Poetry Response #10

Peter DeVries' "To His Importunate Mistress" is extremely effective in his imitation of Andrew Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress".

The initial parallel yet contrast lies within the title. DeVries alters one word, the description of the mistress, changing her from a hesitant to an overbearing woman. DeVries follows the form of the original very closely, copying the couplet rhyme scheme and only deviated in the poems length, as the origional consisted of three stanzas and forty-six lines, instead DeVries' two stanas consists of eighteen lines. DeVrries also recycles a handful of lines from Marvell's work to solidify his parody for his audience, beginining with "Had we but world enough, and time,/My coyness, lady, were a crime" nearly verbatum of the opening of the original. He continues on with "But at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot, striking fear" an again very similar line, which in the original it is the turning point, but here is placed in the opening right before he shows that the poem is not, in fact, about running from time, but creditors.

DeVries takes the tone of the original, which is an urgent and convincing plea of a lover to his mistress, and transforms it into an exasperated tale of a man who has given more than he can afford to his mistress and grows weary of her demands. He twists the address to the mistress to be not about love but about the strain on his pocketbook. He complains about the sacrifices he has to make to afford such an expensive mistress, how he has to pack his lunch to pay for increased hotel rates. But he most loudly laments that though he has given her everything, once he runs dry she will move on.

In analyzing DeVries’ imitation of Marvell’s poem, his similarities served to emphasize the humor in the difference between the poems and the different take on the same subject, one eager and the other irritated.