FEMINISM IN ANDREW MARVELL’S TO HIS COY
MISTRESS AND WILLIAM BLAKE’S
SICK ROSE
Bhange P.B
.
Department of EnglishM. H. M. College Modnimb.
Abstract :
Feminism is concerned with the marginalization of all women that is with their being relegated to a
secondary position. It is an impact of gender on reading and writing. It tries to seek the position of women in a
patriarchal that is a male dominated society
Key Words:- Feminism In Andrew Marvell’s , Marginalization , Patriarchal Culture.
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Feminism In Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy........
INTRODUCTION
Most feminists believe that our culture is a patriarchal culture, one organized in favor of the interests of men.
Feminism inspects women’s feeling of fragmentation and obliteration in patriarchal culture. On the name of beauty and
spirituality women have been always exploited.
Subject Matter:
Andrew marvel’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’ and William Blake’s ‘Sick Rose’ are the examples of it. Andrew
Marvell and William Blake, both were the prominent English poets. They were born in the two different ages-one in
17th and other in the 18th century. Marvell was a metaphysical poet while Blake was a Romantic poet. As the two poets
have the different literary background it is interesting to compare the poems of these poets. However, we can see that
Blake praises ‘sacred natural love’ and Marvell praises ‘physical love’ in their poetry.
Marvell was one of the great admirers of Cromwell. He was a poet and politician. He was known mainly as a
public figure and writer of satires. His fame as a poet rests on ‘Miscellaneous Poems’- a collection of remarkable charm.
He is witty and endowed with an admirable faculty for ‘image making’. Generally, he takes up a well-known and almost
worn-out theme and exploits it to yield newer meanings and complex shades of experience. In this he shares some of the
features with John Donne- the dramatic quality, his love of conceit and use of speech-rhythms etc. T.S. Eliot wrote of
Marvell’s style that, “It is more than a technical accomplishment or the vocabulary and syntax of an epoch; it is what we
have designed tentatively as wit a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace”.
William Blake was a poet, painter and printmaker. However, he was largely unrecognized in his life time as a
great poet. He revealed the philosophical and mystical undercurrents through his work. His poetry is characterized by
simplicity and spontaneity. His poems reveal his belief in liberty and social equality in society and between the sexes.
His ‘Songs of Innocence and Experience’ show the two contrary states of the Human soul. Blake was a mystic and
visionary, but his thinking is sharp and independent. So his books are centered upon man’s fall and the history of the
fallen world. He was greatly influenced by French and American revolutions. So humanity is at the centre in his poetry.
Thus he keeps himself aloof from the politics and composed the best lyrics in his life. His literary importance and the
real value of his work, however is interpreted after his death, particularly in the 20th century.
Blake is sometimes considered a forerunner of the 19th century ‘free love’ movement. His poems like ‘The
Lamb’, ‘The Tyger’ express simple and familiar idea of his day. But his poem ‘Sick Rose’, has a number of similarities
with that of Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress.’
‘To His Coy Mistress’ is Marvell’s most famous lyric. Both Marvell and Blake combined here an old poetic
conceit i.e. carpe diem (seize the day), to make the most of present pleasures. Psychoanalyst related romanticism to the
unconscious and this is clearly seen in these two poems.
‘Sick Rose’ is richly symbolic poem by BlakeO Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed,
Of crimson joy,
And his dark secret love,
Does thy life destroy.
The sexual implications of Blake’s imagery are readily discernible. The rose is a classic symbol of feminine
beauty, but this beauty is being despoiled by agent of masculine sexuality: the worm, symbol of death, of decay and also
of the phallus. In short Blake’s poem is a vaguely disturbing parable of the death instinct, which is closely conjoined
with sexual passion. The sharp juxtaposition of ‘crimson joy’ and ‘destroy’ suggests that Eros, unmitigated by high
spiritual love is the agent of evil as well as of mortality.
A similar juxtaposition is found in Andrew Marvell’s most famous lyric “To His Coy Mistress”. It is one of the
most celebrated erotic poems in English literature. The speaker of the poem begins his proposition of love by stating an
impossible condition –
“Had we but World enough and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime….”
Flattering his prospective mistress as ‘Lady”, he proceeds to outline the ‘ideal’ relationship of the two lovers:‘We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love’s day
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate’.
The speaker’s argument in this first stanza achieves a fine sub limitation. He has managed to refine his
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Feminism In Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy........
seductive motive of all its grossness. His objective is nevertheless the same. It is only a matter of time before the woman
must capitulate to his blandishments. But this ‘only’ makes all the difference in the world, as he demonstrates in the
second stanzaBut at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lie,
Deserts of vast eternity.
There is the subtle implication of sexual union in the image of flying. It is juxtaposed against an eternity of
oblivion, just as the slow but sure fecundity of a vegetable love growing to the vastness of empires. It is contrasted with
the barren deserts of death. After setting forth this prospect, the speaker reveals what all this means in terms of love: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,
And your quaint honors turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
This statement is brutal in its explicitness, ‘The Marble Vault’- is a thinly disguised vaginal metaphor
suggesting both rigor mortis and the fleshless pelvis of the skeleton. “My echoing song” and the sensual meanings of the
lines following are extremely coarse. Reality is that all love must at last end in ashes- just as all chastity must end the
same as sexual profligacy, in dust. The stanza is concluded with a devastating anticlimax:‘The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace’.
In the final stanza the speaker relaxes his harsh irony and appeals passionately to his reluctant sweetheart to
seize the moment. But he achieves a sublimation of sensual statement through the bold sincerity of his passion and
through the brilliance of his imagery:Now therefore, while the youthful hue,
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires,
At every pore with instant fires….’
The speaker addressed to a coy or putatively unwilling woman and pleads for sex using the logical argument that
since they have not “world enough and time” to delay pleasure, the couple should proceed with haste. There is john
Donne –like argumentation in the poem but the most arresting is its shocking attack on female body. The woman in the
poem is not willing to accept the speaker, but is quite obviously intelligent, otherwise, he would not bother with such
vaulting metaphysics .Yet the speaker seeks to frighten her into sexual compliance. This is clear in his violent and
grotesque description of her body. Here her body is indeed the focus not his body. The speaker offers the traditional
adoration of the various parts of her body, following a series of exotic settings and references to times past and present.
He describes her eyes, her forehead, her breasts, etc culminating in a wish for her to show her heart.
The speaker then compares woman’s body to a “marble vault” and this important image occurs in the center of
the poem. The speaker’s problem is that despite the woman’s charms, her vault is closed to him .He deftly uses this
refusal as a means to forward his assault on the woman, however, since the word vault points toward her death. So he
next attacks with the next image, if she refuses him, “then worms shall try, that long preserved virginity.”
The woman is subject to being devoured by her amorous admirer and by time itself. The poem powerfully depicts
the secondary status of the female body. Indeed , when the speaker notes that she will find herself in her grave one day he
does not describe the moldering away of his body in the vault as he does hers , though he does hers , though he does
imagine his lust turned to ashes. He fails to note where he will be, almost as though he will not pay the penalties she will.
However the poem does not belittle women in a simplistic way, women’s marginality in a male- dominated world can
indicate not their helplessness, but their pent up power. The woman addressed is goddess like: capricious and cruel; she
is one who must be complained and served. Both the speaker’s flattery and his verbal attacks mask his fear of her. To him
the feminine is enclosed and unattainable- tomblike as well as womblike. The feminine is thus portrayed as a negative
state; that is, she does not assent; she is not in the poem about power and the power may be with the silent female with the
vault or womb, the negative space of the feminine.
As distinct from his speaker, Marvell offers a portrayal of male and female roles of his day that celebrates their
various positions while sharply indicating their limitations. It is a positive and negative evaluation. On the one hand, it is
a poem about youth and passion for life, both intellectual and physical, both male and female. It gives us a picture of the
lives of sophisticated people during the time, people who enjoy sex for pleasure and who are not above making jokes
and having fun arguing about it. No mention is made of procreation neither in the poem, nor of marriage, or really of
love. It is about sex. The poem is so sophisticated that instead of merely restating the courtly love tradition, it parodies it.
Yet on the other hand, as the male speaker satirizes the lady’s coyness, he is even more satirizing himself and his peevish
fear of the feminine as expressed in his imagistic attempts to scare her into sex with him. The repellent quality of his
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images of women- like a bad dream- haunts us long after his artful invention and his own coy sense of humor fade.
The sexual imagery here is overt. The fire image, which smolders in stanza first and turns to ashes in stanza 2, explodes
into passion in the concluding stanza. ‘Fire’ is the classic symbol of urethral eroticism. In contrast to the tone of Blake’s
“Sick Rose”, here love-as-destruction is set forth rapturously.
CONCLUSION:
Thus, both the poems have the juxtaposition of the death instinct and the sexual passion. Life is short and time
is fleeting so enjoy every bit of moment is the tone and moral of poems. Love and death and its juxtaposition with sexual
passion are enriched by both poets with rich and vivid imagery and metaphors. Though the poems were written in
different ages, they have a lot of similarities as far as the subject and its mysticism is revealed. The poems are really the
revelation of the philosophical and mystical implications of the human life.
REFERENCE:
i)Nicholas Murray :- Andrew Marvell (1999)
ii)A Handbook of critical Approaches to Literature- 4th Ed. Oxford University Press New York2004.
iii)A Glossary of Literary Terms by M.H. Abrams- 7th Ed.
iv)Harold bloom – Blake’s Apocalypse Double day (1963)
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