On Becoming a Poet...

His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvel and Archibald MacLeish’s response. After reading Strand’s essay and taking a closer look at the two poems clear similarities and differences present themselves. “To His Coy Mistress” is a carpe diem poem, the author comments on fleeting our time on earth is and encourages the mistress, and in turn, the reader to take life by the horns. Unlike the “heated urgency”[1] in the first poem, the response, “You, Andrew Marvel,” is less passionate, and more contemplative on the passing of time and life’s imminent end.

In “To His Coy Mistress” Marvell imagines how he would spend infinity, and then in the last stanza acknowledges that he does not have an infinity to spend and then rallies his mistress to make the most of how little time they have with the last line,  “Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run.” The response has no call to action or upfront encouragement to live life to the fullest, the author chooses to ponder the infinity of time, and how time is simply a renewing cycle of events. The last stanza of this poem reflects on this concept of the cycle of lives and time.

And here face downward in the sun

To feel how swift how secretly

The shadow of the night comes on ...

In his essay Mark Strand remarks on how influential “You, Andrew Marvell” was on him, both in his youth and later in life. Especially as a teenager when he was trying to understand life, the “poem's power to enchant carried with it an obligation to reassure.” Strand professes that all poetry has a beautiful ability. “It allows us to have the life we are denied because we are too busy living. Even more paradoxically, poetry permits us to live in ourselves as if we were just out of reach of ourselves.”

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[1] Mark Strand, “On Becoming a Poet”