Although composed centuries apart, John Donne’s “Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed” and Marge Piercy’s “The Cast Off” share a common theme and method of implementation. Both poems use paradox, expressed through diction, metaphor and imagery, to uncover and praise their central figures—for Donne his female mistress and for Piercy everyday, inanimate objects. However, Donne uses paradoxical language and imagery in his treatment of secular love as sacred love to seduce and coax his object of desire and, in doing so, seeks to gain power and agency over her. In contrast, Piercy uses paradox to praise inanimate objects and, in the final strophe, a female figure as well. Through her chosen diction, she employs them both with power and agency—rendering them the subjects not objects of her poem.
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