To His Coy Mistress - Andrew Marvell
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side 5
Should’st rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews. 10
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze:
Two hundred to adore each breast: 15
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate. 20
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near:
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found; 25
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust. 30
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now, therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires 35
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our Time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapt power. 40
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Through the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun 45
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
*
"To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell is a classic carpe diem poem in which a sophisticated and mature man, the speaker in the poem, attempts to persuade his young mistress to yield to his amorous advances. Marvell lived during the seventeenth century in England, a time of radical changes in politics and modes of literary expression. For a while during the Commonwealth Period (1649-1660), drama disappeared, public theaters closed because of fears of immoral influences, and incendiary political pamphlets circulated. The Latin phrase carpe diem or “seize the day” is a very common literary motif in poetry. This kind of poem usually emphasizes that life is short and time is fleeting as the speaker attempts to entice his listener, a young lady usually described as a virgin. Poets writing carpe diem lyrics frequently use the rose as a symbol of transient physical beauty and the finality of death. Examples include Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” and Edmund Waller’s “Go, Lovely Rose.” However, Marvell’s poem is a more psychologically complicated and original treatment of this theme. The poem pretends to explore the dramatic argument situation between the man and his mistress when it really hides a concrete address to death; its gripping second section is filled with unusually bold images of sterility, rotting corpses, tombs, and a shocking denial of the procreative activity of sex. “To His Coy Mistress” does much more than simply celebrate youthful passion and the flesh the way many love poems do. Marvell confronts mortality
Directly and develops a convincing psychological stance that argues one should capitalize on life’s opportunities. The speaker concludes in a riotous charge to live and to love to the fullest.
Author Biography
The son of an Anglican clergyman, Marvell was born on March 31, 1621, in Winestead-in-Holderness, Yorkshire, England. He received his early education at nearby Hull Grammar School and, at the age of twelve, entered Trinity College at Cambridge University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1638. Scholars believe that Marvell remained at Cambridge until 1641 pursuing a master’s degree, but he left after his father died and did not return to finish his studies. During the next four years Marvell travelled in Europe, evidently employed as a tutor. By the early 1650s he was living at Nunappleton in Yorkshire, tutoring the daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax, the retired commander-in-chief of the Commonwealth Army under Oliver Cromwell. During his stay at Nunappleton, Marvell wrote the majority of the lyric poems that now form the basis of his literary reputation. Cromwell’s ward William Dutton was Marvell’s next student until 1657, when Marvell was appointed Assistant Latin Secretary to the Council of State through the influence of his friend John Milton, who then held the post of Latin Secretary. After Marvell was elected to Parliament in 1659, he began to concentrate on political satire and polemics in prose and stopped writing poetry. A dedicated, conscientious statesman, Marvell focused on his political career, serving the middle-class constituency of Hull in Parliament until his death. Although it has often been rumored that he was poisoned by his political enemies, scholars generally attribute Marveil’s death on August 16, 1678 to a fever (although some believe he died of an accidental overdose of medicinal opiates). Admittedly, little is known about much of Marvell’s life. While he is not thought to have married, shortly after his death, a woman claiming to be his widow published a volume of his poetry; that Mary Marvell was truly Marvell’s wife has yet to be either disproved or substantiated.
Summary
Lines 1-2
The basic theme of the poem is announced from the beginning, that time lays waste to youth and life passes quickly, so people should enjoy youth now and “seize the day.” In the first section of the poem (to line 20), the speaker uses subjunctive mood verbs such as “would” and “were” that give a delicacy and tentativeness to his style. The speaker presents his “argument” to a listener, a young woman who holds back from reciprocating with her expression of love. The speaker says that coyness would be acceptable if time were in endless supply and if the world was big enough to accommodate all of his admiration for her.
Lines 3-4
Assuming time continues forever, the poem describes the leisurely pace of life spent in courtship and praise of the beloved, silent mistress.
Lines 5-7
Beginning with line 7 and continuing to line 20, the speaker embarks on some remarkable hyperbole to describe the praise he wants to bestow upon his mistress. He selects two rivers, India’s Ganges, which is sacred to the Hindu religion and thought of as the earthly embodiment of a goddess, and England’s Humber, which flows past Marvell’s hometown of Hull. The wide distance of two hemispheres separating the rivers compares with the time needed to spend adequately in courtship. That the mistress would find rubies in the Ganges underlines the exotic nature of a river in India. The Humber river in England, by comparison, is a slowmoving, dirty estuary where one is more likely to find old shoes than precious stones. The distance between the speaker (by the Humber river) and the mistress (by the Ganges river) is a metaphor for the luxurious, leisurely consumption of time spent in praise.
Lines 8-10
In these lines, the speaker describes the amount of time it would take to love his mistress and how much time she would be allowed to turn his love aside. The poem invokes eschatological or “end of the world” events to compare the allotted time—the great Flood by which God cleanses the earth in the Bible or the conversion of the Jews popularly thought to happen immediately prior to the Last Judgment. These excessive comparisons stress the unimaginably large amount of time it would take to adequately define the speaker’s love for his mistress.
Lines 11-12
The speaker creates the metaphor of “vegetable love” that grows very slowly but amasses enough bulk to be larger than a great dynasty or colonial empire. Because of the depth of his love, the speaker’s “vegetable love” covers much of the earth’s surface, as did the British empire during its peak in the nineteenth century.
Lines 13-18
The speaker fills out the hyperbole begun in line 7. This catalogue of the amount of years devoted to worship of each of his mistress’s physical attributes is outrageous; we find staggering overstatement in the 100 years for her face, 200 years for each breast, and 30,000 years devoted to the rest of her body—an exponential increase! The speaker devotes at least one generation to praise of each part of his mistress, especially to praise of her pure heart, which is saved for last because of its special place as the seat of amorous passion. This catalogue resembles and perhaps parodies the style of Petrarchan sonnet writers, who used standard metaphors to describe their mistresses. However, Marvell’s comparisons are notable for their excessiveness and originality.
Lines 19-20
In this close of section I, the speaker introduces a monetary metaphor: loving at a certain “rate,” like an interest rate charged by a bank for lending money. The speaker implies that the mistress deserves this “state” of lavish praise because of her beauty.
Lines 21-22
This is the logical turn of the poem, shifting from wild exaggeration to somber images of the grave. The subject of death intrudes into this love poem, turning the mood away from the subjunctive to focus on the limitation of time. Time is personified
driver in a chariot. In popular culture, Time is usually pictured as a robed old man holding a scythe—a sinister figure inspiring fear. The verb choice of “hurrying” introduces anxiety and darkness into a formerly light and extravagant, lyric poem.
Lines 23-24
The image of vast deserts begins a macabre list of comparisons having to do with sterility. Deserts are hot and barren, a denial of the life-giving processes of love and sexual activity. No wet, living “vegetable love” can be found in Marvell’s desert.
Lines 25-27
These lines emphasize the loss of beauty that happens to all people over time, especially pertaining to the mistress. The “marble vault” is the resting place for the deceased mistress’s corpse. The speaker’s song of praise will go unheard and unsung when death levels them both; thus the implication is that death is a final stopping place beyond which no magnificent love can escape.
Lines 28-30
The speaker’s grotesque image of the worm penetrating the virgin corpse as it consumes the rotting flesh shocks many readers. The point is that such preserved virtues mean nothing when stretched over the expanse of time. Thus, the speaker offers another persuasive reason for the mistress to give in. “Quaint honor” reflects that fact that virginity will seem a quaint but useless treasure at the end of life. The speaker alludes to the Biblical phrase of “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” (commonly used at funerals) to emphasize his thriving, passionate lust being reduced to oblivion, just like the mistress’s virginity.
Lines 31-32
With the close of section II, the poem uses understatement and irony, praising the grave as a “fine” and “private” place. This is a perfect transition to the carpe diem theme of section III. The speaker uses a grammatical pause to interrupt line 32, making him seem humble and modest. The speaker’s charm and tactfulness are implied by the restraint he uses to punctuate line 32. (In poetry, taking a pause in the middle of a line is a called a caesura.)
Lines 33-34
Section III returns to the theme of youthful lust. The speaker uses imperative mood verbs that give commands, exhortation, and urgent directions to his mistress. While youth is present, the mistress’s skin glows in vitality like the morning dew. This simile as originally published used the word “glew” instead of “dew.” Some scholars suggested that “glew” was a dialectal form of “glow,” as in “the skin’s healthy glow.” The alternative possibility that “glew” means “glue” is not attractive to the tone of the lover’s argument. Probably the best choice in modernizing a seventeenth-century poem would be to substitute “dew” as in the present text.
Lines 35-37
The speaker says that the young soul of his mistress breathes out through her beautiful skin in “instant fires” of enthusiasm and passion for love. The speaker wants his mistress to yield to his lust now while she can still respond before time takes its toll.
Lines 38-40
The speaker makes use of a set of harsh images that lend intensity and force to his expression. The simile of “birds of prey” is an unexpected choice for a love poem; some might consider it bizarre for the poem to compare a lover and his mistress to birds of prey who want to eat, not be eaten by Time. The comparison says that the speaker wants to devour Time like a hawk devours a rabbit caught in the fields—rapidly, in the heat of the moment, unthinkingly and instinctively. Time with his “slow-chapt power” is imagined as slowly chewing up the world and its people; thus the speaker implies he and his mistress are in a desperate fight against Time.
Lines 41-44
In these lines, the poem uses the metaphor of a cannonball of “strength” and “sweetness” rolled into a concentrated package of energy that “tears” through the barriers of restraint. The juxtaposition of “strife” with “pleasures” indicates the ferocious breakthrough of the speaker’s argument winning over his mistress.
Lines 45-46
In the concluding couplet, the speaker and his mistress triumphantly turn back the destructive forces of Time, avidly eating Time instead of being eaten by it. The speaker and his mistress force the sun to race them instead of passively begging the sun to stand still like Joshua did in the Bible, when he pleaded with God to make the sun stand still so the Israelites might defeat the Amorites in broad daylight.
Themes
Time:
Time is clearly the most important issue bothering the speaker of “To His Coy Mistress”; the subject spans the entire length of the piece, from the first line to the forty-sixth. The most obvious relationship to time here is that this work is a traditional carpe diem poem, which means that it encourages the listener to “seize the day”—to make the most of today and not put off action until tomorrow. In this particular case, the speaker is addressing a woman with whom he wants to have sex. He uses the threat of what time will do to her “quaint honor” and “long-preserved virginity” to convince her to give both up to him before they decay. A psychological interpretation—looking beneath the surface of the speaker’s claims to see intentions that he himself is not aware of—might find the situation to be the reverse of what it seems: instead of using the idea of time to get the sex he desires, he might be using sex to push away his own awareness of time’s passing. The first section of the poem, lines 1 through 20, describes an idyllic fantasy of how the speaker would behave if time had no effect, while the second part (lines 21-32) presents time’s effects in the most gruesome terms conceivable. In the last section, the speaker concocts a scheme to battle time’s passage with a cannonball made up of “our sweetness.” This tactic hints at desperation. It may be that he is overly anxious to take the woman’s virginity and will therefore spin any elaborate hoax for which she might fall. Modern psychology, though, particularly the work of Carl Jung, might say that the fear of death the speaker stirs up is not just a ruse to weaken her defenses, it is a real fear, his fear. The poem’s last image, of making the sun (representing time) run, indicates a need for distraction that applies as easily to this speaker’s forty-six-line plea as it does to the person he is trying to convince.
Love and Passion:
“To His Coy Mistress” begins as a declaration of the speaker’s love, but, by its end, it makes the assumption that the woman being addressed is as passionate as the speaker. He declares his love in fantastic, larger-than-life terms in the first twenty lines, because he is describing an admittedly unreal situation: his love would grow to span continents and stretch from the beginning of time to the end, he tells her, if only it could. Readers can recognize a slight touch of irony in the way that he pretends to be frustrated with reality for not allowing his wildly elaborate “proof” of love. After frightening the woman in the middle section of the poem, with visions of what will happen that are much worse than what he would like to happen, the speaker presumes her to be as lustful as he is. There is a clear turning point in lines 31 and 32, where he presumes her agreement in his sarcasm of isolation—he could list any number of things that people do not do in the grave, but his use of the double meaning of “embrace” (none embrace the grave and none embrace each other in the grave) takes for granted that embracing is the thing to do. The last part of the poem speaks from a conspiratorial “we” stance about how they can, together, fight life’s limits with sex, most overtly in the couplet “And tear our pleasures with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life.”
Beauty:
The woman’s concern for her beauty, her vanity, is the tool that the speaker of this poem tries to use to make time’s passage a threat to her. His initial flattery of her beauty is abstract, with no mention
er physical attributes at all, but only exaggerated, hyperbolic declarations of his love. In line 13, his admiration for the woman subtly shifts to praise for the parts of her he can see: her forehead, her eyes, both her breasts and “the rest.” Before his inventory becomes too leering, though, he ends it with her heart, an unseen place where the physical and the spiritual come together. In line 25, he uses the impending loss of her beauty as something of a threat, as he reminds her of the ravages of death and decay and how they will destroy what she is trying to preserve by retaining her virginity.
Death:
The middle section of the poem, lines 21 to 32, applies the philosophical concept of time passing to the biological reality of life. Some of the imagery used to capture the idea of death is common and familiar—the marble vault, the grave, and the dust and ashes are all details that have been used before to represent the body’s fate after death. The image of worms ravaging the corpse, however, is notably rough in this context; it is a little more vivid and disgusting than the speaker’s thoughtful carpe diem warning deserves. it is a tactile image, invoking the sense of touch, while the other images are visual, and, because it belongs to one of the less-used senses, it is more potent. At the same time that the poem is most graphic about death, it is also most direct about what the speaker’s intent actually is: the sarcastic use of “quaint” and “long-preserved” within a context of absolute death makes it clear that honor and virginity are the central targets of his argument.
Style
“To His Coy Mistress” is a poem of 46 lines that uses rhyming couplets and is divided into three verse-paragraphs. Marvell presents a rhetorical situation with a speaker addressing his mistress. The poem masquerades as a syllogism, a three-part argument with major premise, minor premise, and conclusion. A syllogism is used in formal logic, but the three-part structure of “To His Coy Mistress” is deceptively illogical. In part 1 (lines 1-20), the speaker says in hypothetical conjecture that if he had enough time, he would praise his beloved mistress forever. In part 2 (lines 21-32), the tone abruptly shifts as the rapid movement of time rushes past, threatening to waste the speaker’s passion and the mistress’s glorious physical beauty. In part 3 (lines 33-46), the speaker urges—in violent, forceful language—that they should enjoy each other’s company and defeat “Time” at his own game. If a syllogism is properly constructed, the conclusion is irrefutable. However, the speaker’s conclusion is illogical: the mistress’s yielding cannot stop the progress of the sun and speed it away. Yet Marvell’s poem is sophisticated, evocative, and emotionally moving, certainly among the best of seventeenth-century lyrics and one of the most artfully executed carpe diem poems of all time.
Marvell is sometimes described as a metaphysical poet, a trait seen in his style and choice of metaphors. Metaphysical poets were a group of seventeenth-century writers who attempted to reinvigorate the artificial, idealized views of human nature and sexual love common in poems of the previous century. The Petrarchan love poem, particularly, had become standardized and unimaginative, describing lovely women with cliched metaphors. For example, Petrarchan poets described cold and unreachable women being worshipped by distressed lovers from afar. These poets compared their mistress’s eyes to the sun, their hair to golden grain, their white skin to snow, their red lips to roses, and so forth. Metaphysical poets such as Marvell tried to reanimate the poetic line to resemble more closely the actual verbal exchanges of people. They organized their poems in the form of heated arguments with a reluctant mistress, a friend, God, Death, or the poet himself. Metaphysical poets sometimes employed twisted, illogical turns of thought and spiced up their lines with witty metaphors and outrageous, shocking puns and paradoxes. Sometimes serious and sometimes playful, the metaphysical poets deliberately confused the language of erotic love with the language of intense religious experience. It was not until well into the twentieth century that the metaphysical poets were really appreciated for their originality.
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side 5
Should’st rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews. 10
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze:
Two hundred to adore each breast: 15
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate. 20
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near:
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found; 25
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust. 30
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now, therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires 35
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our Time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapt power. 40
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Through the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun 45
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
*
"To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell is a classic carpe diem poem in which a sophisticated and mature man, the speaker in the poem, attempts to persuade his young mistress to yield to his amorous advances. Marvell lived during the seventeenth century in England, a time of radical changes in politics and modes of literary expression. For a while during the Commonwealth Period (1649-1660), drama disappeared, public theaters closed because of fears of immoral influences, and incendiary political pamphlets circulated. The Latin phrase carpe diem or “seize the day” is a very common literary motif in poetry. This kind of poem usually emphasizes that life is short and time is fleeting as the speaker attempts to entice his listener, a young lady usually described as a virgin. Poets writing carpe diem lyrics frequently use the rose as a symbol of transient physical beauty and the finality of death. Examples include Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” and Edmund Waller’s “Go, Lovely Rose.” However, Marvell’s poem is a more psychologically complicated and original treatment of this theme. The poem pretends to explore the dramatic argument situation between the man and his mistress when it really hides a concrete address to death; its gripping second section is filled with unusually bold images of sterility, rotting corpses, tombs, and a shocking denial of the procreative activity of sex. “To His Coy Mistress” does much more than simply celebrate youthful passion and the flesh the way many love poems do. Marvell confronts mortality
Directly and develops a convincing psychological stance that argues one should capitalize on life’s opportunities. The speaker concludes in a riotous charge to live and to love to the fullest.
Author Biography
The son of an Anglican clergyman, Marvell was born on March 31, 1621, in Winestead-in-Holderness, Yorkshire, England. He received his early education at nearby Hull Grammar School and, at the age of twelve, entered Trinity College at Cambridge University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1638. Scholars believe that Marvell remained at Cambridge until 1641 pursuing a master’s degree, but he left after his father died and did not return to finish his studies. During the next four years Marvell travelled in Europe, evidently employed as a tutor. By the early 1650s he was living at Nunappleton in Yorkshire, tutoring the daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax, the retired commander-in-chief of the Commonwealth Army under Oliver Cromwell. During his stay at Nunappleton, Marvell wrote the majority of the lyric poems that now form the basis of his literary reputation. Cromwell’s ward William Dutton was Marvell’s next student until 1657, when Marvell was appointed Assistant Latin Secretary to the Council of State through the influence of his friend John Milton, who then held the post of Latin Secretary. After Marvell was elected to Parliament in 1659, he began to concentrate on political satire and polemics in prose and stopped writing poetry. A dedicated, conscientious statesman, Marvell focused on his political career, serving the middle-class constituency of Hull in Parliament until his death. Although it has often been rumored that he was poisoned by his political enemies, scholars generally attribute Marveil’s death on August 16, 1678 to a fever (although some believe he died of an accidental overdose of medicinal opiates). Admittedly, little is known about much of Marvell’s life. While he is not thought to have married, shortly after his death, a woman claiming to be his widow published a volume of his poetry; that Mary Marvell was truly Marvell’s wife has yet to be either disproved or substantiated.
Summary
Lines 1-2
The basic theme of the poem is announced from the beginning, that time lays waste to youth and life passes quickly, so people should enjoy youth now and “seize the day.” In the first section of the poem (to line 20), the speaker uses subjunctive mood verbs such as “would” and “were” that give a delicacy and tentativeness to his style. The speaker presents his “argument” to a listener, a young woman who holds back from reciprocating with her expression of love. The speaker says that coyness would be acceptable if time were in endless supply and if the world was big enough to accommodate all of his admiration for her.
Lines 3-4
Assuming time continues forever, the poem describes the leisurely pace of life spent in courtship and praise of the beloved, silent mistress.
Lines 5-7
Beginning with line 7 and continuing to line 20, the speaker embarks on some remarkable hyperbole to describe the praise he wants to bestow upon his mistress. He selects two rivers, India’s Ganges, which is sacred to the Hindu religion and thought of as the earthly embodiment of a goddess, and England’s Humber, which flows past Marvell’s hometown of Hull. The wide distance of two hemispheres separating the rivers compares with the time needed to spend adequately in courtship. That the mistress would find rubies in the Ganges underlines the exotic nature of a river in India. The Humber river in England, by comparison, is a slowmoving, dirty estuary where one is more likely to find old shoes than precious stones. The distance between the speaker (by the Humber river) and the mistress (by the Ganges river) is a metaphor for the luxurious, leisurely consumption of time spent in praise.
Lines 8-10
In these lines, the speaker describes the amount of time it would take to love his mistress and how much time she would be allowed to turn his love aside. The poem invokes eschatological or “end of the world” events to compare the allotted time—the great Flood by which God cleanses the earth in the Bible or the conversion of the Jews popularly thought to happen immediately prior to the Last Judgment. These excessive comparisons stress the unimaginably large amount of time it would take to adequately define the speaker’s love for his mistress.
Lines 11-12
The speaker creates the metaphor of “vegetable love” that grows very slowly but amasses enough bulk to be larger than a great dynasty or colonial empire. Because of the depth of his love, the speaker’s “vegetable love” covers much of the earth’s surface, as did the British empire during its peak in the nineteenth century.
Lines 13-18
The speaker fills out the hyperbole begun in line 7. This catalogue of the amount of years devoted to worship of each of his mistress’s physical attributes is outrageous; we find staggering overstatement in the 100 years for her face, 200 years for each breast, and 30,000 years devoted to the rest of her body—an exponential increase! The speaker devotes at least one generation to praise of each part of his mistress, especially to praise of her pure heart, which is saved for last because of its special place as the seat of amorous passion. This catalogue resembles and perhaps parodies the style of Petrarchan sonnet writers, who used standard metaphors to describe their mistresses. However, Marvell’s comparisons are notable for their excessiveness and originality.
Lines 19-20
In this close of section I, the speaker introduces a monetary metaphor: loving at a certain “rate,” like an interest rate charged by a bank for lending money. The speaker implies that the mistress deserves this “state” of lavish praise because of her beauty.
Lines 21-22
This is the logical turn of the poem, shifting from wild exaggeration to somber images of the grave. The subject of death intrudes into this love poem, turning the mood away from the subjunctive to focus on the limitation of time. Time is personified
driver in a chariot. In popular culture, Time is usually pictured as a robed old man holding a scythe—a sinister figure inspiring fear. The verb choice of “hurrying” introduces anxiety and darkness into a formerly light and extravagant, lyric poem.
Lines 23-24
The image of vast deserts begins a macabre list of comparisons having to do with sterility. Deserts are hot and barren, a denial of the life-giving processes of love and sexual activity. No wet, living “vegetable love” can be found in Marvell’s desert.
Lines 25-27
These lines emphasize the loss of beauty that happens to all people over time, especially pertaining to the mistress. The “marble vault” is the resting place for the deceased mistress’s corpse. The speaker’s song of praise will go unheard and unsung when death levels them both; thus the implication is that death is a final stopping place beyond which no magnificent love can escape.
Lines 28-30
The speaker’s grotesque image of the worm penetrating the virgin corpse as it consumes the rotting flesh shocks many readers. The point is that such preserved virtues mean nothing when stretched over the expanse of time. Thus, the speaker offers another persuasive reason for the mistress to give in. “Quaint honor” reflects that fact that virginity will seem a quaint but useless treasure at the end of life. The speaker alludes to the Biblical phrase of “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” (commonly used at funerals) to emphasize his thriving, passionate lust being reduced to oblivion, just like the mistress’s virginity.
Lines 31-32
With the close of section II, the poem uses understatement and irony, praising the grave as a “fine” and “private” place. This is a perfect transition to the carpe diem theme of section III. The speaker uses a grammatical pause to interrupt line 32, making him seem humble and modest. The speaker’s charm and tactfulness are implied by the restraint he uses to punctuate line 32. (In poetry, taking a pause in the middle of a line is a called a caesura.)
Lines 33-34
Section III returns to the theme of youthful lust. The speaker uses imperative mood verbs that give commands, exhortation, and urgent directions to his mistress. While youth is present, the mistress’s skin glows in vitality like the morning dew. This simile as originally published used the word “glew” instead of “dew.” Some scholars suggested that “glew” was a dialectal form of “glow,” as in “the skin’s healthy glow.” The alternative possibility that “glew” means “glue” is not attractive to the tone of the lover’s argument. Probably the best choice in modernizing a seventeenth-century poem would be to substitute “dew” as in the present text.
Lines 35-37
The speaker says that the young soul of his mistress breathes out through her beautiful skin in “instant fires” of enthusiasm and passion for love. The speaker wants his mistress to yield to his lust now while she can still respond before time takes its toll.
Lines 38-40
The speaker makes use of a set of harsh images that lend intensity and force to his expression. The simile of “birds of prey” is an unexpected choice for a love poem; some might consider it bizarre for the poem to compare a lover and his mistress to birds of prey who want to eat, not be eaten by Time. The comparison says that the speaker wants to devour Time like a hawk devours a rabbit caught in the fields—rapidly, in the heat of the moment, unthinkingly and instinctively. Time with his “slow-chapt power” is imagined as slowly chewing up the world and its people; thus the speaker implies he and his mistress are in a desperate fight against Time.
Lines 41-44
In these lines, the poem uses the metaphor of a cannonball of “strength” and “sweetness” rolled into a concentrated package of energy that “tears” through the barriers of restraint. The juxtaposition of “strife” with “pleasures” indicates the ferocious breakthrough of the speaker’s argument winning over his mistress.
Lines 45-46
In the concluding couplet, the speaker and his mistress triumphantly turn back the destructive forces of Time, avidly eating Time instead of being eaten by it. The speaker and his mistress force the sun to race them instead of passively begging the sun to stand still like Joshua did in the Bible, when he pleaded with God to make the sun stand still so the Israelites might defeat the Amorites in broad daylight.
Themes
Time:
Time is clearly the most important issue bothering the speaker of “To His Coy Mistress”; the subject spans the entire length of the piece, from the first line to the forty-sixth. The most obvious relationship to time here is that this work is a traditional carpe diem poem, which means that it encourages the listener to “seize the day”—to make the most of today and not put off action until tomorrow. In this particular case, the speaker is addressing a woman with whom he wants to have sex. He uses the threat of what time will do to her “quaint honor” and “long-preserved virginity” to convince her to give both up to him before they decay. A psychological interpretation—looking beneath the surface of the speaker’s claims to see intentions that he himself is not aware of—might find the situation to be the reverse of what it seems: instead of using the idea of time to get the sex he desires, he might be using sex to push away his own awareness of time’s passing. The first section of the poem, lines 1 through 20, describes an idyllic fantasy of how the speaker would behave if time had no effect, while the second part (lines 21-32) presents time’s effects in the most gruesome terms conceivable. In the last section, the speaker concocts a scheme to battle time’s passage with a cannonball made up of “our sweetness.” This tactic hints at desperation. It may be that he is overly anxious to take the woman’s virginity and will therefore spin any elaborate hoax for which she might fall. Modern psychology, though, particularly the work of Carl Jung, might say that the fear of death the speaker stirs up is not just a ruse to weaken her defenses, it is a real fear, his fear. The poem’s last image, of making the sun (representing time) run, indicates a need for distraction that applies as easily to this speaker’s forty-six-line plea as it does to the person he is trying to convince.
Love and Passion:
“To His Coy Mistress” begins as a declaration of the speaker’s love, but, by its end, it makes the assumption that the woman being addressed is as passionate as the speaker. He declares his love in fantastic, larger-than-life terms in the first twenty lines, because he is describing an admittedly unreal situation: his love would grow to span continents and stretch from the beginning of time to the end, he tells her, if only it could. Readers can recognize a slight touch of irony in the way that he pretends to be frustrated with reality for not allowing his wildly elaborate “proof” of love. After frightening the woman in the middle section of the poem, with visions of what will happen that are much worse than what he would like to happen, the speaker presumes her to be as lustful as he is. There is a clear turning point in lines 31 and 32, where he presumes her agreement in his sarcasm of isolation—he could list any number of things that people do not do in the grave, but his use of the double meaning of “embrace” (none embrace the grave and none embrace each other in the grave) takes for granted that embracing is the thing to do. The last part of the poem speaks from a conspiratorial “we” stance about how they can, together, fight life’s limits with sex, most overtly in the couplet “And tear our pleasures with rough strife / Through the iron gates of life.”
Beauty:
The woman’s concern for her beauty, her vanity, is the tool that the speaker of this poem tries to use to make time’s passage a threat to her. His initial flattery of her beauty is abstract, with no mention
er physical attributes at all, but only exaggerated, hyperbolic declarations of his love. In line 13, his admiration for the woman subtly shifts to praise for the parts of her he can see: her forehead, her eyes, both her breasts and “the rest.” Before his inventory becomes too leering, though, he ends it with her heart, an unseen place where the physical and the spiritual come together. In line 25, he uses the impending loss of her beauty as something of a threat, as he reminds her of the ravages of death and decay and how they will destroy what she is trying to preserve by retaining her virginity.
Death:
The middle section of the poem, lines 21 to 32, applies the philosophical concept of time passing to the biological reality of life. Some of the imagery used to capture the idea of death is common and familiar—the marble vault, the grave, and the dust and ashes are all details that have been used before to represent the body’s fate after death. The image of worms ravaging the corpse, however, is notably rough in this context; it is a little more vivid and disgusting than the speaker’s thoughtful carpe diem warning deserves. it is a tactile image, invoking the sense of touch, while the other images are visual, and, because it belongs to one of the less-used senses, it is more potent. At the same time that the poem is most graphic about death, it is also most direct about what the speaker’s intent actually is: the sarcastic use of “quaint” and “long-preserved” within a context of absolute death makes it clear that honor and virginity are the central targets of his argument.
Style
“To His Coy Mistress” is a poem of 46 lines that uses rhyming couplets and is divided into three verse-paragraphs. Marvell presents a rhetorical situation with a speaker addressing his mistress. The poem masquerades as a syllogism, a three-part argument with major premise, minor premise, and conclusion. A syllogism is used in formal logic, but the three-part structure of “To His Coy Mistress” is deceptively illogical. In part 1 (lines 1-20), the speaker says in hypothetical conjecture that if he had enough time, he would praise his beloved mistress forever. In part 2 (lines 21-32), the tone abruptly shifts as the rapid movement of time rushes past, threatening to waste the speaker’s passion and the mistress’s glorious physical beauty. In part 3 (lines 33-46), the speaker urges—in violent, forceful language—that they should enjoy each other’s company and defeat “Time” at his own game. If a syllogism is properly constructed, the conclusion is irrefutable. However, the speaker’s conclusion is illogical: the mistress’s yielding cannot stop the progress of the sun and speed it away. Yet Marvell’s poem is sophisticated, evocative, and emotionally moving, certainly among the best of seventeenth-century lyrics and one of the most artfully executed carpe diem poems of all time.
Marvell is sometimes described as a metaphysical poet, a trait seen in his style and choice of metaphors. Metaphysical poets were a group of seventeenth-century writers who attempted to reinvigorate the artificial, idealized views of human nature and sexual love common in poems of the previous century. The Petrarchan love poem, particularly, had become standardized and unimaginative, describing lovely women with cliched metaphors. For example, Petrarchan poets described cold and unreachable women being worshipped by distressed lovers from afar. These poets compared their mistress’s eyes to the sun, their hair to golden grain, their white skin to snow, their red lips to roses, and so forth. Metaphysical poets such as Marvell tried to reanimate the poetic line to resemble more closely the actual verbal exchanges of people. They organized their poems in the form of heated arguments with a reluctant mistress, a friend, God, Death, or the poet himself. Metaphysical poets sometimes employed twisted, illogical turns of thought and spiced up their lines with witty metaphors and outrageous, shocking puns and paradoxes. Sometimes serious and sometimes playful, the metaphysical poets deliberately confused the language of erotic love with the language of intense religious experience. It was not until well into the twentieth century that the metaphysical poets were really appreciated for their originality.
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