Sarcasm in Renaissance Poetry

For all of the sonnets praising a lover's beauty or hailing love as immortal as the rhymes that describe it, there are works of poetry whose themes stray in a completely opposite direction. Andrew Marvell's famous poem "To His Coy Mistress" takes the latter approach, satirizing love poetry in a compelling and dark portrait of the futility of remaining chaste for too long. While following poetic conventions like rhyme scheme and the structure of the verses, the content of Marvell's poem explores a darker side of courtship that is not often touched on in poems from this era.

Using a logical structure in three stanzas, Marvell creates a compelling, if not disturbing argument as to why his lover's remaining chaste for too long will result in pragmatic unhappiness for both parties. Marvell's use of sarcasm begins in the first stanza of the poem in which he introduces his argument. While maintaining the poetic conventions of the time for praising the beauty of a lover, Marvell's idealizing here speaks to the sarcastic tone of the stanza. He says that if time were no object, he would spend ages adoring different parts of her body. He says, "An hundred years should go to praise/Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;/Two hundred to adore each breast;/But thirty thousand to the rest" (Lines 13-16). The preposterous amount of time he should spend on these minute aspects of his lover's appearance speaks to the parody with which he writes these lines.

It is in the second stanza that Marvell begins to explain the dire consequences of the coquettish nature of this chaste lover. He begins with the famous couplet, "But at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrying near;" (Lines 21-22). While in the first stanza he proposes the hypothetical scenario in which time is of no consequence, he moved on to a more realistic argument in which he divines that this waiting will bear no contentment either for him, or for this coy mistress. He says, "worms shall try/That long preserved virginity" (Lines 27-28), a macabre reference to the in tact hymen with which is mistress lay buried which now only worms can enjoy.

Marvell's use of sarcasm in this poem speaks to the frustration that many men must have felt toward puritan and prudish social conventions. Using language that should be meant to proclaim the pure divinity of the beauty of his mistress, Marvell instead uses this same language in a sarcastic tone that chastises the archaic practices of a woman's affected coy nature.