Poetry 2

I quite like this poetic conversation. The world would be a really beautiful place if all of our conversations had to be in iambic pentameters. Andrew Marvell’s poem had to mean something to Macleish, or else it would have been pretty lame of him to take the time to write this graceful poem in response to another one. Marvell describes his time as fleeting, always noting “at my back I always hear / time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.” He’s also calling to some mistress, basically asking her to love him like there’s no tomorrow – “tear our pleasures with rough strife / Thorough the iron gates of life.” The poem shifts to ‘if only we had time!’ to “we don’t have time, we are about to die!’ to ‘we’re going to die, we might as well do this.’ Pretty suave, if you ask me.  Archibald Macleish also points out that time is fleeting, but he is much grander in his descriptions, not just focusing on getting a woman. He mentions many beautiful scenes that make me feel like human history is flashing before my eyes. Macleish wants us to realize that we’re eventually going to reach the end with the last two lines of his poem, “To feel how swift how secretly / The shadow of the night comes on.” Time is ticking and it’s inevitable, but we can make the most of it by living up each moment, you know, yolo-ing it out. After reading Mark Strand’s response, I came across an idea that I really like – Macleish’s poem “urges us to read its lines one after another without stopping, yet insisting, it seems to me, on the integrity of each.” The way that we read his poem is just how Marvell wants us to live life. I think the overarching theme here is pretty relatable. You have to live life as if every moment were your last because it may very well be your last.