Wednesday, October 6, 2010
Coy Mistress: hyperbole
In To His Coy Mistress, Marvell employs the use of several literary devices to employ string emotions felt. Moreover, one of the most prominent, and central types of literary devices used is hyperbole. Marvell uses hyperbole to express his emotions for his mistress, for example the distances that he is willing to travel for his love. "Thou by the Indian Ganges side" is a hyperbole because his mistress is not truly in the Ganges. Moreover, Marvell's employs juxtaposing hyperbole to understatement in his first two paragraphs. For example, the hyperbole in part one is juxtaposed to the understatement in part two of how time will age his "beautiful" mistress into and ugly, unattractive being. This is juxtaposed because in part one he says that he spends so much time investing into his mistress loving her, but in part two he says time will age her.
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I completely agree with levy on this one. Marvell does use the literary device "hyperbole" multiple times throughout his poem to help stregthen the narator's love for his mistress. I really like Levy"s connection of juxtaposing hyperboles, it is something I could not point out previously. I believe he uses these juxtaposing hyperboles to show how time can be a negative aspect towards a loving relationship. It can easily be the "kill factor" to a promising relationship of a couple. So, the narrator uses this form of juxtaposition to illustrate how time is killing his own relationship with his "coy mistress".
ReplyDeleteYour juxtaposition between the hyperboles in the different stanzas is a really interesting point of analysis. I agree that hyperbole is a very important element to this poem, most importantly because it creates the drastic changes in emotion between the stanzas. These sudden leaps of emotion are central to the poems theme of carpe diem. I think you did a great job on this blog post; however, a couple things you should consider are how the changes in hyperbole are related to the tonal shifts and what Marvel’s ultimate purpose for having juxtaposing elements of hyperbole in the different stanzas.
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