…And while thy willing soul transpires
Willing! You think me willing?
And that my soul transpires…
T’were nearer the mark to assert
my body glows with rage
At every pore with instant fires,
Blushes at first
when I your base desires
didst early espy but soon
‘twas anger coloured my face
Now let us sport us while we may
Sport you say
with you the hunter
and no doubt I the prey
but you have made me furious
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
I refer you to my previous stanza
furious not amorous
– we or I at least – are not animals
forever chasing food or mating
Rather at once our time devour
You see you even now confuse
the act of mating
with that of eating
but I will not join you at your table
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
An age at least
would be too long
to tarry in your lascivious presence
in fact I will not waste another hour
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
My strength will henceforth
be employed in resisting
your siren call
and enjoying sweet silence
when you are gone
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life
Oh snake I see you now
taking my maidenhood
with rough strife
no thought to later
make me your wife…
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run…
Enough! Begone you tiresome poet
you can’t try your wiles on a Yorkshire girl,
a girl from Hull – and you should know it
and yet…
when you are gone…
you will leave a lacuna…
© Andrew Wilson, 2024
We studied the poet Andrew Marvell at school and I suspect that more than one of us callow youths committed the poem “To His Coy Mistress” to heart in case these lines of seduction might someday prove useful in our own future seduction attempts…
Having just watched Bridgerton, Season 3, I was perhaps channelling the feisty women challenging the rather weaker men in reframing this response to lines from the poem.
Written for Laura Bloomsbury in Meeting the Bar: Critique and Craft over at dVerse Poets Pub, who tonight challenges us to elaborate on a fragment of up to 13 lines from another poem – to “Elaborate Lacunae in the Fragment or Keeping Things Whole“