STO Pe The poem takes the form of a deductive argument called a syllogism (popularized by Aristotle). The poem is structured tightly and conspicuously. The first movement begins with the premise "if" consisting of 20 lines. It is divided into movements, not stanzas. The use of tense, syntaxes, etc makes it clear that the situation in the beginning is artificial. The fact that the speech is so compact and eloquent indicates the personality and temparament of the speaker, who persuades the ladylove rigorously. The speaking voice is witty, playful, urbane and learned, but also a manipulative, calculative, insincere, exploitative oppotunist misusing his rhetorical skills. The persuasion is made by posing a threat, a warning to the lady love, which is not neatly camouflaged. Predominantly it is approached as a love poem about the tragic ephemarility of youth and human life. But, the undertone is sinister. He urges her to shed her inhibitions and give in to his advances so that they can make the most oftheir youth and live devoid of regrets. There is no: mention of eternal, immortal love, loyalty and sincerity. Sexual pleasure is an end in itself, progeny is not mentioned either. It is the speaker's appeal that makes the poem more complicated and aesthetically engaging. World and time are conflated, emphasized, reinforcing each other's significance. A comically exaggerated vision of time is presented in the poem. The flood refers to the flood recorded in the book of Genesis. The lovers’ courtship/ lovemaking could continue till the end of humanity, having started at the very beginning. Love is compared to a vegetable, with the emphasis being on slowness. Going by the tripartite division of the soul (Deanima by Aristotle)(vegetative=plants, sensitive=animals, rarional=humans), the vegetative soul is the most unglamorous form of existence, which is a far cry from intellection and celebrality possessed by the rational soul. It is thus the most nominal rudimentary form of love. The superlative quality, the rarity of the body parts of the beloved is expressed in terms of the lengtha of time that would be required to appreciate and admire them(blazon). He seeks access to the beloved's private parts as a part of this elaborate agenda. Their desirability and exquisite quality is expressed. The Heart will be the last part of her body to be revealed for it is the most inscrutable part. It is sort of a lament over his inability to master her and convince her of the urgency of enjoying herself sexually, claiming her heart to be inaccessible. It is a compliment with a sting. This picture of prolonged worship of her body is not comically hypothetical, but it is very much a conditional construction. In the first movement, time stands for leisure and staticity, showing that it was false. The second movement: the picture he has is short and comical, contrasting the inaccessible movement of divinity in the previous statement. The time available to them is limited. They are chased by time, the way a predator chases its prey. This movement is about the urgency of time, about the limited time of the lovers. Time is an active hunter and frighteningly swift. The lover is alarmed and trying to alert his love while running away.a 20/02/2024: In the second movement, time is understood to be characterized by brevity and transience. Eternity and time are expressed in terms of a measure of space, they are juxtaposed. A picture of unmediated bleakness and sameness terrifies the speaker more than the idea of the cessation of existence altogether, of annihilation and nothingness. The young lover looks upon eternity, the existence following death, as a series of deserts which are deadening and stultifying, due to the lack of intent and meaning which characterizes the present existence. His lifespan is pictured as a small space between his present position and vast stretches of deserts of eternity. He meditates on the post mortem condition of the beloved's body. He is unbothered by the possibility of the lovers uniting on the level of souls. His fixation is on the destructible aspect of the human flesh. He cannot look past the body into the realm of the spiritual. Worms are considered to be phallic creatures, that is, sinister monstrous OOcounterparts of the phallus of the lover. The beloved's insistence on bodily chastity, her virginity is regarded only as an anatomical attribute which is accessible to worms upon her death, if not accessed by the lover. Even death is polluted with sexual violence and defilement. The coy mistress is considered haughty for resisting his sexual overtures. Queynte: female genitals. The chastity is looked at in a reductive way. In Chaucer's time, lusty meant not only lascivious but also vigorous, youthfully healthy and energetic. Such lust would also die along with death.DSSS... 27/02/2024: Time, riding on the chariot, is to be conceived as a predator. The chariot signifies its swiftness. It is this aspect of time that is to be abhorred. Phaeton, a son of Apollo, wanted to drive his chariot, which was not a feat suitable for a mortal. The indulgent father relented, but the son wasn't able to control the fiery streaks, compelling Zeus to strike him dead. Time's chariot chases the poet speaker steadily to drive him to annihilation. Time can be perceived as both menacing/destructive (Chronos, associated with mortality) and beneficial (Kairos, a fleeting opportune moment) in Classical mythology. Time as holding the scythe (originally belonging to Kronos/Saturn) or sickle becomes the representative of mortality and has been transferred to the iconology of death. Kronos(the planet god) is notorious for his filiphagy, and Chronos(elongated time), by association, is also depicted as the devourer of all creation, making time the supreme destroyer. Erwin Panofsky and emblem books by Andrea EE eeOoOon7wOAlciato portrayed time as an opportunity. But the approach of time as the destroyer is to be feared. The poet speaker has no confidence in the ability of love to continue unaffected by time. In Shakespeare's sonnet 116, love is celebrated as supremely triumphant over death. The same immunity to time is to be observed in "The Anniversary" by Donne. No such promise is to be found in the poem, where the speaker urges her to give in to carnal pleasure as the only means of utilizing time. Vermiculation: In Christian art, the corpse was shown as a reminder of the inevitability of death, to inspire in people the fear of God and turn them towards devotion. But the poem harks upon the image to emphasize the attractiveness of the present world and the desirability of their short-lived youth (the trope of carpe diem), not to inspire in the beloved religious devotion and turn her away from the evanescent world of the flesh (the trope of memento mori). The rose is the symbol of the female reproductive organ, and the worm is the destructive, sinister, abominable surrogate for the phallus. Third movement: the speaker hasfabricated this message. This movement deals NALA AAI ta aat=m Ole-sSX-10) N20 (om aM eS) mer] ST time tending towards eternity (hypothetical, patently artificial, comically exaggerated), and the second deals with time being the supreme destroyer. The third movement portrays time as Kairos, the opportune moment that both the lover and the beloved could seize. In one 1681 edition, "hue/hew'" in the poem is replaced by "glew" (Yorkshire dialect). The beloved is also sexually aroused, although she refuses to give in to his advances. A sexually charged soul seems to ooze out of her bodily pores. She's overflowing with sexual appetite and visibly exuding desire, which the poet speaker particularly reminds her of to convince her to surrender. "So is the will of a living daughter curbed by the will of her dead father"~Portia.a 02/04/2024: Like the poet speaker's art is tied down to his physical being (unable to transcend his material existence), the virginity of the mistress is also discussed in somatic terms, if she does not allow the importunate speaker to execute his will. The old English word coiente meant clever. In Marvell's time, quaint meant haughty, conceited or attractive. In the medieval times, it refers to the female genitalia. If we factor in this interpretation, her honour is tied to the state of her genitalia, which is undignified. The poet speaker reminds the beloved that upon death, they would lose the opportunity to enjoy themselves sexually. The grotesque joke serves also as a warning. The words in the opening movement are in the conditional and subjunctive tense. The second movement equates time with finitude, evanescence and mortality. In the third movement, the simple present is primarily used. It gives the picture of time as something that can be experienced in the immediate future or at the instant. There is an injunction to work, ani invitation to action. The beloved is described as youthful, beautiful, charming, and additionally, visibly aroused. She is stimulated to the point of sexual urges oozing out of her bodily apertures and overflowing with sexual appetite. She is refusing the poet speaker's advances only owing to societal inhibitions. She is inflamed with desire, which is quite conspicuous. He suggests her to reverse the hunter-hunted relationship and turn upon time as predators, rather than letting time prey upon and devour them by seizing the moment. The grim picture of the predatory birds of prey is indicative of the aggression which he wishes to enact. There is the conflation of images of lovemaking and hunting. In order to defeat time, they should make love aggressively and speedily, behaving with each other like oversexed birds of prey. Time's predation becomes slow all of a sudden as a contrast to the intense, aggressive, fast-paced lovemaking that the lover invites, which serves as an antidote. The picture of slow movement of times jaws, crushing creatures in its mouth, is meant to magnify the torture and prolong the agony TOthat time is supposed to bring about, is intended to manipulate the beloved into submission. A passage in Ovid's Metamorphosis, Book 15, is spoken by Pythagoras. Here, we come across a memorable picture of time as the ultimate devourer. The beloved is invited to conjoin with him and form a sphere, which would approximate to the picture of perfection. This ball is supposed to be the emblem of completion, and might also hint at the concept of the hermaphrodite. The union of man and woman would result in a complete being, canceling out each other's flaws, as detailed by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium. The lovemaking the poet speaker looks forward to is not spontaneous but should rather be proactive, assertive, and a sort of struggle in itself. The iron gate of life refers to the corporeal limits and boundaries of the body that entraps the soul. In some editions, the word gates is changed to grates, suggesting the bars of a prison. They have to make the most of the time presented to them in order to defeat time. He is under no illusion that he can affect the course of time.t 4-4. 28 ae om nade er pl a oop. _is i sa ppt ! a — SENS =. Y"Sv renee He a . ena SS 7 Saray inanal tins te ___» ieee —————— wha ; ee taninas tune mnbatylinsontt tae ” a ~ eZ? 9 2 poe