In 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know (2010), John Sutherland uses Andrew Marvell’s poem “To his Coy Mistress” to illustrate the idea of ‘double bind’ (pp. 132-135).

Had we but world enough time
this coyness, lady, were no crime. 
[…] 
But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near 
(L1-L2; L21-L22)

The ‘bind’ in the poem is that ‘If you [the ‘coy’ mistress] don’t submit, you’ll die withered up and unfulfilled’. But this ‘bind’, Sutherland thinks, is ‘disingenuous’. The ‘Mistress’ in the title, meaning both ‘adored virtuous one’ and ‘illicit bed partner’, already ‘gives the game away’. Sutherland suggests that if the poem were titled “To the Virtuous Woman I Desperately Want to Screw but Don’t Want to Marry”, the persona’s motivation would be more clearly expressed, although admittedly more vulgar. In a double bind situation, inequality exists between someone/something with power who binds and someone/something who has no power and is bound. In “To his Coy Mistress”, the male suitor is the empowered one, as ‘She cannot answer him with another of the most brilliant poems in the English language. Or, apparently, with the riposte: ‘Marry me, then, if you want it that badly’ (p. 133). Of course, the world has changed now.

Other literary texts Sutherland uses to discuss double bind include Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, George Orwell’s 1984 and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. 

Of interest here is a neo-classical response poem to Marvell from the mistress’s perspective by the Australian poet A.D. Hope; the poem ends with the lines: ‘(Though I am grateful for the rhyme) / And wish you better luck next time’ — see the video below. In fact, Hope wrote a collection of response poems, and “His Coy Mistress to Mr. Marvell” is one of them. This collection, then, is similar to Carol Ann Duffy’s The World Wife. Duffy’s book features works ostensibly narrated by the wives of well-known historical and fictional men, famous men reimagined as women, or women who were well-known in their own right. Some of the subjects are Mrs Midas, Mrs Aesop, Mrs Darwin, Mrs Faust, Anne Hathaway, Queen Kong, Pygmalion’s Bride, Mrs Icarus, Frau Freud, Salome, Eurydice, Penelope, Mrs Beast and Demeter.