With the two poems, I get two different distinct impressions on the passage of time. "To His Coy Mistress" seems to show how a life can pass by in the blink of an eye, but "You, Andrew Marvell" seems to show the creeping passage of time with phrases like "ever climbing shadow grow," and "loom and slowly disappear." Mark Strand also brings up the point that this poem is also firmly based on a theme of cycles. He mentions that the first rhymes of the poem are also its last, bringing the poem full circle back to where it began.
I can usually pick up on the baser elements of poetry, but am not as adept at the more in-depth stuff that Mark Strand obviously is. When he talked about the whole theme of circulation, I could go back to the poem and easily be able to tell what he's getting at and probably could have come up with that on my own if I had thought on it a little harder. But then he'll go deeper and say something like, "it suggests... the more tragic rise and fall of civilizations." I doubt I would have ever picked up on that. It's an intriguing point of the poem, one that definitely makes sense, just not one that I would have known on my own.
I can usually pick up on the baser elements of poetry, but am not as adept at the more in-depth stuff that Mark Strand obviously is. When he talked about the whole theme of circulation, I could go back to the poem and easily be able to tell what he's getting at and probably could have come up with that on my own if I had thought on it a little harder. But then he'll go deeper and say something like, "it suggests... the more tragic rise and fall of civilizations." I doubt I would have ever picked up on that. It's an intriguing point of the poem, one that definitely makes sense, just not one that I would have known on my own.
I agree--the pacing is so different.
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