To His Mistress Going to Bed (Elegy 19) Literary Elements

To His Mistress Going to Bed (Elegy 19) Literary Elements

Speaker or Narrator, and Point of View

The narrator is an unnamed man attempting to coax his mistress into bed.

Form and Meter

Iambic pentameter, with the occasional line in loose iambic pentameter. The last couplet is also somewhat reminiscent of a sonnet.

Metaphors and Similes

The narrator uses the image of a book's cover as a metaphor for the face a woman shows to the world, and her inner secrets are akin to the book's interior.

Alliteration and Assonance

Alliteration: "Before, behind, between, above, below." (26)

Irony

The narrator ironically asserts that entering into these "bonds" with him is the true way to be free.

Genre

Love poem, elegy, parody

Setting

Seventeenth-century England

Tone

Wry, provocative, flirtatious

Protagonist and Antagonist

The male narrator might be considered the protagonist, fighting to overcome his mistress's inhibitions and sensibilities, although that casts him in too kind a light.

Major Conflict

The narrator, a man looking upon his mistress from his bed, is attempting to coax her into undressing and climbing into bed with him.

Climax

At the poem's end, the narrator reveals that he has already undressed, telling his mistress that it's her turn with a winking double entendre.

Foreshadowing

The narrator's first command for the mistress to remove a piece of clothing is foreshadowing for the time he begins to speak of complete nakedness.

Understatement

"Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy,
Until I labour, I in labour lie." (1-2)

Allusions

The narrator alludes to the biblical passage of Moses and the burning bush (Exodus 3) when he tells his mistress to remove her shoes because the space is "hallow'd." He also references America, the New World, as well as the Greek myth of Atalantea and her apples.

Metonymy and Synecdoche

"we easily know,
By this these Angels from an evil sprite,
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright." (22-24)

"Flesh" is clearly a metonym for another part of the man's anatomy.

Personification

"As when from flowery meads th’hill’s shadow steals." (14)

Hyperbole

"Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee" (33)

Onomatopoeia

N/A

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