Andrew Marvell is the only puritan among the Metaphysical poets. He is a humanist, a wit and a poet. In his attitude to love he belongs to the school of John Donne and like Donne he gives importance to the intellectual elements such as witty conceits, blend of passion and thought in his love poems.
In writing love poetry, Marvell was greatly influenced by the Elizabethan poets. He has a tendency to describe his beloved in hyperbolical terms. The lover in ‘To His Coy Mistress’ says,
‘My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow’.
If the lovers really had enough time, he would spend a hundred years in praising his beloved’s eyes and gazing on her forehead, he would spend two hundred years in admiring each of her breasts, and he would spend thirty thousand years in praising the remaining parts of her body.
Marvell shows his sensuality by preferring body to soul, lust to love. His fierce and violent passion may be noted in the following lines:
‘Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Through the iron gates of life’.
Marvell believes that human passion of love suffers decay in death. So he proposes to utilize the present moment in enjoying the pleasures of life.
Like Donne Marvell blends passion with intellect and reason. ‘The Definition of love’ begins with an intellectual conceit. He says that his love was ‘begotten by Despair/ upon Impossibility’. ‘Magnanimous Despair’ alone could show him so divine a thing as love. He could have achieved the fruition of his love, but Fate drove iron wedges and placed itself between him and the fulfillment of his love. Fate grew jealous of two perfect lovers and did not permit their union, because the union of two lovers would mean the ruin of the power of Fate. Finally, he describes the love between him and his mistress as the conjunction of the minds and the opposition of the stars.
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