The Carpe Diem Pattern in To His Shy Mistress “Seize the day. » For the cavalier poets, there seemed to be nothing else as interesting to write about as the concept of carpe diem. The form of carpe diem poetry is generally consistent, almost to the point of being predictable. Although Andrew Marvell worked with the same concepts, his modifications were carefully considered. In “To His Coy Mistress,” Marvell uses allusions, metaphors, and grandiose imagery to convey a mood of majestic endurance and to innovatively explain the carpe diem motif. Earlier carpe diem poems (such as those written by Robert Herrick in the same period) often took an apostrophic form and style that emphasized the temporality of youth. The logical extension was to encourage the recipient of the poem to take advantage of this youth to deepen their relationship with the narrator. Their theme was often dark and melancholic, beneath a bright exterior of euphony and spring imagery (perhaps to encourage consideration of the coming winter). Marvell chooses not to employ many of these techniques in the opening of "To His Coy Mistress". Instead, his images and tools emphasize how he wants his love to be quiet and prolonged. Rather than beginning by focusing on the concept of death, he opens the poem with the lines: “If we had enough people and time / This timidity, madame, was not a crime” (ll. 1- 2). He will later take on the trappings of the poem carpe diem, but he will then concentrate on the grandeur and passion of love, rather than on its instability. To begin to slow down the passage of time in his poem, Marvell references past and future events on a large scale plane. His allusions to religious scriptures...... middle of paper ......it becomes easy to say "death is coming, so we must love" without any particular impact behind the thought. Now, in contrasting the alternative to love caught in time, Marvell demonizes time into a tyrant, slowly killing us all. He then states that an escape and method to combat time is to love with passion and defy its aging effect (ll. 40-46). In rethinking the theme of carpe diem, Andrew Marvell makes his point more effectively than many other poets. work with the same ideas. Using the methods described above, he makes the ideal scene of timelessness more concrete, so that when it is swept away, the alternative seems even more frightening and imperative. In this way, it recreates an aspect of real life: death is imperative, but banalities can often make it seem distant. But invariably he will greet us all.