Cource:M. A English
Semester:2
Batch:2016-2018
Roll No:11
Submitted to:Department of
M.K.Bhavangar
Email id:kavitamehta164@gmail.com
Paper no:8
Topic:Study of ‘To His Coy Mistress’
My assignment
What is cultural
studies:
Cultural study is a field of
theoretically,and empirically engaged culture analysis that concentrates upon
the political dynamics of contemporary culture,its historical
foundations,defining traits,and conflicts.
Cultural studies thus joins
subjectivity that is ,culture in relation to individual lives with engagement,a
direct approach to attacking social ills.Though cultural studies practitioners,
deny “humanism” or “the humanities” as universal categories, they strive for
what they might call “social reason”,which often resembles the goals and value
of humanistic and democratic ideals.
Study of “To his coy mistress. This poem To his coy mistress is
written by Andrew Marvell.Who also son of a clergy man .His most of the poem
focasis more on “love and God”.This poem to his coy mistress is also about love
and shyness of the beloved.
Andrew Marvell ‘s in this poem tells
the reader a good deal about the speaker of the poem,much of which is already
clear comments in this volume,using traditional approches.we know that the
speaker is knowledgeable about poem and convention of love poetry,such as the
courtly love conventions of medieval Europe,and about Biblical passages.
In this poem poet start with the coyness of
beloved saying that if both the lover had enough time then beloved coyness was
no crime but hence the beloved is so shy that her shyness is like a crime
because they have very less left and if they had enough time they could think
over how to pass their long loves day.Also in this paragraph use of
traditional and culture type of writing like a man was center an historical
reality ignore in them.Our culture very silence in reality,and Marvell showing
the richness of the class in this poem.
The speaker knows all of these
things well enough to parody or at least to echo them,for in making his
proposition to the coy lady,he hardly expects to be taken seriously in his
detailing.He knows that he is echoing the conventions only in order to sati
rise them and to make light of the real proposal at hand.He knows that she
knows,for she comes from the same cultural milieu that he does.
In other words,the speaker like
Marvell is a highly educated person ,one who is well read,one whose natural
flow of associated images moves lightly over details and allusion that reflect
who he is and he expect his hearer or reader to respond in a kind of harmonic
vibration.He thinks in terms of precious stones,of exotic and distant places,of
a milieu where eating,drinking ,and making merry seem to be an achievable way
of life.
Beyond what we know of the
speaker from his own words, we are justified in speculating that his coy lady
is like the implied reader,equally well educated,and therefor knowledgeable of
the conventions he uses in parody.He seems to assume that she understands the
parodic nature of his comments, for by taking her in on the jests he appeals to her intellect thus trying to throw her off guard against
his very physical requests. After all if the two of them can be on the same plane
in their thoughts and allusions,their smiles and jests than perhaps they can
shortly be together on a different and literal plane literally bedded.Thus
might appear to be the culture and the era of the speaker,his lady and his
implied reader.
But what does he not show? As
he selects these rich and multifarious allusion ,what does he ignore from his
culture? He clearly does not think of poverty,the demographics and
socioeconomic detail which would show
how fortunate his circumstances are.For example ,it has been estimated that
during this at list one quarter of the European
population was below the poverty line.Nor does the speaker think of disease as
a daily reality that he might face.To be
sure ,in the second and especially in the third stanza he alludes to future
death and dissolution .But wealth and leisure and sexual activity are his
currency,his coin for present bliss.Worms and marble vaults and ashes are not
present,hence not yet real.
Now conciser historical reality ,a
dimension that the poem ignores.
Consider dieseas –real and present disease what has been called the chronic
morbidity or the population .Alknow that syphilis and other sexually
transmitted diseases were just as real a phenomenon in Marvell's day as in our
era.What was the reality that the
speaker chooses not to think about as he pushes off death and the ‘vault’ to some distant time?
“To his coy mistress”: A new historicism reading
New historisicism is a literary
theory based on the idea that literature should be studied and interpted within
the context of both history of the auther and the history of the critic.
The execution of charles I in 1649
was an unprecedented event in English history ,and, like the rest of the
English nation , Marvell would have been actutely conscious of its political
and spiritual implications. According to the contemporary doctrine of “divine
right”, the monarch was appointed not by the people,but by the divine ordiance
of his birthright,thus any trespass against the king was a sin against God.
Yet 1649 proved the culture’s
departure from unconditional monarchical loyalty and in the wake of the
protestant reformation ,the English had a new sense of themselves as autonomous
subject.
Marvell,imdicatory of this
ambivalent historical moment ,supported the ant-royalist Oliver Cromwell as
England’s Lord Protector in the country’s interregnum government even serving as
tutor to Cromwell’s family yet also
penned a sympathetic description of the executed king.While Marvell thrived
with such judicious self posting,his speaker in “To his coy mistress”, both the
subject of the poem and a type of English “subject”, rebels unequivocally
against the monarch,suggested in lines 1-20 in the figure
of the beloved herself.
I would
Love you ten year 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.
Describing this hypothetical scenario
, the speaker employs “Petrarchan” language,excessive and hyperbolic reverence
for an elusive woman made famous in the medieval sonnet of the Italian poet
Petrarch.Maevell’s rhetorical choice is significant as it would have evoked for
his reader the Lyrics of many sixteenth century poets who incorporated the
genre in praise of Elizabeth .Yet ,beginning in line 21,Marvell’s speaker urges
and presumes physical gratification rather than insatiate yearing. While
marvell's monarch belived in his own omnipotence,this figure of the monarch,one
evoking the last Tudor line before the absolutist Stuart King ,James and charles,is denied this
kind of power.Marvell’s speaker suggest that such promises of eternal devotion
are inappropriate in a world that is governed by “times winged chariot,” the
universal experience of human mortality to which they are both vulnerable.
At the “turn” at line 21,the speaker
turn his beloved from this immortal,ideal object of reverence to a possible
co-conspirator against godlike “time”,which does hold the power of life and
death .Forewarning his mistress of “time’s winged chariot,”he gives a crude
description of her dead body in the grave:
The 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.
The speaker creates an image
of chaos and disorder .Worms will violate his beloved and his “lust” will
become “ashes”. Yet 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. The speaker’s “vegetable love” .while lush and abundant can not
aspire to become “vaster than empires”, his own future evades his control,as
its only certainty is death.
Despite his apparent sexual bravado with his
“mistress” , the speaker demonstrates an acute consciousness of his own
dismpowement throughout the poem. Ultimately ,he will enlist his beloved ‘s
complicity with his rebellious cant:in the final stanza of the poem ,the
speaker proposes a subversion overthrow of “Time” itself.
The poem concludes with an
ominous and thickly symbolic challenges to the “sun” itself a common pun for
the “son” of the monarch in contemporary literature .Perhaps here Marvell is
speaking directly of the “son” Charles 2 ,who became his father’s successor
with the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.as the speaker and his beloved
provoke this celestial object,emblematic of the monarch’s ostensible
divinity,”carpediem” becomes as much a cry of lustas one of insurrection.
With this poem,Marvell portrays
his subject as a dangerous “subject”, and in doing so evokes the discord of the
political moment.Yet he also casts compassionately his speaker’s rallying
challenges to all forms of authority one that perhaps anticipates Marvell’s own
lyrics that critiqued the Restoration government.As a poet employed by
Cromwell,Marvell was aware of his own position more broadly as a dependent
“subject”. In a broader sense ,the poem in its systematic rejection of
authority creates a possible outlet for Marvell’s own fantasy of autonomy .If
Marvell was able to be a perennially loyal subject,”To his coy mistress”
celebrates a more subversive figure who , despite being governed by the sun,has
no qualms about exerting himself against this all powerful sovereign.
“The Flea” : This poem is a remarkable metaphysical poem of john
Donne ,he makes use of a biological image of the flea for the expertion of the
theme of love.The image of the flea to deal with the theme of love ,the poem is
addresed by the lover to his beloved .The lover expresis love,purposise to her
and she refuses it because of her sense of sin ,shame and maidenhood.In this
poem also theme of love and beloved and shyness employed in the cultural
studies and also it’s a metaphysical poem.
Gujarati poem implied in cultural study:
“Kuchi aapo baijee”
Kuchi aapo baijee this poem is written
by Vinod joshi . In this poem many things like kuchi aapo,bhitethi utravo,pachikda pakdavo ,this type of many thing are use in this poem that is a
personified our culture and tradition
and reality of female life and
after marriage girls life, how female face his trouble with his mother in low
that is presented in this poem and after marriage one girl feeling how she was
connected and tell his mother inlow that words are “Marag melo baijee tame kiya kuhade vedi mara dadani vadavai ji.” With this poem,Vinod joshi portrayal for Indian culture.
This poem not related with ‘To his
coy mistress poem’ about shyness and love.But this poem full of showing Indian
tradition and culture.
Reference:
Study material
