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What figurative language does Andrew Marvell use in "To His Coy Mistress"?

Marvell uses several types of figurative language in this poem. In the first stanza, he describes the way in which the lover who narrates the poem would pursue love languidly and without rushing if time were no object. The lover compares his love to the slow growth of a vegetable: "My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires and more slow." His love would increase as slowly as empires grow and would become as vast. "My vegetable love" is an example of a metaphor, as is the comparison of the growth of his love to the growth of empires. In the second stanza, he uses other metaphors to explain that time is rapid and forever proceeding. He says that he can always hear "Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; / And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity." In these lines, he compares time to a chariot that is traveling quickly by him, as if it were carried by horses, and he says that eternity is a vast desert filled with nothingness. These two ideas are both metaphors.


While his mistress is young, the lover thinks they should pursue love. He says that "youthful hue / Sits on thy skin like morning dew." In this simile, he compares the freshness of his mistress's skin to morning dew. He says that he and his mistress should act like "amorous birds of prey," a simile. He also suggests that they tear through "the iron gates of life," a metaphor in which life is compared to a walled area through which they must burst. In the last two lines of the poem, he says, "Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run." This is an example of personification, as the lover suggests that he and his mistress cause the sun to race and hurry, as if the sun were a person. 

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