Love and Time

“The Gilded Six-Bits” by Zora Neale Hurston, “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed” by Edna St. Vincent Millary, and “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell all look at love in relation to time. Each author views this relationship in different lights, a plausible result considering that each work was written in a different time period and by individuals from varying social groups.

Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is an argument poem in which the speaker pleas for his mistress to seize the day. The poem is really three distinct arguments, each separated into sections by indention. The first argument (lines 1 to 20) is that the mistress deserves to be admired for an immeasurable amount of time. The speaker suggests that his love would grow slower than an empire (lines 11 and 12) and that each part of his mistress deserves an age at least to be praised (line 17). In the second argument (lines 21 to 32), the speaker expresses the ever growing fear that their lives will expire before he is able to give her the praise she deserves. In this section the speaker’s true intentions are revealed. He talks about his mistress’ long preserved virginity and honor going to waste (lines 28, 29) as well as his own lust (line 30). The final section concludes that because their time is so short, the mistress must throw her coyness aside and dive into love. The author uses a great simile when he says they ought to us there time together now rather than letting it waste agonizingly away in the bird’s “slow-chapped power” (line 40). The speaker’s final plea is to love as much as you can today before it is gone.

In “I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed” Millary says that timing and proximity play a role in love. In the octave of this Italian sonnet, the speaker explains her emotional situations: she is anxious as a result of “all the needs and notions” associated with women (line 2). In line three the author uses the word propinquity to describe one of the forces that attracts her to the subject. Propinquity means nearness in proximity or time. To me, this clearly says that she is attracted to this guy because he is good looking and he is in the right place at the right time. At the sestet, however, the mood of the sonnet changes as the speaker reminds the subject that although she may have been thinking with her heart rather than her head, the fact remain that her emotional attachment was just for her time of need. The overall relationship between love and time in this sonnet is that love is sometimes based on proximity, which is short lived

In “The Gilded Six-Bits”, time is portrayed as both enemy and healer. The story is about an African-American couple who live in a well to do African-American neighborhood. Joe, a night shifter at the local fertilizer plant, is deeply in love with his wife Missie May. Their love is evident in the mock fights they get into: Joe throws silver dollars into the front door every Saturday afternoon when he gets home from work, and Missie May gets “angry” and investigates to find it was her husband. One night when the acid runs out at the factory, Joe comes home early to find his love in bed with the new ice cream parlor owner. Hurston’s eloquent figurative language paints time as the betrayer of his trust; she writes:

“The shapeless enemies of humanity that live in the hours of Time had waylaid Joe. He was assaulted in his weakness.” (369)

Joe’s response to the calamity was odd: he did not leave Missie May yet he seemed remote and she was in agonized by his silence. Several months passed with little conversation between the two of them. Missie May felt empty without the affection of Joe, and Joe was obviously upset by Missie Mays pregnant belly. When the baby finally came, Joe’s mother told him it was his spitting image. After all they had been through, Joe’s heart had been mended and Missie May again heard the clank of silver dollars against the wood floors.

Although each story describes the relationship between time and love, each has its own distinct opinion of that relationship. Regardless of how we define the relationship, there is no doubt that time and love go hand in hand.