I have not greatly enjoyed the poems so far. The high level of misogyny in these poems makes them incredibly difficult to enjoy. The repetitiveness of the poem design is exhausting. Youth is brief, beauty fades, life is short, death is final. These guidelines are repetitive on their own, if youth and beauty are tied together, then both must be brief and must fade. Life is short and death is final. Obviously. Do you know how stupid it is to try and win over a woman by reminding her that she is going to die? Thinking about my death sends me into an existential crisis, not into your bed. Telling me that one day I won’t be beautiful? It is like they have never seen the scene in Barbie (the movie) when Barbie compliments the old woman by telling her that she is beautiful and the lady says “I know it”. Every time I watch that scene, I bawl a little bit. How dare a man insinuate that any woman is going to lose her beauty? Like Robert Herrick’s poem, To The Virgins, to Make Much of Time, and specifically when he writes:
Then be not coy, but use your time / And, while ye may, go marry / For, having lost but once your prime / You may forever tarry. (ll. 13-15).
How is that supposed to be a selling point for a marriage? Why would my beautiful fading have anything to do with you? Also, life is shorter for men than for women, because men do stupid things like throwing themselves off buildings when they are intoxicated or telling a woman that her beauty fades. These things are dangerous and almost always result in fatal injury. Yes, I am running low on youth, but marrying or sleeping with a man and having to deal with all of that will only run my youth dry quicker. To wrap this up, I would have to say that the poems of seduction, at least, have been very disappointing.