To Her Brazen Suitor: a response

To Her Brazen Suitor

My coyness is no crime of mine

As this world turns with planets align.

We could sit and talk of our lives all day

So long as you never think to stray.

My heart is thorny like a rose’s stem

But could you keep me like a rare gem.

My mind will not change on such matters

You claim. This is not like the hatters

Where you choose, wear, and discard

Each new adornment. You would leave me scarred

With what you want. I must say no

For you, my love would not grow.

Should your vegetable love shrivel and shrink

Smaller than diamonds, I would not blink.

Were we immortal with centuries to gaze

You would ne’er set my world ablaze

For though you would praise my breast

And my breath, my limbs and the rest

I would wonder about the care for my heart

Of which you mention little. You start

To praise my eyes and gaze but fail

To praise my mind. It is a tale

Your love for me when all you see

Is my body. You hold no love for me.

You say I would show my heart the last,

Age after age of praise to my parts cast.

Love for my form is not what I wish

But love for my mind and heart. How selfish

You are to claim to love me when

You prod and poke at my virginity again.

To hear Time’s wingèd chariot near

Means little to me if you held me dear.

I will age as all humans do

And my beauty will fade, that much is true.

That does not mean your lust I crave

For I will not take your name to my grave.

My body is mine or to another I give

But I’ll not have you so long as I live.

            Turn your gaze from me now

For your touch, no, I’ll not allow.

The sun would sooner collapse

Before I ever gave you any scraps.

You will find no pleasure in my embrace

As your words have poisoned your grace.

The world would crumble and burn yet

And my honour you still would not get.

For my third and final unessay project, I wanted to do something with Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress. It took me a while to think about how I was going to go about this but ultimately decided to write a response to the poem from the perspective of the mistress in question. I thought about printing my version out and putting it within a border but couldn’t decide what the border would be; if it would be characters from Paradise Lost, just to tie the section together, or some random design. Ultimately, I decided against that, partly because my printer isn’t working and I can’t get to another one, and partly because I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to actually portray in the border. I could have written the poem out but that didn’t seem like a great idea as my handwriting can be pretty terrible pretty quickly and because when I write freehand, as I would have refused to write on lined paper, my font rapidly changes and the sentences start to curve downwards.

I started off by rereading Marvell’s poem and then doing a lot of counting. I wanted to write my poem in a similar fashion as his poem though with more modern vocabulary as I can’t decide when thy, thee, thou, and thine are properly being used when I’m used to you and your. I found that he had 46 lines, one stanza, rhyming couplets throughout the entire poem, and generally 8 syllables per line. There is some fluctuation in the syllable count but only by one in either direction. I already knew that 46 lines is more than I normally write when it comes to poems of a fixed sort of form but I found myself pretty distressed by it. I wanted to try and keep at least a few of the references within my poem so I wrote lines next to/based on the lines of Marvell’s work. Throughout the entire poem I had to use Rhymezone and another rhyming website, both of them, Rhymezone especially kept giving me words that most definitely didn’t rhyme with the word I gave it.

I couldn’t think of where to start and actually ended up writing the last couplet first. I think I did that because Marvell’s lines of “And your quaint honour turn to dust, / And into ashes all my lust” offended me in some way. After I wrote that I wrote the first couplet where the first line matched closely to the second line of To His Coy Mistress where both lines speak of coyness and it being/not being a crime. From there I decided to write about the section where Marvell compares his love to a vegetable. The entirety of my poem is just a lady being utterly unimpressed and annoyed at the audacity of this man trying to coax and demand her virginity with flowery words and insults to her worth as a human being. For the rest of the poem, I wrote things kind of out of order. Mostly I wrote it last couplet, first couplet, vegetable love to as long as I live, everything in between line three to the previously mentioned section, and then I filled in the rest. My brain did not want to work in the slightest for the last 20 lines I had to write. And then finally, I wrote the title.

My explanation of “Why does literature matter?” is going to be the same as the second unessay because I like what I wrote. “I think [literature] matters because it passes along history and myths and ideals of times past. It allows us to relate to the story being told, either by pointing out that it matches something in your life or by pointing out something that you’ve never experienced. It allows you to see into the mind of at least one person whose opinion and knowledge of that time were strong enough or well composed to the point that their work didn’t vanish into the ether but instead made its way to your eyes and ears. Literature matters because it is history, opinion, and [the] determination of a person that made itself to you.”