In the beginning of the poem, the speaker explains to his mistress how much he would love to live forever just to admire her every beauty and show her how much he loves her.
He goes on to explain that he has loved her even prior to the start of eternity and even if she resists his love, he still will not mind and his love for her will continue to grow. A few lines later he continues to talk about his everlasting love. He begins to divide his love up between her body parts.He promises to her that he will dedicate a hundred years to her eyes.
Then he tells her that he would dedicate two hundred to each breast. Here you begin to see how his mind begins to shift toward sex. He begins to shift his thoughts from her eyes to her body. He is very nonchalant about it. After the comment about her breasts he says and thirty to the rest.
He is trying to be smooth about it, but in the next stanza we begin to see his patience giving out.In the second stanza he goes from being the person that you could spend eternity with to a person whose time is coming to an end fast. He says that time’s chariot is hurrying near. This line sets the standard for the next stanza.
This stanza is a little faster, and you can see that the narrator does not put as much thought into what he is saying. He then proceeds to tell her that they have eternity to be together, but her beauty will not last forever. It seems like he’s starting to become less and less patient. He then murmurs that the worms are going to take her virginity, which is followed up by him saying that his lust is going to go to the grave with her. Now he is becoming pretty desperate.
In the third stanza the narrator loses all hope. He is now on the verge of total distraction. In this stanza he tells her straight up that their attraction is going to end one day, so they need to do seize the moment.
He ends the stanza by saying that they cannot make the sun stand still, but they sure can make it run. This line wraps up the rest of the poem. In this line the guy tells her that the sun will be up soon, but we can make it run if we go now.Throughout this poem the narrator loses his patience more and more, until eventually he is ready to go.
His words go through a big change. They start out by being very compassionate at the beginning of the poem to being very anxious at the end. The message in this poem is very abstract; Marvell leaves it to us to decide; but the messages of “carpe diem” are very well shown and portrayed.–>Final Message: time is fleeting, awake and grab what it is that you want “and tear our pleasures with rough strife through the iron gates of life.
” Tearing things through the iron gates of life is like biting into life and doing what you want to do, no matter what anyone tells you to do, not family nor society and despite any barriers that may stand in your way. Just fight for what you want and never back down.