On Marvell

The seduction scene of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" becomes an opportunity for rhetorical performance: to show learning, persuasion, sophistication. These qualities masque (or compensate) for the understated exertion of force on the part of the male speaker. If it's persuasive, then the poem needs to call up values that both speaker and listener will share.

In the first stanza, the speaker adopts terms and uses figures (metaphors) of fairness, rate, value, and esteem.  The measure of love is its valuing of the other, or it would be if...

The second stanza overturns the condition of the first. Unfortunately, there is not an eternity of time to wait in adoration and suspension. This stanza picks up on the language of mortality, the body, and time's passing. Honor becomes quaint, lust ashes in the face of eventual  death.

"Now therefore" begins the third stanza. The physical body is repainted as vital, still animated with youth (sparking, transpiring). The speaker's imposition of will upon the addresse comes to seem like an invitation for shared power over mortality -- "thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run." 

Are the male and female roles here universal? Do the form, style, and trappings of this seduction distinguish it as "high culture"?