Read it through once

The first point to be noticed is Marvell's temperament. He is fundamentally a lyric poet; his sensibility is immediate and sensuous, and his imagination delights in the concrete image. Yet alongside this lyric quality there is a vein of intellectual irony, a sceptical, argumentative tone which often modifies the directness of his feeling. It is this interplay of sensuous lyric and ironic reflection that gives Marvell his characteristic ambiguity.