These final two lines, separated off from the rest of the poem by a space and thus accentuated, offer an ecstatic song of praise to the body’s life: ‘burn incense in, and dance and sing, /oh, yes and weeping, worship in.’ In contrast to the relative restraint of the first two stanzas, the seemingly involuntary exclamation ‘oh, yes’ conjures a sense of overflowing emotion. The worship of the body involves both joy and its opposite, pain (‘weeping’), but both are rolled up in an overriding sense of celebration.
The final lines offer, as they often do in Metaphysical poetry, a kind of paradoxical resolution. The image of the body as ruined temple is ambiguous: it speaks of the self as fractured and fragmented – even destroyed – by desire, a suggestion that is perhaps supported by the ‘broken’ appearance of the last two lines. But the lovers’ ritual celebration of that body is also given the power to revive and renew. These lines emphasise the world of the senses, including smell (‘incense’) and sound (‘sing’). There is a sense of exchange between inside and outside in the figurative depiction of the lovers’ embrace: ‘incense’ is evocative of ‘in sense’, the outside world becoming inner, but it is also linked through assonance to ‘sing’, a verb that carries the idea of air/sound leaving the inner cavities of the chest and becoming part of the outside world.
Similarly, clever phonic echoes and assonantal patterns bind together different, sometimes contradictory ideas explored over the poem. ‘Sing’ harks back to a title of one of the speaker’s imaginary books, ‘To Sin’, thereby reconfiguring bodily shame as celebration, and frustrated literary creativity as fulsome creative expression. ‘Worship’ points back, through ‘ship’, to the ‘Northern seas’, presenting desire (like poetry) as a journey of discovery that is transformative to self and other. On one level, the roles ascribed to the lovers, with the female speaker as temple and her lover as archaeologist/adventurer would seem to replay the gender norms found in poems like Marvell’s. But the absence of pronouns in these lines suggest that the separate identities of the lovers are submerged and altered (altared?) in their shared celebration of the speaker’s body.
‘From his Coy Mistress’ comes from Deryn Rees-Jones’s second collection of poetry, Signs Round a Dead Body (1998). The name of this collection might seem to signal a preoccupation with loss and/or poetic language as a series of mysterious signs or clues – themes that frequently resurface in Rees-Jones’s work.[1] But in fact this book is perhaps more centrally concerned with the life of the body and with making the body live, in all of its contradictions and vibrancy, through the medium of poetry. It also offers an extended meditation on erotic love, charged with personal feeling yet laced with irony, and – in fitting with Rees-Jones’s scholarly interests – explores the construction of gender identity in and through poetry. ‘From his Coy Mistress’ exemplifies many of these concerns.
This poem, then, can be seen as ‘writing back’ to a male-authored tradition of love poetry that worshiped women as a muse without really allowing space for the expression of their own desires.
At the beginning, the speaker parodies and ultimately undermines the whole idea of female ‘coyness’ by ‘overdoing it’, turning coyness into a forceful dramatic art in itself (just as Marvell’s speaker ‘overdoes’ the role of ardent male lover, to great effect). And as the poem progresses and the speaker gradually reflects on, and embraces, her imaginative and sensual longings, she becomes anything but ‘coy’ – expressing instead a mutual physical desire that is equated (through the incense) with prayer and creativity.
Through its references to Marvell’s poem, ‘From his Coy Mistress’ can be seen as a consciously intertextual piece of writing – that is, it crafts its meaning in relation to another text. Rees-Jones has herself noted in relation to other women poets that their ‘use of intertextuality, while not necessarily always parodic, can almost always be read in terms of its potential for subversion.’[2] The subversive potential of this poem lies in its tendency to open up new perspectives on past and present. Rather than rejecting a male-authored tradition completely, it transforms the love-language of the Metaphysical poets from within, to give new voice to women’s creativity.
[1] Her book Quiver (2004), for instance, reworks the poetic murder-mystery genre pioneered by Rees-Jones’s friend, poet Gwyneth Lewis. See Lewis’s Y Llofrudd Iaith (1999) and the English version, ‘The Language Murderer’, in Keeping Mum (2003).
[2] Rees-Jones, Consorting With Angels, p. 17.