How exactly does Andrew Marvell mock courtly love type language in his poem “To His Coy Mistress”?
The elaborate, formal compliments of courtly love are depicted not in the western tradition of Castiglione but instead are cast in the eastern (“Ganges”); moreover, the formal, stepped ritual of courtship is reduced to a plea that the woman cede immediately since the “winged chariot hurrying near” is not a symbol of heaven and paradise and eternity but of the changes brought by time itself, and therefore death.
