'To His Coy Mistress' by Andrew Marvell- Analysis

To His Coy Mistress

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

Shouldst 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.

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;

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.

But at my back I always hear

Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

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 honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust:

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

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.

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

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Andrew Marvell

Biography:

Andrew Marvell was an English metaphysical poet born in March 1621 in Winestead, Yorkshire, the son of a clergyman. Educated at the Hull Grammar School, he was accepted into Trinity College Cambridge in 1633, where he published his first poems, written in Latin and Greek, before receiving his BA in 1639. In the ensuing years, he is said to have travelled extensively in Europe, before becoming the tutor of Mary Fairfax, the daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax. At their Yorkshire residence, Nun Appleton House, he wrote many of his non-satirical poems, such as ‘Upon Appleton House’, as well as ‘To His Coy Mistress’.

            In 1653 he struck up a friendship with fellow poet, John Milton, and tutored Oliver Cromwell’s nephew, William Dutton, before being appointed Assistant Latin Secretary to the Council of State in 1657. In 1659, he was elected as MP for Hull, a post he retained until his death. During the final twenty years of his life, he participated in political activities and published political pamphlets and satires before his death in August 1678.

Analysis:

‘To His Coy Mistress’ takes the form of an eloquent appeal to a mistress, challenging her to succumb to the temptation of engaging in sexual activity. Using Horace’s ‘carpe diem’ as his main theme, Marvell argues that they should remember the fleeting nature of life, and seize the moment in all their youth to make love before they die.  ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is a metaphysical poem, embellished with some telling characteristics of such works, including wit and far-fetched, unique metaphors and similes. In this unconventional declaration of love, and proposition of sex, Marvell also meditates on the wider significance of the passing of time, and conveys a clear message that one should live for the present.

           

Marvell presents his argument logically in three separate verses. In the first stanza, he elaborates on a scenario that would exist if their love did not know the boundaries of time and space. He begins by introducing this idea in his first two lines: ‘Had we but world enough, and time/This coyness, lady, were no crime.’ He makes the point that they do not have unlimited time to wait for sex. Therefore, this woman’s coyness is verging on criminal. Using hyperbole and cunning flattery, and employing the conditional tense, Marvell then continues to depict the situation of limitless time. With such a luxury, he would court and pursue his mistress for eternity, beginning to love her ‘ten years before the Flood’. She could deny his affections until ‘the conversion of the Jews’, referring to Jesus’s return at the end of the world. These religious metaphors convey the infinite time scale Marvell wishes they possessed, but never can. He continues to toy with his mistress’s emotions, telling her that even physical separation and distance would not diminish his love. She could search for rubies by the Ganges, a glorified and exotic image that is juxtaposed with his placement by the Humber, dull and boring in comparison, where he does nothing but complain. This contrast is designed to inspire pity in the woman. An impression of the eternity for which Marvell yearns is conveyed by a series of time periods, each more extreme than the next, and showing the enormity of what he desires. He would spend ‘an hundred years’ alone just praising her eyes and forehead, ‘two hundred to adore each breast’, and dedicates ‘thirty thousand to the rest’. In one of the most striking and original comparisons of the poem, Marvell audaciously compares his love to a ‘vegetable’. Instead of choosing a safer simile, such as a rose, he chooses a vegetable to symbolise his emotions, which represents the natural, slow ripening of his love until it is ‘vaster than empires’, a line which is again adorned with exaggeration.

           

From the very beginning of the second verse, Marvell wrenches us back to reality, with the authorial pointer of ‘But’ hinting at the content of what is to follow. He talks of how he always hears ‘Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’: by personifying Time wielding this force, a sense of being hounded and pursued by the ticking tyrant of Time is created. His love growing ‘vaster than empires’ becomes ‘deserts of vast eternity’ stretching before them: a desolate, barren image. Appealing to his mistress’s vanity, he tells her that her ‘beauty shall no more be found’ in the ‘marble vault’ where she will lie once she is dead. Using gruesome and detailed imagery, Marvell warns her that worms will burrow into her until she is reduced to a skeleton, and offers her the choice between worms taking her virginity when she is a corpse, or experiencing the passion of sex with her lover now. He gently mocks her ‘quaint honour’: her antiquated, ridiculous hold on her virginity, and tells her that this will be of no consequence when she is dead, for she will ‘turn to dust’. He cleverly rhymes ‘dust’ with ‘lust’ to emphasise what a terrible fate it would be to go to the grave a virgin. The final couplet is wryly amusing and ironic, for Marvell speculates that ‘the grave’s a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace’. This is a humorous finish to a morbid verse, as he writes as though he possesses an element of doubt regarding the sexual activity of skeletons. It is impossible for them to love, and so his mistress should seize the opportunity to make love to him while she is still alive.

           

The final stanza combines his two previous arguments, and Marvell begins to pursue another angle with renewed vigour. Having flattered and terrified his lover, he seeks to inspire and infect her with his urgency: he employs ‘now’ three times in twice as many lines in an attempt to galvanise her into making love. In the passion of their youth, he encourages her to relent (‘thy willing soul transpires/At every pore with instant fires’) and goes on to conjure up an arresting simile, comparing them to ‘am’rous birds of prey’. This image is laden with contrast: ‘am’rous’ implies gentle love, but birds of prey are savage and cruel animals. This hints at his wild, desperate lust, and echoes lines from Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Lovesong’ such as ‘she bit him she gnawed him she sucked/She wanted him complete inside her’ and ‘their deep cries crawled over the floors/Like an animal dragging a great trap’. Furthermore, the spirit of Marvell’s poem is captured by another line in ‘Lovesong’: ‘he wanted all future to cease.’

Marvell boldly continues to challenge his lover to ‘devour’ time with him: if they make love, then they will be able to conquer time, instead of yielding to its ‘slow-chapp’d power’. This is an exhilarating notion, as the reader has previously been informed of humanity’s incapacity in the face of time. In a combination of pain and indulgence, Marvell tempts her to ‘tear our pleasures with rough strife’, a violent thought, reinforced with the use of the word ‘iron’ to describe the ‘gates of life’. In the conclusive couplet to his argument, Marvell uses the sun as an emblem of time, which is a fitting image as it is often used to indicate the time of day, and is constantly moving and changing position. He ends on a philosophical note: if they cannot make time stand still for them, then they can at least try to defy it without fear, in the comfort of their passionate love.

The stylistic three-stanza argument employed by Marvell presents his persuasive case logically and clearly. Rhyming couplets are used, creating a graceful lyricism. Assonance and alliteration are also present in the first verse, in lines such as ‘long love’s day’, designed to captivate the reader by the portrayal of an ideal universe. However, alliteration does not resurface until the final two lines: ‘our sun/Stand still’, making this final point more memorable. Although there is an obvious iambic tetrametre throughout the poem, Marvell uses punctuation to influence the rhythm and pace of the poem, and to match the content it describes. In the first verse, the short sentences are frequently interrupted by commas and colons, mirroring the slow romancing that he imagines, and creating a gently sensual rhythm. In the second verse, the rhythm subtly begins to speed up, until the climax of his thoughts is expressed in the final section. The words rush from him, reflecting his urgency, and the hurried rhythm alludes to the pressing situation.

            In my opinion, this poem is not only an appeal to a mistress to sleep with him, but an elaboration on the ephemeral nature of mortality, and a plea to seize the moment. Marvell deftly weaves solemn seriousness with ironically comical black humour. He aims to convince his lover that she should shed her inhibitions and make love to him by showing her repulsive images of death, for time literally flies (‘Time’s winged chariot’) and she can never experience passion once she is dead. This poem resonates with me, especially the final couplet: we underestimate how precious time is and take it for granted, naïve to the fact that there are many who desire only an extra day to live. We should live life to the full, and its alarming brevity should serve only to spur us on.