Marvell's narrator uses hyperbole or exaggeration in this poem to try to persuade his beloved to sleep with him. He refers to his beloved as coy, meaning shy, but with the added twist of faking the shyness, of holding back to play games with him. He uses exaggeration to indicate how much time he would love spending wooing her—if that amount of time existed:
A hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
The narrator uses this instance of hyperbole to suggest to his beloved that, as mortal human beings, we do not have all the time in the world before we grow old and die. Hyperbole—two hundred years to praise each breast—is meant to showcase to the beloved how ridiculous she is being in holding out on him. Of course, he does not literally expect (or want) to spend centuries praising her body—this is figurative speech.
The narrator uses figurative language to describe death in order to persuade his beloved to seize the day. He paints a vivid picture of the beloved in death. He never uses the word death, instead relying on imagery to describe it: her "marble vault," will be silent, and worms will crawl through her corpse:
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity
Finally, he personifies the sun, which stands for time in this poem, saying we will "make him run."
No comments:
Post a Comment