Donne's Angel and Marvell's Mistress

Extract

[...] Therefore, Donne says that when he found the woman, he love ask, and now/ That it assume thy body I allow” 13). The physical side is merely ballast but even this solution is imperfect (15). Donne finds that even the sight of her hair overwhelms him and allows the physical to take precedence over his formerly spiritual love, saying, in nothing, nor in things/ Extreme and scatt'ring bright, can love inhere” 22). He admits that her physical charms have “love's pinnace overfraught”, a feeling Marvell seems to share when he says that he would devote age at least to every part” of his mistress' body (18). [...]

[...] He was deeply stirred by his belief in the Incarnation; the poem and Angels” seems to adhere closely to that in its conceit of the spiritual love assuming the shape of a real woman. Donne sees his love as an enduring thing. He hopes the woman will love him in return, saying, as an angel, face and wings/ Of air, not pure as it /So thy love may be my love's sphere” (609, lines 23-25). He needs the woman's love to give his own a realm to govern. [...]

[...] Marvell's poem vacillates between the longing for eternal love and the knowledge that he and his lover will both die and decay. At the beginning he conjectures what it would be like if they had “world enough, and time” to accommodate his mistress' “coyness” (Marvell 677, lines 2). He begs the reluctant woman, like amorous birds of prey/ Rather at once our time devour” (678, 38). He imagines life as a pair of “iron gates” and determines they should snatch whatever pleasures they can get (44). [...]