SOURCE: “Simic's ‘Cabbage’,” in Explicator, Vol. 51, No. 4, Summer, 1993, pp. 257-58.

In the following essay, Miller analyzes similarities between Simic's poem “Cabbage,” Andrew Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress,” and John Donne's “The Flea.”

Charles Simic's recent book Gods and Devils, itself a kind of Dantean parody, contains poems that displace a number of other literary myths. One poem, “Cabbage,” for example, comes nicely into focus when we see its subtle parody of two well-known seventeenth-century carpe diem love poems: Andrew Marvell's “To My Coy Mistress” and John Donne's “The Flea.”

The “mistress” of Simic's poem is about to “chop the head” of cabbage “in half,” just as the mistress in Donne's poem prepares to kill a flea. The cabbage is Simic's emblem for love, like Donne's conceit, but also brings to mind the “vegetable love” of Marvell's poem. Simic's narrator makes “her reconsider” just as Donne “stays” his mistress's...