Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”: Using New Historicism

Marvell, like the rest of the English nation, would have been acutely aware of the political and

spiritual implications of Charles I’s execution in 1649. The monarch was appointed not by the people,

but by the divine ordinance of his birthright, according to the contemporary doctrine of “divine right,”

and any trespass against the king was a sin against God. Charles, like his father James I (1603-25), was an

absolutist who believed that only God could override his judgment.

Nonetheless, 1649 marked the end of the culture’s unconditional monarchical loyalty. The

English had a new sense of themselves as autonomous subjects after the Protestant Reformation.

Parliament’s decision to put Charles to death stemmed from long-standing dissatisfaction with both his

absolute monarchy and his apparent encouragement of anti-reformist practices within the English

church. His fellow citizens did not condemn him. His alliance with William Laud, the Archbishop of

Canterbury, a proponent of Catholic Church practices, was not only because of his marriage to the

Catholic Henrietta Maria. Laud supported external ritual and the priest’s authoritative role in church

prayer, rather than individual, inward worship, which was one of the reformist church’s fundamental

concepts.

Marvell, a harbinger of this tumultuous historical period, backed anti-communists. During

England’s interregnum, the royalist Oliver Cromwell served as Lord Protector. Despite serving in the

government and even tutoring Cromwell’s family, he wrote a sympathetic account of the king who was

executed. While Marvell thrived on such deft self-positioning, the speaker in “To His Coy Mistress,” who

is both the poem’s subject and a type of English “subject,” is adamantly opposed to the monarchy,

which is suggested in lines 1-20 in the figure of the beloved herself in the figure of the beloved
herself.“Had we but world enough,” the speaker explains to his “coy mistress” in the beginning of the

poem, he would praise her in perpetuity:

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 than empires and more slow. (7-12)

The speaker uses “Petrarchan” language to describe this hypothetical scenario, expressing

excessive and hyperbolic reverence for an elusive woman immortalized in Petrarch’s medieval sonnets.

Marvell’s rhetorical choice is significant because it would have brought to mind the lyrics of many

sixteenth-century poets who used the genre to praise Elizabeth I. (1558-1603). These poets, courtiers

seeking the queen’s support, ingratiated themselves by portraying her as an intangible, ideal beloved, as

many critics have shown. However, Marvell’s speaker, beginning in line 21, urges—and presumes—

physical gratification rather than insatiable yearning.

Unlike Marvell’s monarch, who believed in his own omnipotence, this monarch, who evokes the

last of the Tudor line before the absolutist Stuart Kings, James and Charles, is denied such power. In a

world governed by “Time’s winged chariot,” the universal experience of human mortality to which they

are both vulnerable, Marvell’s speaker suggests that such promises of eternal devotion are

inappropriate. While Tudor and Stuart monarchs had referred to the king’s “two bodies,” the material

body a correspondent to a divine form, here the speaker insists on only the former.
 The speaker’s beloved is transformed from an immortal, ideal object of reverence to a possible

co-conspirator against godlike “Time,” which does hold the power of life and death, at the “turn” at line

21. He gives a crude description of her dead body in the grave, forewarning his mistress of “Time’s

winged chariot”:

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 honor turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust. (25-30)

However, Marvell’s intention is not simply to vilify the speaker’s aggressive disregard for social

mores; his defiant ranting, the poem suggests, is also that of a sympathetically powerless subject.

Worms will violate his beloved, and his “lust” will become “ashes.” While the speaker’s “vegetable love”

is lush and plentiful, it cannot aspire to be “vaster than empires”; his own future is beyond his control,

as death is the only certainty.

Throughout the poem, the speaker displays an acute awareness of his own disempowerment,

despite his apparent sexual bravado with his “mistress.” In the poem’s final stanza, the speaker

proposes a subversive overthrow of “Time” itself, and he will eventually enlist his beloved’s complicity

with his rebellious cant. In an absurd and passionate tone, he describes love as a form of mutiny: “birds

of prey” will turn on “Time,” rather than “languish” beneath its incomprehensible power, they will

charge the very “iron gates of life.”

 The poem ends with an ominous and densely symbolic challenge to the “sun” itself—a common

pun in contemporary literature for the monarch’s “son.” Perhaps Marvell is referring to his “son,”

Charles II, who became his father’s successor after the monarchy was restored in 1660. “Carpe diem”

becomes a lustful as well as an insurgent cry as the speaker and his beloved provoke this celestial object,

symbolic of the monarch’s ostensible divinity.

Marvell portrays his subject in this poem as a dangerous “subject,” evoking the political unrest

of the time. However, he compassionately portrays his speaker’s rallying challenge to all forms of

authority—a challenge that may foreshadow Marvell’s own Restoration-era lyrics. Marvell recognized

his own position as a dependent “subject” as a poet working for Cromwell.

In a broader sense, the poem provides a possible outlet for Marvell’s own fantasy of autonomy

through its systematic rejection of authority. If Marvell could be a perpetually loyal subject, “To His Coy

Mistress” celebrates a more subversive figure that, despite being ruled by the sun, has no qualms about

opposing this all-powerful monarch.

The Electronic Labyrinth by George Lucas using Media Criticism

Given that at least one “Star Wars” film has been released every decade since the 1970s, when

you hear the name George Lucas, you’re likely to think of this epic science fiction franchise. ‘Industrial

Light and Magic,’ which was founded by George Lucas in 1975 and has contributed to the special effects

of over 275 feature films, may come to mind instead. In any case, Lucas’s proclivity for creating fantastic

worlds has radically shaped the cinematic landscape of the past 40 years, particularly in the realm of big-

budget films. But, like many filmmakers since the 1960s, he began with a student film: “Electronic

Labyrinth: THX1138 4EB” (1967).

 In comparison to the modern fairytales of the “Star Wars” films, “Electronic Labyrinth” presents

a strikingly different vision of what the cinematic medium is capable of. It, too, is set in a science fiction

universe, but instead of heroes and princesses, it explores the dystopian potential of technology.

“Electronic Labyrinth” paints a picture of a world reminiscent of George Orwell’s “1984.” Reveals Lucas’s

early interest in creating cinematic futurescapes and sets the stage for the creation of Industrial Light

and Magic, which would become his empire of other worlds.

The constant thrum of radio chatter suggests the power of the technocracy that hunts 1138,

while Lucas builds his fantastic vision in “Electronic Labyrinth” through avant-garde editing, special

effects, and meticulously designed mise-en-scene. Despite the inclusion of a pop song early on in the

film, little else adheres to the Hollywood or commercial film style, which emphasizes spatial-temporal

coherency and narrative efficiency. Instead, the mise-en-scene creates a world through its architectural

and costume design consistency, as well as its technological imagery. The images from the beginning of

the film may have been familiar to 1967 audiences, but when the image drops into its red inversion of

heat and light, we see the birth of Industrial Light and Magic and Lucas’s desire to create a world that is

completely unlike our own, even if it is based on true stories, desires, and fears.

Despite his rekindled success with the “Star Wars” space operas, this experimental student film

led to the feature “THX 1138” in 1971, and it was an inauspicious start for this filmmaker. Many of the

images from “Electronic Labyrinth” are used in “THX 1138,” which transforms them into a narrative

feature film. The visual consistency of “THX 1138” with the previous film, on the other hand, hampered

its commercial appeal and revealed Lucas to be a cold science fiction filmmaker, if well-versed in his

craft. “Modern society is a rotten place thing, and by God, if you’re smart, you’ll get out and try to

escape,” Lucas writes about the film. Start an alternative civilization above ground, out of the sewer you

find yourself in.” And, while the film would go on to become a cult classic, it was a commercial flop for
Warner Brothers. Despite the fact that “Star Wars” marks a return to science fiction for this filmmaker,

the Joseph Campbell-influenced space opera is nothing like the dystopian political critiques of

“Electronic Labyrinth” and “THX 1138.”

Despite Lucas’s early career’s drastic transformation, the premises developed in “Electronic

Labyrinth” shaped Lucas’s subsequent films and the Hollywood industry’s future. In “American Graffiti”

and the “Star Wars” films, Lucas created rhetorically deft critiques of industrial society that cleverly

continued the Marcusian critique found in “THX” through much more commercially viable films.” And

while Lucas’s subsequent films may be less conceptually difficult, they demonstrate the same close

attention to the design of a world that Lucas develops in “Electronic Labyrinth,” leading him to create

Industrial Light and Magic for “Star Wars.” Lucas’s brilliance for world building is revealed in “Electronic

Labyrinth,” which he created because no company or technology existed to assist him in realizing his

vision. Understanding the path from “Electronic Labyrinth” to Industrial Light and Magic demonstrates

how Lucas’s student film paved the way for a radical new vision of the cinematic medium that would last

decades.