"The Anniversary" And "To His Coy Mistress": The Synchronicity Of Pen And Life

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now progressed so smoothly, as all good fantasies must if they are to
be successful. We begin to question this world of Marvell's creation and
see the enigma that lies within the term "lower rate." We have been
hearing of an agonizingly slow mating ritual, Marvell has been patiently
dancing around his mistress, praising her every aspect with a devotion that
approaches what one would offer to the divine. How, we ask, can he slow
down to a "lower rate?"
This is not the only striking aspect of the first stanza. We know
that Marvell is speaking of a state we are unfamiliar with and in its
unfamiliarity lies the force of his argument. The unfamiliar weaves in and
out of our notion of the familiar as we seek to understand Marvell's
position. We know, on one cognitive level, that in this state an aeon is
insignificant, yet we lay on it the import we would ascribe to an aeon in
the human sense. For the beings Marvell speaks of, ages pass by as
minutes; indeed we acknowledge that ...

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ground. In this manner the
beginning of his lament at the fleeting nature of time does not jar us as
it wakes us from our daydream in the land of the eternal.
We find Marvell now occupying the role of a pharmacist. He has
become one who is aware of his mortality and of the advance of time. Time
now becomes an enemy to be feared, an enemy who is closing down on us, and
the eternity that he earlier facilitated the requisite offering to his
mistress now becomes a vast desert. It is ironic that to understand ‘
deserts of vast eternity' we call upon that very conception of the
monotonous which we have failed to apply where it would be most apt. It
would seem that a lover, any lover, ...

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