Donne, Marvell and Time
the pressure of time as an ever-present drain upon beauty, encouraging young virgins of the 17 th century to ‘go marry’ ‘when youth and blood are warmer’ for fear of ‘you may forever tarry’ and be forever alone.
The theme of female agency in both poems, and most certainly more so in Herrick’s ‘To the Virgins’, is problematic when viewed through a 21st-century lens. Each poem is characterized by female inaction, and hence requires masculine persuasion from rejection to surrender and capitulation. Herrick has no acting female role at all; the poem is entirely based upon instruction – to marry early, as the personified ‘Old Time is still a - flying’. Marvell redeems himself in some nature in that his female protagonist has made some action, in the coyness and rejection of Marvell, but the poem is still undeniably egocentric, fashioned upon Marvell himself: the first half can be redeemed for Marvell’s emphasis on the s econd- person pronouns ‘you’ and ‘thy’ for his praise of his lover, but the poem is ultimately focused on the first- person pronoun ‘I’ and occasionally the plural ‘we’. Similarly, all male submission and reverence is invalidated, for he ultimately reveals h is carnal, base desire for ‘that long - preserved virginity’. The disclosure of Marvell’s true motive enables the reader to look past the seductive lyricism, and to recognize all compliments given to his lover are surface-level and hyperbolized to a point where they are unable to be taken seriously, especially while only 100 years are to praise ‘thine eyes . . . thy forehead’ but 200 dedicated ‘to adore each breast’ . We recognize Marvell is more interested in physical, immediate love, rather than any further spiritual love, focused upon the sexualized features of a woman. Donne, however, approaches his female protagonist with more tact – while she is still being manipulated and persuaded to yield to him, Donne notes not her typified beautiful features (these are not in fact mentioned at all in the poem, a characteristic of all his poetry) but instead upon her strong will and emotional strength. In fact, Donne marks his female protagonist with more strength than himself, endowing her with stereotypically masculine attributes like cruelty and mercilessness. His mistress is gra nted an agency above Marvell’s, in that she takes action to kill the flea, and having ‘triumph’st’ is more powerful and dominant than Donne. This take on masculinity is shared with Ben Jonson’s ‘Song: To Celia’ , 8 an earlier poem (1616), touching upon the popular theme of dejection in love. Jonson adopts a longing, worshipful tone, and much like Donne, reverses the traditional power dynamic of the 17 th century. ‘To Celia’ shares similar themes of raising love from a physical level to that of spirituality: Jonson ‘will pledge’ after she ‘Drink to me with thine eyes’, a similar form of wordless, prayerful and reverent worship being that of man and God. However, Jonson returns from his spiritual love of his mistress to a physical and emotional form of powerles sness, as she returns his ‘rosy wreath’ on which she ‘didst only breathe’. Jonson’s attempt to eternalize their love beyond that of a withering rose fails, and he is left in dejection, left only with the ‘smells . . . not of itself, but thee’, much like Do nne’s failure to prompt mercy from his lover as he similarly tries to immortal ize his and his mistress's love within the flea.
While in both poems Donne and Marvell encounter the theme of time, Marvell impresses it upon us more so. The flea is only upon the arm of the mistress for an instant, before it would have hopped off, had she not ‘purpled thy nail’ with its ‘blood of innocence’. Donne was concerned with the concept of
8 See Jonson (1996).
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