In Robert Herrick's poem "To His Mistress Objecting To Him Neither Toying Or Talking," the poet provides a traditional sonnet of 14 lines, including a rhyming couplet to end the poem. In the poem, Herrick uses a number of poetic tools from metaphor to rhyme to illustrate the difference in emotion and gender when it comes to love. In the poem, the speaker protests his beloved's claim that he does not love her because he does not toy with her or talk to her to express his love. Herrick uses a number of poetical devices to express this emotional and gender difference with respect to love.
Women are conventionally perceived as the emotional sex, while males are perceived as more stoic. Herrick's sonnet opens by giving us the perspective of a male speaker who is refuting the claims of his beloved that he loves her not. As Herrick (1) writes, "YOU say I love not, 'cause I do not play / Still with your curls, and kiss the time away." Herrick (1) uses metaphor to refer to the little girl look in his beloved's eyes he cannot seem to please, "You blame me too, because I can't devise / Some sport to please those babies in your eyes." Because of the sonnet's aa/bb/cc/dd/ee/ff/cc/gg rhyme scheme, the poem is musical in its sound and rolls off the tongue, mimicking what might well be a love song of protestation and profession.
The purpose of the speaker is to convince his beloved that he maintains a different manner of expression than she expects but that this connotes nothing about his degree of love for her. As he tells her, "By love's religion, I must here confess it, / The most I love when I the least express it" (Herrick 1). We see how modern the poem's content is, with respect to gender differences in emotional expression. As Landrum (181) asserts, "Herrick recognized the ambiguities of gender and the inconsistencies of his era's beliefs pertaining to women and disrupted and interrogated them." In thi...