To His Coy VirginsSay no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get an Original Essay The concept of carpe diem or “seize the day” is a popular poetic credo. Seventeenth-century poets Andrew Marvell and Robert Herrick attacked carpe diem by warning young virgins against timidity and procrastination. Despite differences in device, motif, and narrative voice, Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" and Herrick's "To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time" are unified by an urgent message. This message emphasizes that a young girl must use the gift of youth while she is still able, otherwise she will later regret not having lived. More precisely, the virgin must not remain chaste throughout her life and must renounce her virginity when she is young so as not to deprive herself of the pleasures of youth. The two poems share many images. Both poets personify the sun and weather as looming reminders of mortality. Marvell sees the sun as the adversary of life and asks his mistress to defy fleeting time by deliberately living with it: "So even if we cannot make our sun stand still, we will make it run." (45-46). Herrick takes a more passive approach to the sun, seeing it as a mark of the inevitable passage of time: "Heaven's glorious lamp, the sun/The higher he rises/The sooner his race will be run/And the nearer he will set" (5 -8). Herrick and Marvell also approach the entity of time differently. In the first half of “To His Coy Mistress,” the speaker makes glorious promises on the hypothetical basis of having an eternity to fulfill them: “If we had enough people and time/This coyness, Madam, would not was not a crime” (1-2). However, after the speaker records his long list of noble intentions, he claims that it is impossible to act on them because "...behind my back I always hear/The winged chariot of time rushing /And there before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity.” (21-24). On the other hand, Herrick does not use the image of time as a manipulative force. He actually encourages virgins to live as they please, provided they recognize the existence of time and intend to use it: "Pick rosebuds while you can/Old times are still flying” (1-2). It is evident that Marvell takes a negative and urgent approach to these images while Herrick is calm, passive and somewhat didactic. The speakers of these two poems have different, but not necessarily opposing, agendas. Herrick seems to be playing the role of a wise man, giving advice to a younger generation of women, and not to any one girl in particular. The speaker of Marvell's poem addresses his mistress specifically, with the ulterior motive of gaining her virginity. His poetry, full of promises and supplications, has a blatant seductive intention. In the second half of "To His Coy Mistress", the speaker invokes grotesque images of the grave, worms, and dust as a desperate attempt to intimidate his stubborn mistress into acquiescence, "...so the worms will try/This long-preserved virginity/And your old honor will turn to dust, and to ashes all my lust” (27-30). In addition to much flattery, Marvell uses his mistress's fear of death to seduce her. His message: The only fate worse than death is to die a virgin. It ignores all the repercussions of immediate physical consumption and only recognizes the negative consequences of never acting on sexual desire, which is a strange inversion of conventional morality..