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Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”

Like Marvell’s famous carpe diem poem, Marlowe’s is a work of seduction. In contrast to Marlowe’s speaker, who attempts to convince his beloved with the enticement of leisure and material goods, Marvell’s speaker makes a more sustained argument to convince his beloved. This argument is much more direct about the sexual nature of his aims. Yet, Marlowe’s speaker is also ultimately interested in sex.

Ovid, Metamorphoses

Though different from Marvell’s poem in many ways, Metamorphoses is a valuable companion piece for the way it shows humans and gods alike pursing love in mythic, quasi-pastoral landscapes.

Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

Though written much later than Marlowe’s poem, Hardy’s 1874 novel offers an example of how Marlowe’s neoclassical pastoralism survived, in altered form, in late-nineteenth-century British letters. Hardy’s pastoral landscape is his native Wessex in the south of England.

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