How to See Like a Poet:
Take 200 Years To Adore Each Breast

I would need 200 years to “adore each breast” wrote Andrew Marvell to his “Coy Mistress” in 1681. And “thirty thousand to the rest” of your body.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But then he quickly puts the pressure on in the next verse, warning her that unless she returns his love,
worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust
Poets recognize romantic manipulation. And I think Marvell is wise enough to parody his own in this famous love poem.
Poets see irony. Like the soul feeling trapped inside the body,
Manacled in hands…
blinded with an eye…
deaf with the drumming of an ear…
— A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body
I love the ironies here of being “blinded by an eye” and “manacled by hands,” and “deaf with the drumming of an ear” which Marvell so quickly detects in our struggle as amphibians — flailing between flesh and spirit.
Poets hint. And I love the subtle hints he makes between little girls crying over fawns and The Church grieving over Christ’s death. Or Merry England dying in the Civil Wars and a young girl’s sorrow over a lost virginity.
Poets do math. They notice how tears can correct the false angles of mathematical eyes; and how the yearning “upward bend” of a single drop of dew can be a microcosmic heaven — -or a soul yearning to rise — -or even the manna which disappears the day after.
Poets do beauty. And I believe with Marvell that pleasure preserves piety; that truth without beauty is heresy; that nature preserves the soul, and that God is probably a hedonist who created everything for his own pleasure. And that if theologians won’t recognize the glory and fallenness of grass and dewdrops then the poets will raise their voices.
Poets see through other eyes. C. S. Lewis said that his own eyes were not enough for him, that he would “see through the eyes of others.” And Marvell helps me in doing this.