Brotherly Advice

If the speaker of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” could see the speaker of William Carlos Williams’ “Portrait of a Lady,” he would laugh, but it would be a brotherly laugh. Both of these poems are dialogue between a man and a perspective lover. In Marvell’s this lover is the “Mistress” from the title; in Williams’, it is the “Lady.” It seems that both speakers have the same goal of seducing their respective women but Marvell does so with ancient grace and eloquence while Williams falls flat on his face, stumbling for words and ultimately making no progress.
Marvell’s compliments grow as the poem progresses. He would adore his mistress’ eyes for “an hundred years,” each breast for “two hundred,” and finally “thirty thousand to the rest.” He takes the mistress, and the reader, on a visual journey starting in India, traveling back in time to the great Biblical flood, and through “the iron gates of life.” Contrarily, Williams’ poem is unable to progress past the initial image that he presents: “Your thighs are appletrees / whose blossoms touch the sky.” He does make his way down the body of his lady addressing her thighs, knees, and ankles, but once he’s gotten to the bottom, the lady, again, interrupts his description asking “Whose shore? Whose shore?” causing the narrator return to the beginning of the poem reiterating in frustration, “I said petals from an appletree.” Thomas R. Whitaker pinpoints the reason for Williams’ stumbling as “the sequence of initial composition and sardonic question or retort.” He notes that it is this distraction that “carries the speaker beneath such decorative surfaces [the decorative surfaces that Marvell is able to achieve] toward an inarticulate contact.” The speaker’s goals of seduction with beautiful rhetoric are distracted and he is forced to resort to “defend[ing] himself.”
Critic, Mordecai Marcus, claims that “far as I can determine no one has noted the particular nature and function of the overlapping references to [Fragonard and Watteau}.” However, the answer may lie in Whitaker’s observations from the poem. The narrator’s initial path has become misaligned. He may have planned on rolling through his compliments and straight into his lady’s arms, like Marvell’s narrator, but instead he is thrown off his track. The confusion the narrator concerning the two painters may be one of Williams’ ways of showing the reader how misaligned the narrator has become. The constant questions and other interruptions make it impossible for the narrator to compliment the lady in the same manner as Marvell’s narrator.
Marvell’s narrator’s laughter and Williams’ narrator would be the laughter of an older brother, watching his younger, less experienced brother try to ask a girl out on a date. Marvell’s narrator knows the way to get what he wants. He is able to flee “time’s winged chariot” and run for safety in the bedroom. Williams’ narrator can’t quite even seem to take his lady to a metaphorical beach without getting tripped up in questions like “Whose shore?” Marvell’s narrator, as well as Thomas Whitaker, would have one piece of brotherly advice for Williams’ narrator: Don’t let the woman speak, she will only distract you from your true goal.
And, possibly also, don’t start with her thighs.