Human Mortality in "To His Coy Mistress" and "The Bull Moose"
Summary:
The poems "To His Coy Mistress" by Andrew Marvell and "The Bull Moose" by Alden Nowland both meditate on the meaning of death. While Marvell romanticizes death, Nowland takes a realistic approach.
Despite the way that either Romanticism or metaphysics approaches the connection between spiritual world and human reality, there are still some alternative ways in expressing the relationship between human mortality and death. The poems "To His Coy Mistress" and "The Bull Moose" both stress death as well as the impact of death. Nevertheless, both of the two poems emphasize death and how human beings respond to death. By applying different writing approaches to romance the themes, these poems reveal very different aspects of human mortality and our attitude toward death.
In "To His Coy Mistress," Marvell presents the relationship between death and human mortality in a more romantic mode: "My vegetable should grow." The metaphor "vegetable" represents the life - long love with healthy essence that the speaker wants to hold. Also, in "To His Coy Mistress", the speaker's mind changes from line to line to express his increasing demands that love is not the only thing he desires. When the speaker realizes there are more things he can get beyond the limited life time, a sexual request is sent to the coy girl. Nowlan creates a vivid image to audiences about death and human mortality through providing violent scenes in his "The Bull Moose" while Marvell reveals death and its reality. In "To His Coy Mistress", there are two couplets mention about death, but the speaker's tone about "death" and "limited time", then, the admiration of the girl, is fulfilled in the whole poem. In "The Bull Moose", Nowlan concludes his idea about death in the last couplet. The human mortality is as same as the Bull Moose's, like the gory God crucified on the cross and the "scaffolded king, straightened and lifted his horns." Nowlan uses death to conclude his poem with the moose's mortality to reflect human beings' fate while Marvell presents human mortality by unfolding the story step by step.
The style of these two poems addresses death and human mortality in completely different ways. By describing the moose using the personification technique, Nowlan wants to emphasize the central theme of the poem: comparing his sympathy to the moose, he suggests human beings to reconsider our attitudes toward nature-the moose's freedom beyond the fence is just a mirror image that human beings are just cutting them off from the nature. In "To His Coy Mistress" Marvell used metaphors to introduce death: "the flood" and the "conversion of Jews" means the speaker wants to hold the love forever. Then, his mind changes to sexual desire because he realizes they can do more in their life time. "Carpe diem" is the best phrase to sum up the theme of this poem.
In addition, contexts of the poems had strong impacts to the way of describing the relationship between human beings and death. Alden Nowlan, who was born in 1933, achieved various jobs as a manual laborer in his entire life, which certainly influenced his way of writing style. A roaring voice appears in his work: "When he roared, people ran into their cars." In the same way, Nowlan addressed the relationship between human mortality and death through vivid language: "lurching through forest", "scaffold King" emerge Nowlan's own voice: human beings self- righteous and ignorance toward nature.
Although there are several differences between the techniques used in these poems to reveal the nature of death and human mortality, similarities are still present. Both authors use irony to communicate the central theme to imagined readers. In "To His Coy Mistress", Marvell is trying to tell more than a conventional love story, metaphysical statements introduce the theme of carpe diem in his poem. In "The Bull Moose", the author reveals that human beings attitude toward anything beyond normal social scope and civilization. "stopped at last by a pole-fenced pasture" and how ordinary people act when ordinary society meets extraordinary entities.
In conclusion, although both poems address human mortality and death, they claim different aspects by the authors. Metaphysical symbolism and humorous tone of "To His Coy Mistress" is a good example of Carpe Diem. And Nowlan's "The Bull Moose" can be considered as good allusion of human beings in the 20th century from Nowlan's perception.
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