To his shy virginsSay no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The concept of carpe diem or “seize the day” is a popular poetic creed. Seventeenth-century poets Andrew Marvell and Robert Herrick address carpe diem by admonishing young virgins against timidity and procrastination. Despite differences in artifice, motif, and narrative voice, Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress” and Herrick's “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time” are unified by an urgent message. This message emphasizes that a girl should use the gift of youth while she still can, otherwise she will later regret not living. More specifically, the virgin should not remain chaste throughout her life and should renounce her virginity when young so as not to deprive herself of the pleasures of youth. The two poems share many images. Both poets personify the sun and time as looming reminders of mortality. Marvell sees the sun as the adversary of life and asks his lover to defy fleeting time by living deliberately with him, “Thus, though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make it run” (45-46). Herrick takes a more passive approach to the sun, seeing it as a sign of the inevitable passage of time: "Heaven's glorious lamp, the sun/The higher he's rising/the sooner he'll run his race/And the closer he'll be to setting" . (5-8). Herrick and Marvell also approach the entity of time differently. In the first half of "To His Coy Mistress" the speaker makes glorious promises on the hypothetical basis of having an eternity to fulfill them: "If only we had world enough and time / This shyness, Madam, would be no crime" (1-2 ). However, after the speaker records his extensive list of noble intentions, he states that it is impossible to put them into practice because “…behind me I always feel/the winged chariot of time fast approaching/and yonder all ahead we lie/deserts of vast eternity" (21-24). In contrast, Herrick does not use the image of time as a manipulative force. She actually encourages virgins to live as they see fit, as long as they recognize the existence of time and intend to use it: "Gather the rosebuds while you can / The old days are still a flight" (1-2). It is evident that Marvell takes a negative and urgent approach to these images while Herrick is calm, passive and somewhat didactic. The speakers of these two poems have different, but not necessarily opposing, agendas. Herrick seems to take on the role of a sage, giving advice to a younger generation of women, not to any one girl in particular. The speaker of Marvell's poem specifically addresses his lover, with the ulterior motive of winning her virginity. His poetry, full of promises and supplications, has the brazen intent of seduction. In the second half of “To His Coy Mistress,” the speaker invokes grotesque images of the grave, worms, and dust as a desperate attempt to intimidate his willful mistress into acquiescence, “…then the worms will try/That virginity long preserved/ And thy strange honor will reduce to dust and ashes all my lust” (27-30). In addition to broad flattery, Marvell resorts to playing on his lover's fear of death to seduce her. His message: the only fate worse than death is to die a virgin. It ignores all the repercussions of immediate physical consummation and only recognizes the backlash of never acting on sexual desire, which is a strange inversion of conventional morality. Interestingly, Marvell doesn't even once mention the prospect of marriage in this one.