Use of Sound in To His Coy Mistress At first glance, Andrew Marvel's poem "To His Coy Mistress" is a 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 marriage. Today the speaker's speech may seem sexist in his attitude towards women and irresponsible towards the demure lover (the speaker does not explain how he would seize the moment if the woman became pregnant, for example). However, 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 gender or relationship involvement) should savor the pleasures of the moment. For the poet, there are two types of attitude towards 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 enjoyed or evaluated based on their impact at that time. The lover would like to postpone sexual intercourse (theoretically until she and the speaker are married). The speaker wants to consummate their physical relationship now. Each point of view has its reasons, and certainly the woman in the poem stands to lose practically because of premarital sex. Marvell, however, is not suggesting that unbridled lust is preferable to moral or ethical restraint; sex is the topic, not the theme of the poem. Marvell's real point here is that instead of dividing our lives or our 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 irre...... middle of paper ......g up and slowing down the tempo, the irregularities of the speaker's meter create a melody that substitutes the rough spondaic meter for the iambic softly regular tetrameter. After reading (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 work of philosophy. Its 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 according to a neatly divided clock or calendar. We cannot control whether life follows death, nor should we try to do so by fantasizing about the future, but we can control every moment we are alive: every erratic, spontaneous, surprising moment.