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To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

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Poem of the week: To His Coy Mistress. The male poet strides through European literature, eloquently pleading with his mistress to seize the day, ie come to bed. We don't hear much from the mistress – unless of course we look into the subterranean streams of ballads and folk songs, which are perennially filled with the anonymous laments of those women who let themselves be seized (by jolly sailors and soldiers more often than poets, it must be said) and were left holding the baby.

In this week's poem, To His Coy Mistress, Andrew Marvell takes the conventional plea to new heights of imaginative wit. "Had we but world enough, and time …" the speaker muses, and almost at once the reader is conducted into a utopia in which this happy condition literally exists. Like a novelist, it seems, Marvell has embarked on the pursuit of that seminal question, "What if? " All the same, those flourishes of comic exaggeration issue from grave and impassioned depths.

To His Coy Mistress. Learning Zone Class Clips - Andrew Marvell: To His Coy Mistress - English Video. Learning Zone Class Clips - Andrew Marvell - 'To His Coy Mistress' (audio) - English Audio. Learning Zone Class Clips - Andrew Marvell - 'To His Coy Mistress' (poem only) - English Video. To His Coy Mistress.