To His Coy Mistress - Andrew Marvell

The narrator uses the three stanzas to present his argument of love; each stanza taking a different approach. The first stanza is very slow and leisurely. The narrator expresses how he will love the mistress for many hundreds of years. "An hundred years should go to praise thine eyes..." (13-4). He is being extremely playful trying to woo the mistress with crazy, yet romantic confessions of love. The narrator goes even further to state: "But thirty thousand (years) to the rest" (16). His love is so over exaggerated that it can be interpreted two ways. The narrator is either trying to be extremely romantic, or his intentions are strictly sexual and he is saying anything to woo the mistress. By reading further, it seems as though he is more concerned with a sexual encounter rather than long lasting love. This is quite hypocritical to the first stanza which is filled with statements of long-lasting love.