Let's Make Much of Poetry

Herrick treats in "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time", the same theme as Andrew Marvell in "To His Coy Mistress". The primary difference is one of quality: Marvell handles the theme with more depth and a greater variety of symbolism. Herrick writes a primarily pastoral poem with little humor and less variation.

He approaches the usual subject of 'carpe diem' poems: make much of the time you have, because before long you'll be old and dead. It is not exactly clear, in this poem, what the speaker hopes to get from the woman he is speaking to. (I presume it's a woman - there's not much evidence to support that, actually.) In "To His Coy Mistress" it's obvious the speaker wants a relationship, marriage, love, and of course sex. It could be, in this poem, that the speaker is simply offering advice.

The same symbolic wheel is spun over and over in this one. "Gather ye rose-buds" he says (line 1), and the flower dies in lines 3 and 4. The "sun" is getting "higher" (lines 5-6), but will soon be "setting" (line 8). "[Y]outh and blood are warmer" (line 10), but these good times will be "spent" (line 11). Over and over again, physical images of nature in bloom, then later dead, are used. In fact, you could predict the symbolic pattern of the third stanza based strictly on a close reading of the first stanza.

Though I'm sure it was important then, this one struck me as quite boring.