['Coy Mistress']
> Yes. That's an easy one.
Easy to parse, maybe not quite so easy to catch what its curious tone is meant to convey. It bears somewhat the same relationship to its straightforward (ostensible) genre as the Quodlibet in the Goldberg Variations does to 'Kraut und Rueben'.
Thought experiment: Would a contemporary reader have smiled at the phrase 'vegetable love'? If so, would it have been for the same reasons that we do?
Actually, the Bermoothes poem seems quite straightforward to me: a performance of a different type, for a different audience. Marvell in his echt-Proddie mode, playing it absolutely straight. His more Cavalierish texts like 'Coy Mistress' seem far more tricky, and to use an overused word, ludic.
The Horatian Ode on Cromwell is worth reading. Some of the references are obscure, unless you happen to be an English Civil War re-enactor (as in some sense we all are, of course). And clearly Marvell's own feelings are complex: he admires Cromwell but also rather admires Charles Stuart, in a different way, and for different reasons.
But his presentation of these complex feelings is not itself complicated or equivocal, and it never makes you wonder just where his tongue is in relation to his cheek.