To His Coy Mistress
To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell 1678
“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.
Poem Text
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.
Poem 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
Media Adaptations
- Milton and 17th Century Poetry was released on video cassette by Films for the Humanities in 1988.
- An audio album by Sir Cedric Hardwicke, titled Poetry of the XVII Century, is available from Caedmon Records.
- An audio cassette titled The English Poets, #6: Richard Lovelace; Charles Cotton; Andrew Marvell; Samuel Butler; John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; and John Milton was released by Longman Group in 1979.
- Andrew Marvell, an audio reel, is available from the University of Colorado.
as a 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
Topics for Further Study
- Write a modern-day dialogue between Andrew Marvell and a girl who he is trying to pick up, including all of the arguments he uses in this poem and her counterarguments.
- Find one of the other poems written about the same time as this one that has the same theme, such as Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,” Ben Jonson’s “Song: To Celia,” or Robert Herrick’s “To The Virgins, To Make the Most of Time.” Describe your impression of each of the two poets. Who do you think would be more successful with his poem? Which one would you rather know? Why?
- This is a fairly long poem, especially for one that is about how little time we have on earth. Could the poet have made his point more quickly without losing anything crucial?
of her 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.
Historical Context
The English Civil War
During Marvell’s lifetime, the government of England underwent startling changes, including the overthrow of King Charles I, then his return from exile, his beheading, the establishment of a new government, and, finally, the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II on the throne. Causes for the troubles can be traced back throughout history, but a good place to start is in the early 1600s, during the reign of King James I, who was King of England from 1603 to 1625. James came from Scotland and was the cousin of the ruler he replaced, Queen Elizabeth I. Because James was from outside of England, his political base was weak. Instead of working with the established government, however, he supported the idea that the king held power by God’s will and was responsible to nobody. While the monarchy and the parliament had worked together fairly well during Elizabeth’s reign, James did not have the negotiating skill or the inclination to be cooperative. As a result, the loyalties of the English citizens were divided between the Monarchists, who supported the king, and the supporters of the parliament, who were called Roundheads. At the same time, the Puritans, who were members of the Church of England who supported stricter (purer) adherence to the Bible, felt that the monarchy opposed their religious beliefs: they built up hopes during the reign of Elizabeth that the next king would be more understanding, but the Hapton Court Conference soon after James’s coronation made the government’s intolerance perfectly clear. Some Puritans fled to the colonies in North America as a result, while others stayed in England and actively opposed the king.
The public’s support of the monarchy was weakened during James’s reign, but it became much worse after his son, Charles I, succeeded him in 1604, when Marvell was four years old. Charles was a morally decent man, unlike James, but he was not intelligent, and he was not up to maintaining the public’s support. Historians still debate about the specific dynamics that brought the Civil War about—which political or religious groups had more influence in riling up change—but the bare fact is that by 1640 relationships were so strained between the king and the House of Commons that fighting was inevitable. By 1642, armed conflicts were common between supporters of each side. The king’s forces fell in 1645 at the Battle of Naseby, and Charles left the country for Scotland. With him gone, the winning side divided within itself, with the army and the parliament disagreeing about how the country should be run. In 1648, Charles returned with an army of Scots, but the opponents of the monarchy were able to unite enough to defeat him, and he was beheaded at a public execution in 1649 (an event that Marvell depicted in his poem “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”).
From this turmoil, it was Oliver Cromwell who emerged to head the revolutionary government. Cromwell had been a leader in parliament before the revolution, and he had sided with the army against the parliament after the king was chased away. Many hopes for the revolution were destroyed, however, when Cromwell, trying to restore order to a country that had fallen apart, became more of a dictator than the king had ever been. In 1653, he declared himself the Lord High Protector of the Commonwealth, and he dissolved the parliament. This move settled the power struggles between various political factions and did bring peace, but it also ruined Cromwell’s hope of ever being considered a legitimate ruler. He promoted greater tolerance for religious beliefs, and he expanded the army and the navy, which enabled the British Empire to expand its influence throughout the world. When Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, his son Richard became Lord Protector, but he ruled for only approximately nine months before the monarchy took back its power. Charles II was made king in 1660. Cromwell’s body was dug up and his head was removed, put on a pole, and mounted above Westminster Hall—a warning to all future rebels.
Compare & Contrast
- 1678: Twelve of the thirteen colonies that originally comprised the United States had been settled. The last, Pennsylvania, was settled in 1782.
1776: The United States of America declared its independence from England and established itself as an independent country.
Today: The United States quit expanding in 1959, when Alaska and Hawaii were admitted into the Union.
- 1678: Dutch traders bought black slaves in Angola and sold them in the New England Colonies for ten times what they paid. 15,000 slaves per year were sold this way.
1863: On January 1, the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by President Lincoln, went into effect, outlawing slavery in the United States. The states that had quit the United States to form the Confederacy did not honor President Lincoln’s proclamation: they were in the middle of a Civil War to establish their independence from the United States government.
1865: When the Civil War ended with the Confederacy’s defeat, slavery became illegal in the United States.
Today: The effects of the period of slavery can still be felt in the country’s uneven race relations.
- 1678: Almost half of England’s population lived in the country. The population was approximately 5.5 million people.
Today: The population of England, now referred to as Great Britain, is 58.5 million people, but this number is expected to drop in the next twenty years.
The Metaphysical Poets
The term “Metaphysical Poets” is applied to poets of the seventeenth century who came after John Donne (1572-1631) and who wrote like him, showing his influence in their style and their themes. Donne’s poetry was notable for the complexity of its imagery and the unevenness of its form, in contrast to the smooth elegance of the Elizabethan sonnets that writers before him were producing. Even when he was writing about uplifting subjects such as love, Donne’s poetry displayed an intellectual, philosophical bent—an interest in metaphysics ran through everything he did. In the same way that Marvell was a favorite of Cromwell and was involved in the government of his day, Donne was a favorite of King James I and was appointed by him to be dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The term Metaphysical Poets was not used by the poets of the 1600s to describe themselves: it was applied almost a hundred years later, by the famous Dr. Samuel Johnson, who said in A Life in Cowley, “About the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, appeared a race of writers, that may be termed metaphysical poets.” Different critics have different ideas about who is included in this group, but most are certain to include Donne and Marvell, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Richard Crenshaw. During the Restoration, after the monarchy of England was restored with the start of Charles II’s reign in 1660, poets began to concentrate on outer, social concerns, rather than thoughts and emotions. This change is seen in Marvell’s works, which developed from his earlier lyric poetry to social satires later in his life.
Critical Overview
Marvell’s reputation has risen spectacularly during this century; his poetry was dismissed as obscene and obscure by previous generations, who generally preferred the polished artificiality of Elizabethan love poetry and sonnet cycles. Earlier criticism tends to focus on reviving interest in metaphysical poets such as Marvell, John Donne, and George Herbert, while later criticism discusses the poem’s rhetoric, persona, and implied audience. T. S. Eliot initiated the critical reevaluation of Marveil’s work with his essay “Andrew Marvell” in his Selected Essays, originally published in 1921. Eliot argued that critics misunderstood “Puritan” writers and failed to see the wit beneath poems such as “To His Coy Mistress.” Eliot viewed “To His Coy Mistress” as based on a great traditional theme of European literature, but he also noted the manner in which Marvell transformed this theme through wit and playfulness. Eliot argued that the poem’s rapid lines, concentration of an astonishing variety of images, and surprising comparisons make it superior to John Milton’s shorter poems. Eliot also found that Marvell’s ability to navigate between levity of tone and seriousness of message gave the poem poise, inventiveness, clarity, and power unsurpassed by any seventeenth-century poet.
Joseph J. Moldenhauer, in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, wrote that although Marvell worked within the narrow range of traditional carpe diem lyrics, he had a superb appreciation for the poem as rhetorical discourse. Moldenhauer described the way that Marvell capitalized on the poem’s hypothetical situation of speaker addressing a silent listener, inventing a distinct and dramatic rhetorical situation. The critic also argued that Marvell’s persona is perfectly suited to his purpose; he is an urbane and sophisticated speaker, not the irrational and lust-driven youth we expect in a love poem. Moldenhauer believed that the mistress, however equal in social position, is probably younger and less sophisticated than the speaker. She expects to be praised but is surprised by the extent of the poet’s charms.
Recent criticism focuses on gender issues and tensions between the sexes present in “To His Coy Mistress.” Bernard Duyfhuizen, in College English, argues that a female reader of the poem might have difficulty appreciating the smooth strategic argument of the speaker and would instinctively identify more with the silent mistress. The female student reading the poem may recognize as familiar the passionate, masculine appeal to love. Duyfhuizen believes the female reader is likely to feel upset at the poet’s display of egoism and his proud assault on her virginity. A female reader would see the movement of the poem’s logic differently by contemporary standards, with the understood social and physical consequences of giving in to a lover’s plea. He feels women are likely to be angered by the poem’s marginalization of the mistress through the discrepancy in power inherent in the poem’s argument.
Criticism
David Kelly
David Kelly is an instructor of creative writing at several community colleges in Illinois, as well as a fiction writer and playwright. In the following essay, Kelly examines what makes Marvell’s poetry particularly popular with poets, finding the answer in the connection between the wit of his imagery and the serious ideas he examines.
Andrew Marvell is a poet’s poet. Non-poets can see what is going on in his works and appreciate it, usually on a distant, intellectual level, but nobody gets quite the kick out of Marvell that other poets do. It is the same way that short story writers relate to Chekhov, that filmmakers watch John Ford, or how saxophonists, when they’re home, spin Eric Dolphy records. When poets read Marvell, it is not a case of their “studying” an artist that they want to copy, any more than the process of growing up can properly be referred to as “studying” your parents. Marvell is studied and mentioned by historians of the seventeenth century because he was an active participant in the politics of the times, and because his work fits neatly into that pocket of post-Donnian writers we know as the Metaphysical Poets. It is not, however, just his style, but his thoughts that end up showing their influence in other poets’ works. Archibald MacLeish’s “You, Andrew Marvell” seems like something Marvell would appreciate, but it doesn’t cling onto his style the way that creepier homages do; T. S. Eliot understands him so well that his use of Marvell’s images in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is not even rightly called borrowing, since he has made them belong to the new poem.
And part of his being a poet’s poet, just like being an anything’s anything, is that the rest of us never really, truly get what the fuss is all about. Sure, we can go over “To His Coy Mistress” word by word, backward and forward, throwing strands of web to other poems of the carpe diem tradition and spinning theories about what is eternal and what is cultural and what is Western in sexual relations. In the end, though, most of us still leave the poem standing as an inanimate object: we leave it amicably, but still leave it, and it leaves us.
In his famous essay “Andrew Marvell,” Eliot speaks with reverence about his subject’s use of wit. He talks about how wit has meant different things in different generations, an observation that is more crucial for us today than it has been in the
What Do I Read Next?
- A recent collection of Marvell’s poetry is 1991’s The Essential Marvell, from Ecco Press. The book is edited by poet Donald Hall, who also wrote a fascinating introduction that makes the material relevant to today’s students.
- Robert H. Ray’s An Andrew Marvell Companion, published in 1998 by Garland Publishers, offers students a wealth of information on the poet.
- Archibald MacLeish’s poem “You, Andrew Marvell” is a main reason that some students develop an interest in Marvell. It is considered one of MacLeish’s best works. This poem is often anthologized and can be found in Collected Poems, by Archibald MacLeish, published in 1985 by Houghton Mifflin.
- Students who are doing research on the seventeenth century are almost certain to come across the works of Christopher Hill, who is considered to be the most knowledgeable and prolific writer about England during that era. His works are as thorough as any historian’s, yet they are written for the nonhistorian to understand. Among the numerous books Hill wrote are Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), Change and Continuity in 17th-Century England (1974), and God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (1970).
- There is a clear connection between this poem and Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599), Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” (1600), Robert Herrick’s “To The Virgins, to Make Much of Time” (1648), and Ben Jonson’s “Song: To Celia” (1606). Because these poems were published well before today’s copyright laws were written, they are available in numerous poetry anthologies.
past. In our cynical world, it is hardly even a compliment to call a writer a wit anymore—the word, too often used by the half-intelligent to describe the fifty-five-percent intelligent, is used more often sarcastically, to capture a particularly pathetic strain of self-delusion, than it is used to identify mastery of words and ideas. But it is exactly in the field of words and ideas that Eliot tells us wit has skated around, from one generation to the next. Some wits are funny and others are nasty; some wise and some silly; and some witty poets are all about the ways in which their words intertwine with each other in their own pure space, away from the real world. Others—and this is where Eliot places Andrew Marvell—are wits because of the ways their words reflect an identifiable world, but do it in their own terms.
Every poet who has written throughout the ages has, of course, been moved by a unique inspiration, but all have had the same few tools to work with. The same essay by Eliot cites Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the varieties of balances, the sliding scales that, differently calibrated, all make up the thing we call imagination. We find it revealed in qualities
of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order; judgement ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm with feeling profound or vehement....
In other words, the differences that we observe in poetic imaginations are the results of the almost infinite varieties of ways different poets resolve these differences. Poet A might lean closer toward sameness, concreteness, imagery, representation, etc., than Poet B, while Poet C’s tastes could incline in the entirely opposite direction, and so on.
Marvell’s poetry tends, in general, to draw upon the least expected sources for its images. The reason that poets use images at all is to make us see things differently than they appear to the naked eye. Similes and metaphors tell us that two things are like each other, and the less they have in common, the more readers have to think in order to realize the connection. For instance, “wispy clouds” might give a sense of what the clouds look like, but “clouds like an old man’s beard” implies a whole new dimension of meaning. Marvell’s comparisons are admired because they join things that the rest of us would not notice as having any common ground. Two lovers might get themselves jumbled in a ball, literally or symbolically, but not every poet could turn that ball into a cannonball and fire it at “the gates of life.” Very few poets would think of comparing love and vegetation because vegetation just does not seem like a lovely thing, but the comparison works in “To His Coy Mistress” because of the way Marvell is able to focus his readers on the qualities that love and vegetation do share: slow growth and the ability to spread almost indefinitely.
Bringing unlike things together in this way takes the kind of cleverness that we usually associate with wit in its most unpleasant form: empty cleverness, or cleverness for its own sake. This is the kind of wit that we are amused with, but we usually can dismiss it easily enough, the way a good joke is put aside once it has been heard. Hollow wit, in fact, is often like a joke in that surprise is all that it has to offer. Marvell’s comparisons, on the other hand, linger on well beyond the initial jolt of recognition. The ideas that he is explaining are important ideas, not throwaways. Superficial readers, who feel that all they need to see about “To His Coy Mistress” is that the speaker has an overactive libido, are missing a whole world of understanding that the poem presents. Whether you believe that his use of death imagery is sincere or just the speaker’s trick on the girl, the fact remains that, using sex and love and wordplay, this poem can take readers closer to the truth about life and death than they would ordinarily choose to go. This is why Eliot describes the particular type of wit that Marvell displays as most often “... a structured decoration of a serious idea.”
Everybody likes to be entertained. It is often a huge disappointment to students to find out that there is nothing about great ideas requiring them to be even the slightest bit entertaining: sometimes, it even seems that great thinkers are measured by how uninteresting they can be. On the other hand, nothing disgusts true artists more than someone using the tools of art to make themselves popular. Poetry is great thought made appealing: it is easy for poets
“Marvell’s comparisons ... linger on well beyond the initial jolt of recognition.”
to veer too far to either side, to be too thoughtful or too clever, giving up too much of the side being neglected. If we go by what T. S. Eliot said in his essay about Andrew Marvell and by what we can see of Marvell on display in “To His Coy Mistress,” the secret of his success appears to be that he struck the right balance. Maybe it isn’t the right balance for most of us: average readers would like to be amused with more wit, and academics might find intellectual poetry more interesting, but then, poets, like any special group, tend to see things in their own way.
Source: David Kelly, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999.
Bruce Meyer
Bruce Meyer is the director of the creative writing program at the University of Toronto. He has taught at several Canadian universities and is the author of three collections of poetry. In the following essay, Meyer examines Marvell’s use of rhetoric in “To His Coy Mistress.”
Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” features one of the best-known opening lines in English poetry: “Had we but world enough, and time.” What makes this poem both interesting and engagingly complex is Marvell’s use of rhetoric, perhaps the most overlooked critical aspect in discussions of poetry. Put simply, rhetoric is the art of persuasion through language, where the speaker attempts to convince the listener to an action, a belief, or to an idea by presenting an argument in support of a particular position.
Throughout the course of “To His Coy Mistress,” Marvell evolves an elaborate argument in which a man attempts to persuade a young woman to have sex with him. As pickup lines go, “To His Coy Mistress” ranks as one of the most memorable. The poem, as a rhetorical structure, is composed of five separate units, each with its own argument and subconclusion. The poem opens, lines 1-2, with a
“As pickup lines go, ‘To His Coy Mistress’ ranks as one of the most memorable.”
statement of expediency, the thesis of his discussion. The body of the discussion within the poem contains four sub-arguments on the topics of what he would do with eternity if he had all the time in the world to wait for the woman to make her decision about losing her virginity (lines 3-13); a flattering examination of her body in which he praises the parts of her physique (lines 14-20); a somber and solemn discussion on the nature of death and how it would affect their relationship (lines 21-32); and, finally, a concluding discussion that returns to the opening statement on the need for expediency. Although it is unknown whether the young woman in question found his arguments convincing enough to acquiesce to the persona’s suggestions, the poem stands as one of the finest pieces of poetic persuasion.
As a poem about the need to love, “To His Coy Mistress” has little to do with love, yet it borrows quite substantially from the traditions of love lyrics. The sentiment expressed in the opening couplet, “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime” is a standard’s lover’s plea. The persona of the poem is suggesting to the “coy” young woman that time is of the essence, that if they had eternity, her “coyness” or reticence would not be a problem in their relationship, and the speaker surmises all the wondrous things they might do (other than sex) to fill their blissful eternity. Time, however, is not on their side. This awareness of time creates an urgency to the matter of their consummation in much the same way that Juliet decries the singing of the lark at daybreak in Romeo and Juliet or Donne offers mock disgust to the dawn in “The Sun Rising.” Marvell, however, turns this prototypical lover’s complaint into a playful series of exemplums for speculation at the opening of “To His Coy Mistress.”
Lines 3 to 20 are a wonderful catalogue of exotic images that answer the question of what the persona would do if he had eternity to spend waiting. There is the suggestion echoed through lines 3 and 4 that the eternity shared by the two would-be lovers is an Edenic extemporality—a circumstance that is not only outside of time, but a single “long love’s day.” After all, hints Marvell, the extemporal condition is without the meaningful natural measure of the seasons so that time, or the absence of it, is perceived as a stretch of possibilities. In this imaginative expanse, the woman might walk “by the Indian Ganges’ side” while the persona would strike a melancholy pose and “by the tide / Of Humber would complain.” In effect, what the speaker is envisioning is an artificial, almost posed, set of circumstances that are both fanciful and exotic and that form a tableau where the woman journeys to the mysteries of the East while the persona waits at home and frets deeply and anxiously about his desires. His unquenched desires, however, are not without conviction, and he follows the tableau with a promise that future poets, such as Auden in “As I Walked Out One Evening” or Burns in “My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose” express: the concept of timeless devotion. Marvell writes, “I would / Love you ten years before the Flood, / And you should, if you please, refuse / Till the conversion of the Jews.” Essentially, what emerges from the opening lines of the poem (3-10) is a portrait of two individuals with a great deal of time on their hands where the poet strikes a subtle allusion to a situation akin to Adam and Eve in a paradisal state of eternal timelessness. Like the Eden in Milton’s Paradise Lost, this timeless state is a fecund place, if not for humans, at least for vegetables. In a splendid note of wry wit, the persona compares his love to a vast empire that is nothing more than an extensive vegetable garden: “My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow.” The suggestion here may be that although this love may be fertile, it is unharvested and slow-growing, and coupling this image with the previous discussion of time and expediency strikes a quiet though suggestive note of the presence of entropy in the world. The need to reap what has been sown while the “fresh” opportunity exists seems to be the implicit question that this odd couplet begs from the reader and presumably the “coy mistress” to whom the poem is addressed. After all, as Marvell perceives it, love has a short shelf life.
At line 13, however, the structure of the speculation of what to do with such timelessness shifts away from the exotic and the fanciful, and the poet falls back on an accepted poetic convention centered on the beloved, where the lover “studies” her from head to toe. What results is epideictic rhetoric, the rhetoric of praise and blame that is most often at the core of poems about love or desire, in which a lover is considering the beloved’s physical attributes. Marvell plays the convention with gusto and emphasis.
In what amounts to pure flattery on the lover’s part, “To His Coy Mistress” borrows a solemn convention that is used by other poets such as Shakespeare in “Sonnet 130” (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”) or Chaucer in “Parliament of Fowles.” This “top to bottom” process of examining each part of the beloved’s anatomy and pausing at each aspect for an apt comparison has its origins in the love poetry of the Bible, “The Song of Solomon.” As in “The Song of Solomon,” “To His Coy Mistress” suggests, in a very flattering passage, that the best usage of time would be for the lover to contemplate his beloved, starting at her “eyes” and then moving on to her “forehead.” The “forehead” is an important aspect of the female anatomy in any naming of a beloved’s body parts because, at least in the conventions that arose from Medieval love poetry, the Virgin Mary was supposedly the owner of a high and very beautiful forehead. Also, the mention of the forehead (which by the seventeenth century was no longer considered a focal point for the female body) lends to the poem and the mistress an archaic, if not nostalgic note in much the same way that Spenser’s The Faerie Queene borrowed heavily from the conventions of Medieval romance literature for an affected sense of archaism. What should be remembered is that archaism is, rhetorically and poetically, a form of elevation. If it is the poet’s aim to elevate the “coy Mistress,” then the standard application of naming body parts is an apt and recognizable place to start, and it is an action that charmingly locates the woman amongst a catalogue of the most praised women in literature.
After declaring that he would spend “thirty thousand years” to “adore each breast,” the persona follows this hyperbolized statement by announcing that he would spend “An age at least to every part.” What hyperbole does in a love poem is that it leads to more hyperbole, and the greater the pronouncement on the part of the poet, the wilder the assumption. As ridiculous as this may sound, it serves, rhetorically, as an elaborate and entertaining form of persuasion in which the poet is given the opportunity not only to describe and praise the beloved but to show the breadth and skill of his imagination in an effort to impress and flatter.
Marvell then assures the woman that she is worthy of such hyperbole when he notes that “lady, you deserve this state / Nor would I love at a lower rate.” This reassurance of worthiness is the conclusion of his subtopic into flattery, for he suddenly returns to the theme of expediency and time with a bathetic introduction of the theme of death: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” The world beyond, he is sorry to say, is not paradise or even a broad range of extemporal activities and pleasures but “Deserts of vast eternity.” The metrical truncation of line 24 sounds like a curfew bell on the pleasures of dreaming and, rhetorically, brings the argument back to the factuality of reality. What is really confronting them is the lack of time, the spectre of death, and the end to all earthly pleasures: “Thy beauty shall no more be found; / 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.” Coyness, the persona concludes, serves no one after he or she is dead. “The grave’s a fine and private place,” he tells her as if to drive home the point in a conclusion to the sub-argument on death, but it is a place where no one loves and “none, I think, do there embrace.” As a subsection to the poem, the introduction of the argument on death is intended partly as a shock to the listener after the pleasant earlier sections of the poem and as a memento mori, a reminder of the presence of death in the world and a sharpener of both the senses and the urgency underlying the need to love.
The final section of the poem, lines 33-44, returns to the opening theme of expediency in the face of fleeting time. The speaker pleads with the woman not to waste her youth, her beauty, and the moment itself by holding her virginity in reserve: “Now let us sport us while we may,” he advises. Marvell borrows the concept of “devouring Time” from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 19,” another allusion that is designed to reinforce the argument for expediency. The “amorous birds of prey” in line 38 is a perplexing image, perhaps suggesting a sense of carpe diem, of taking control of the situation and seizing the moment by rolling “all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball” in an act of both spiritual and sexual union. This union of the two souls would then permit them the free reign of passion in defiance of the world and all of its hardships so that they would “tear our pleasures with rough strife / Thorough the iron gates of life.”
The poem concludes, as a student’s essay might conclude, with a passage beginning with the word “Thus.” This “Thus” is an equal sign where all the elements in the rhetorical structure, like all the parts of a balanced equation, are put in sum with the suggestion that there can be no other possible conclusion to the situation than the one the persona reaches through his discourse. Although they “cannot make the sun / Stand still,” effect a miracle, or stop time like a Biblical prophet, the persona assumes that together as a “we,” rather than as separate entities, they can “yet make him run,” suggesting that it is better to face time together than alone. As a rhetorical strategy, “To His Coy Mistress” is a frontal assault on a topic, a very blatant effort to address the delicate issue of seduction. What makes it interesting and enjoyable as a poem is not simply the ardor of the persona in his quest for the woman’s virginity, but the various plays he pulls from his bag of persuasive tricks. It is this combination of energy and ingenuity as a “comeon” line that has kept this poem fascinating for generations of readers and would-be lovers.
Source: Bruce Meyer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1999.
Sources
Aylmer, G. E., The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646-1660, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1972.
Beer, Patricia, An Introduction to the Metaphysical Poets, Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972.
Duyfhuizen, Bernard, “Textual Harassment of Marvell’s Coy Mistress: The Institutionalization of Masculine Criticism,” College English, Vol. 50, April 1988, pp. 411-23.
Eliot, T. S., “Andrew Marvell,” in his Selected Essays, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1950, pp. 251-63.
Moldenhauer, Joseph J., “The Voices of Seduction in ‘To His Coy Mistress’: A Rhetorical Analysis,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 10, No. 1, Spring 1968, pp. 189-206.
Untermeyer, Louis, “Puritans and Cavaliers,” Lives of the Poets: The Story of One Thousand Years of English and American Poetry, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959, pp. 152-169.
For Further Study
Becker, Ernest, The Denial of Death, New York: The Free Press (Macmillan), 1973.
This innovative breaking book by one of the most introspective of recent psychologists looks at the ways in which humans turn to pursuits like sex in order to suppress their fear of dying. This is the same idea that Marvell was writing about three hundred years earlier.
Brett, R. L., ed., Andrew Marvell: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Death, London: Oxford University Press, 1979.
This collection analyzes how Marvell’s reputation has grown over the 300 years since he died, giving a late-twentieth-century understanding of the poets that he has influenced.
Jones, Richard Foster, The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope, Stanford, CA: Stanford University, 1969.
This groundbreaking work presents a collection of essays by Jones, one of the most respected scholars in the study of Marvell’s time, and also includes more than a dozen essays by other thinkers and researchers who were influenced by Jones’s writings.
Paglia, Camille, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
As the title implies, Paglia’s book examines the role of sex in literature and the roles that men and women have played in literary works throughout history.
Semler, L. E., The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press/Associated University Presses, 1998.
Marvell does not play a large part in Semler’s study, but students who are interested in seventeenth-century painting should appreciate the ideas this book has to offer.
Stephens, Dorothy, The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure From Spenser to Marvell, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Although written at a complex level for the professional scholar, Stephens’s work addresses a central question about Marvell. We study “To His Coy Mistress” today as much to find out about the sexual mores of his time as we do for his technique.