Considering the poem as a whole, does the speaker seem playful, or serious?
What will be an ideal response?
- This fifth question presents an easy dichotomy, but of course Marvell’s speaker is both playful and serious. In making clear the tone of the poem, a useful poem for comparison is Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd.” What are the two speakers’ attitudes toward love? Marvell’s seems more down-to-earth, skeptical, and passion-driven: a lover in a fallen world, not (like Marlowe’s shepherd) a lover in a pastoral Eden.
If later on, in teaching figures of speech, you want some great lines for illustrations, turn back to this inexhaustible poem. There’s hyperbole in lines 7–20, understatement (“But none, I think, do there embrace”), metaphor, simile, and of course the great personification of chariot-driving time.
Telling a class that Marvell was a Puritan usually shakes up their overly neat assumptions. Some may be surprised to learn that one can be a Puritan and not necessarily be puritanical.
Defending the poem against charges that its logic is fallacious, a contemporary critic, Richard Crider, has shown that “the speaker’s appeal is not merely to the lady’s passion, . . . but to a more inclusive and compelling value—completion and wholeness.” A good student of Aristotle’s logic as well as Aristotle’s ethics, Marvell’s speaker calls on his listener to exercise all her human powers, among them reason. “Although no single net will capture all the resonances of the final couplet, near the heart of the passage is the thought of living life completely, in accordance with natural law” (“Marvell’s Valid Logic,” College Literature [Spring 1985]: 113–211).
Language Arts & World Languages
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Language Arts & World Languages
Has the twins or my father arrived from New York yet?
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Language Arts & World Languages
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Our teacher is really sick today. What will be an ideal response?
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