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

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

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

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

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

Love poem, elegy, parody

Seventeenth-century England

Wry, provocative, flirtatious

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

"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.

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

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

N/A