Use of Sound in To His Coy MistressAt first glance, Andrew Marvel's poem "To His Coy Mistress" is a fairly typical carpe diem poem, in which the speaker tells his beloved that they should "seize the day" and have sex now instead of waiting until they are married. Today, the speaker's speech may seem sexist in his attitude towards women and irresponsible in his attitude towards the shy mistress (the speaker does not explain how he would take advantage of the opportunity if the woman became pregnant, e.g. example). Yet if we look beyond the limited perspective of the speaker himself, we can see that Marvell is making a statement about how all of us (regardless of our gender or involvement in relationships) should relish the pleasures of the moment. For the poet, there are two types of attitude toward the present: (1) activities in the present are judged by their impact on the future, and (2) there is no future state - all activities occur in the present and can only be appreciated or evaluated based on their impact at that time. The mistress would like to postpone sex (in theory until she and the speaker are married). The speaker wants to consummate their physical relationship now. Each view has its reasons, and the woman in the poem would certainly be at risk of virtually losing premarital sex. Marvell, however, is not suggesting that unbridled lust is preferable to moral or ethical restraint; sex is the subject, not the theme of the poem. Marvell's real point here is that instead of dividing our lives or values ​​into mathematically precise but artificial categories of present and future, we should savor the unique experiences of each present moment; to convey this theme, the poet uses irregular...... middle of paper ......g to speed up and slow down time, the irregularities in the speaker's meter create a melody that substitutes the rough spondaic meter for the iambic gently regular tetrameter. By the time they have read (aloud) the entire poem, readers should be less concerned with the overall moral (or amoral) philosophy of the poem than with its musicality. Marvell, after all, is writing a poem, not a philosophical work. His use and then subversion of conventional rhyme, rhythm, and meter creates music that opposes both philosophy and anti-philosophy. Life, these irregularities remind us, exists here and now, not on a carefully divided clock or calendar. We cannot control the fact that life is followed by death, nor should we try to do so by fantasizing about the future, but we can control every moment of our life: every irregular, spontaneous and surprising..