
blend of passion and thought in his love poems.
In writing love
poetry, Marvell was greatly influenced by the Elizabethan poets. He has a
tendency to describe his beloved in hyperbolic terms. The lover in ‘To His
Coy Mistress’ says,
‘My vegetable
love should grow
Vaster than
empires, and more slow’.
If the lovers
really had enough time, he would spend a hundred years in praising his
beloved’s eyes and gazing on her forehead, he would spend two hundred years in
admiring each of her breasts, and he would spend thirty thousand years in
praising the remaining parts of her body.
Marvell shows
his sensuality by preferring body to soul, lust to love. His fierce and violent
passion may be noted in the following lines:
‘Let us roll all
our strength, and all
Our sweetness up
into one ball,
And tear our
pleasures with rough strife,
Through the iron
gates of life’.
Marvell believes
that human passion of love suffers decay in death. So he proposes to utilize
the present moment in enjoying the pleasures of life.
Like Donne
Marvell blends passion with intellect and reason. ‘The Definition of love’
begins with an intellectual conceit. He says that his love was ‘begotten by
Despair/ upon Impossibility’. ‘Magnanimous Despair’ alone could show him so
divine a thing as love. He could have achieved the fruition of his love, but
Fate drove iron wedges and placed itself between him and the fulfillment of his
love. Fate grew jealous of two perfect lovers and did not permit their union,
because the union of two lovers would mean the ruin of the power of Fate.
Finally, he describes the love between him and his mistress as the conjunction
of the minds and the opposition of the stars.
Great Informative...
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