To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell has recently become one of my favorite poems mostly due to its wordplay and tone. It is a prime example of how blinded our society has become by ideals of the past. What everyone forgets to realize is that in hindsight everything looks much more glamorous. Take that time you had one drink too many and ended up feeling sick for an entire week, for example. Or the semester you got too distracted by college-life and spent the rest of your college career trying to make up for it, or that piercing that you tried to hide from your parents until it ended up getting super infected and needed to be surgically removed. At the time, these moments were the most difficult in your life, yet now in hindsight they make for the greatest stories and have somehow evolved into some of your best memories.
Chivalry is viewed in this same way. In present time people often speak of how chivalry is an act of the past and how in the past the men were much more modest, yet this poem, written in 1681, displays the exact opposite. In this poem, the male speaker is no less aggressive than men are made out to be nowadays. Today, SOME men use social media and text messaging to ask women, to whom they barely know, for sex. (I am not stereotyping here, SOME women do this as well; however more often than not, it is men that are chastised for doing so.) And though this may be appalling, To His Coy Mistress proves that this act is not a new occurrence. The speaker in this poem does exactly the same thing, but perhaps to the woman's face or by means of a written letter.
In the first stanza, the speaker tells this woman that if he had more time he would wait for her to overcome her prudence. "Had we but enough, and time / This coyness, Lady, were no crime."(2-3) In the second stanza, he continues to tell the woman that he does not have the time being that death is inevitable and if she does not have sex with him, the worms once she dies and is buried will take her virginity, and that his lust will disappear being that it is impossible to have sex once you're deceased. "Then worms shall try that long-preserved virginity / And your quaint honour turn to dust, and into ashes all my lust; / The grave's a fine a private place / But none, I think, do there embrace."(27-32) Then, in the third stanza, he tells her that since they are young they should fornicate now, like birds of prey. "Now let us sport us while we may / And now, like amorous bird of prey."(37-38) He concludes the poem by reiterating the fact that time cannot be stopped, so they should have sex to use the time wisely. "Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run."(45-46)
To His Coy Mistress by Marvell ultimately proves that the physical act of love, or ways to obtain/achieve such love, have remained unchanged over time. Women for decades have been dealing with appalling behavior, so maybe it is time to stop romanticizing the past. Perhaps chivalry is not dead, simply for the fact that it never truly existed. Perhaps chivalry is not an act of a specific time period or generation, rather a characteristic of a good and honest man. Perhaps we should be idealizing men that treat us right, rather than men that abide by society's preconceived notions of chivalry.
