How A Feminist Would Criticize "To His Coy Mistress"

Despite the fact that it's only a poem, there are a number of things that a feminist could criticize in Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress". The title alone is one of them. "To His Coy Mistress" could be seen in a few different ways. For one, it could imply that the speaker is writing a letter of some sort to another man's "coy mistress". The term "coy mistress" in and of it self could also mean that the mistress is strong flirt, as the term "coy" means playful. Given the text of the poem, the speaker apparently loving the woman for her beauty, an assumption of her flirtatiousness is a potentially accurate assumption to make. The feminist could see that assumption and think that the woman the speaker is addressing is a promiscuous woman, as a mistress is a woman usually associated with a man who is cheating on his wife, another thing that the feminist would criticize.

A feminist, while the speaker refers to this woman as someone absolutely beautiful through the first stanza, may disapprove of the speaker's turn in the second stanza as he says "Time's winged chariot hurrying near/And yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity/Thy beauty shall no more be found/.../And your quaint honour turn to dust,/And into ashes all my lust.". He is basically saying that as the years go on, her beauty will fade, as will his desire for her. The feminist would look at that and say that the man is shallow and petty for only caring about her outer beauty and neglecting her inner beauty.

Given that this poem was written approximately four hundred years ago (upon looking at his Wikipedia page, I had discovered that he lived in the 17th Century) and that feminism wasn't a concept that emerged until the 19th Century, this poem might be an easy criticism for a feminist looking upon it four hundred years after it was written. Regardless, there are still the major elements of the poem that the feminist would shun, despite the time period "To His Coy Mistress" came from.