The ways in which attitudes to love re explored by each poet, Shakespeare and Marvell are that they both talk about love with a sense of time. Shakespeare writes about how time is insignificant and love is everything, whilst Marvell writes that time shouldn’t be wasted when love is and they should make the most of the time they have now. But the thing that they both have in common is that they both talk about love very passionately.
In “to his coy mistress”, Marvell splits the poem into three sections with each having its own significant meaning. The first section is where he talks about his flattery and his fantasies for her. He says that time has no effect on his love for her and that he will love her for ever and that time has no effect on his love. Marvell reiterates his point that he will love forever when he says he will keep pestering her from “ten years before the flood”, until “the conversion of the Jews”. This is an effective metaphor as we know that it is nearly impossible for all the Jews to convert. This is basically saying that he will love her forever and could also be taken as exaggeration because it is so extremely unlikely that the Jews will convert. This could be quite flattering for women to read as the Jewish religion would have been very strange and mysterious almost like an alien religion these days because people were so unaware what was going on in the world. He then continues to fantasise about her and gives a description of her body. He tells us what he would do with each individual part of her body and how much time he would spend on each part. All the first section seems to be in his fantasy world and sounds very unrealistic.
In the second part of the poem he comes back to reality a bit more and says that they should waste no more time not being together. He says that time could catch up on them and she’ll