Marvell vs. Capcom (jk MacLeish)

I didn’t think I’d end up liking “To his Coy Mistress.” I read it about three or four times before it really started to sink in. I was particularly surprised that I felt motivated to really take in what each line meant rather than passing it off as mere dribble from a really old poem that probably says a whole lot of nothing. These lines in particular I resonated with: “Thy beauty shall no more be found/Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound/My echoing song; then worms shall try/That long preserv'd virginity/And your quaint honour turn to dust/And into ashes all my lust.” In other words, after time consumes her, his lady’s beauty will wither, and, as she lies in her coffin, she will no longer be able to hear his song, and all his efforts to seduce her out of her virginity will have been a waste. If we had all of the time in the world, he says, it’d be alright for you to be coy about having sex with me, but unfortunately, he hears “time's winged chariot hurrying near,” so they’d better get on it:

“Now therefore, while the youthful hue/Sits on thy skin like morning dew,/And while thy willing soul transpires/At every pore with instant fires,/Now let us sport us while we may;/And now, like am'rous birds of prey,/Rather at once our time devour,/Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power.”

In other words, let’s not waste any more time and get together.

Archibald MacLeish responds to this with his poem “You, Andrew Marvell.” Very forward title. Essayist Mark Strand writes that this poem was the first he’d ever read that he wished he had written himself. I’m not sure why, because there are several other poems I would prefer I had written myself over this one. Regardless, “You, Andrew Marvell” is a very lulling poem. As night slowly falls upon more and more places on earth by the hour, I get a little sleepy, and imagine everything silent as the sun slowly descends upon the hills of Arabia, or as the bustle at a Sicilian harbor fizzles down and all that remains is the setting sun steadily approaching mutedly lapping waters…I want to take a nap. Strand is right, however, when he points out there is much more to extract from this poem than the imagery of night steadily falling around the world (although the image alone makes the poem quite soothing.) One could see this poem as describing the cyclical nature of the universe. What is born will die, and from what is gone there will be birth still. One can read this poem and visualize the sun sweeping across the earth day after day for centuries; as time goes by, one civilization will fall, and  day by day the sun will shine on a slowly budding new civilization to stand in its place. Such is the nature of life itself. From the moment a person is born, there will be “the always coming on/the always rising of the night.” We are dying. We are always dying. To the darkness we came out of, we will return. This is the one rule of life. The shadow of death is ubiquitous, and it steadily consumes all people of the world; be you in the East or the West, be you in the mountains of Asia or the flatlands of the desert, it is all the same. The sun will come to bring light for a while, and then the sun will go. This happens in all places. MacLeish does not mourn this cyclical nature of life nor that of the universe itself. He merely ends it with an ellipses, signifying that he calmly awaits its inevitable continuation. After all, what is there to do? If you accept something freely, then you must too accept its accompanying conditions. It is no different with human life itself.

Marvell, however, feels a sense of urgency. He does not seem to accept this cycle. MacLeish’s poem is titled the way it is, then, for a specific reason: to say something directly to Marvell that MacLeish thinks he ought to know. MacLeish acknowledges that death or the end of things does creep up unexpectedly—“secretly,” he says, with the connotation that this cycle does indeed have little concern with the happiness or the livelihood of human beings—but he does seem to want to express to Marvell that because it is inevitable, it must be accepted calmly, and there is no need for a grudge against it. What MacLeish doesn’t address is Marvell’s insistence on seizing the day, which implies that although he accepts it, he was primarily interested in addressing Marvell’s attitude about it.

This was long as hell but I don’t regret it.