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
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,

1
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Summary:
The poem is spoken by a male lover to his female beloved as an attempt to convince her to sleep with
him. The speaker argues that the Lady’s shyness and hesitancy would be acceptable if the two had
“world enough, and time.” But because they are finite human beings, he thinks they should take
advantage of their sensual embodiment while it lasts.
He tells the lady that her beauty, as well as her “long-preserved virginity,” will only become food for
worms unless she gives herself to him while she lives. Rather than preserve any lofty ideals of chastity
and virtue, the speaker affirms, the lovers ought to “roll all our strength, and all / Our sweetness, up into
one ball.” He is alluding to their physical bodies coming together in the act of lovemaking.

Analysis:
Marvell wrote this poem in the classical tradition of a Latin love elegy, in which the speaker praises his
mistress or lover through the motif of carpe diem, or “seize the day.” The poem also reflects the
tradition of the erotic blazon, in which a poet constructs elaborate images of his lover’s beauty by
carving her body into parts. Its verse form consists of rhymed couplets in iambic tetrameter, proceeding
as AA, BB, CC, and so forth.
The speaker begins by constructing a thorough and elaborate conceit of the many things he “would” do
to honor the lady properly, if the two lovers indeed had enough time. He posits impossible stretches of
time during which the two might play games of courtship. He claims he could love her from ten years
before the Biblical flood narrated in the Book of Genesis, while the Lady could refuse his advances up
until the “conversion of the Jews,” which refers to the day of Christian judgment prophesied for the end
of times in the New Testament’s Book of Revelations.
The speaker then uses the metaphor of a “vegetable love” to suggest a slow and steady growth that
might increase to vast proportions, perhaps encoding a phallic suggestion. This would allow him to
praise his lady’s features – eyes, forehead, breasts, and heart – in increments of hundreds and even
thousands of years, which he says that the lady clearly deserves due to her superior stature. He assures
the Lady that he would never value her at a “lower rate” than she deserves, at least in an ideal world
where time is unlimited.
Marvell praises the lady’s beauty by complimenting her individual features using a device called an
erotic blazon, which also evokes the influential techniques of 15th and 16th century Petrarchan love
poetry. Petrarchan poetry is based upon rarifying and distancing the female beloved, making her into an
unattainable object. In this poem, though, the speaker only uses these devices to suggest that distancing
himself from his lover is mindless, because they do not have the limitless time necessary for the speaker
to praise the Lady sufficiently. He therefore constructs an erotic blazon only to assert its futility.
The poem’s mood shifts in line 21, when the speaker asserts that “Time's winged chariot” is always near.
The speaker’s rhetoric changes from an acknowledgement of the Lady’s limitless virtue to insisting on
the radical limitations of their time as embodied beings. Once dead, he assures the Lady, her virtues and
her beauty will lie in the grave along with her body as it turns to dust. Likewise, the speaker imagines his
lust being reduced to ashes, while the chance for the two lovers to join sexually will be lost forever.
The third and final section of the poem shifts into an all-out plea and display of poetic prowess in which
the speaker attempts to win over the Lady. He compares the Lady’s skin to a vibrant layer of morning

2
dew that is animated by the fires of her soul and encourages her to “sport” with him “while we may.”
Time devours all things, the speaker acknowledges, but he nonetheless asserts that the two of them
can, in fact, turn the tables on time. They can become “amorous birds of prey” that actively consume
the time they have through passionate lovemaking.

Summary: Critical Survey of Literature

In “To His Coy Mistress,” his most famous poem, Andrew Marvell follows many of the conventions of the
carpe diem (Latin for “seize the day”) theme in poetry. This type of poem dates from ancient times and
was made popular in English in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by such writers as Sir
Walter Ralegh, Christopher Marlowe, and Robert Herrick. In such poems, typically, the speaker is an
eager male lover lamenting the brevity of life to persuade his female listener to yield to his sexual
advances. Thus a carpe diem complaint is perhaps best understood not as a love poem but as a lust
poem.
Marvell adheres to this tradition in several ways, but he dispenses with the pastoral scenery and
songlike lyrical quality typical of much carpe diem verse. Marvell cleverly invests this pagan argument
(life is short and uncertain, so one must partake of all the pleasures one can) with somewhat melancholy
Christian allusions. His poem is more ambitious as art than is the standard shepherd’s lament. Marvell
frames the familiar urgings of the frustrated lover within three strictly organized verse paragraphs that
resemble a three-part syllogism, a formula logicians use to demonstrate the validity of an argument. The
argument in the poem concerns sexual gratification. The speaker’s premise in the first verse paragraph
describes the rate at which he would woo the lady, given time enough to do so properly. In the second
verse paragraph, the premise is the blunt fact of human mutability: Time is limited. In his conclusion,
Marvell’s speaker resolves these conflicts—figuratively, at least.
Marvell’s poem’s originality of structure has contributed to the work’s being ranked as the epitome of
carpe diem verse. Everything contributes to the speaker’s overall urgency. Marvell’s clipped, tetrameter
(four-beat) rhymed couplets create a hurried pace. The poem begins, for example, with two closed
couplets, or couplets of a single sentence each. This clipped beginning hints at urgency. As the speaker
gains confidence, he loosens this form and uses more enjambment, running lines over into the following
lines more often. By the third verse paragraph, he seems hardly to pause for breath at all. The variety of
allusion, metaphor, and other figures of speech give the poem an exuberance appropriate to its theme.
As if to call attention to the fleetingness of time, the speaker opens with a terse, elliptical statement, not
wasting even a syllable in his wooing. “Had we but world enough, and time” saves him from having to
utter the only slightly longer “If we had,” and “This coyness, lady, were no crime” similarly condenses
the more customary and conversational “would be no crime.” In this opening couplet, then, the speaker
argues that time and distance—not his own impulsiveness or lust—are the primary enemies of love. If
men and women had all eternity and all the world to devote to each other, “coyness” (her refusing his
amorous suggestions) would hardly bother him. As it is, however, he deems coyness a crime against his
emotions and her own—indeed, perhaps a crime against nature. He then offers examples of how, if
immortal, they would pass their “long love’s day.” Part flattery, part display of his own inventiveness,
wit, and learning, this catalog of praises follows the classical tradition of a list of charms designed to
weaken the woman’s resistance and make her admirer’s advances more appealing.
Marvell’s speaker employs a wide range of such stratagems. He draws on geography, implying that the
distance between two of the world’s rivers—the Ganges in India and the Humber in England—is
somehow equal to the distance he feels lies between them as he makes this traditional lover’s
complaint. From the tide of the Humber he moves to Noah’s flood (near the dawn of time) and then
ahead to the “conversion of the Jews,” in Marvell’s day a proverbial reference to the end of the world.
These allusions not only emphasize the infinitely slow “rate” at which his mistress deserves to be praised

3
but also introduce the idea that her coyness is vaguely sacrilegious. The speaker’s “vegetable love” in
line 11 is botanical (hence natural), historically significant (vaster and more lasting than empires), and
personal in its physical, clinging aspect.
By the end of this first verse paragraph, the speaker has achieved an almost geological perspective of
love, claiming that hundreds or thousands of years, even entire ages or eras of time, would be necessary
to praise adequately his prospective lover’s beauty. That Marvell’s ardent speaker is careful to conclude
that her “heart”—her inner beauty—demands the most attention of all indicates a shrewdness hardly
compatible with the inarticulate throes of sincere affection. This is a poem of persuasion, after all. The
speaker aims to disarm the lady further with an even more grandiose piece of flattery: “For, lady, you
deserve this state;/ Nor would I love at lower rate.” This summation allows the speaker to make
promises he knows he shall never be forced to keep, since, of course, the couple does not have all the
world to range upon and all of time to spend.
Having professed his boundless love for her, the eager lover quickly contrasts what would be with what,
unfortunately, must be: the eventual death of them both. Fittingly, this second part of the argument is
the briefest, and it employs the starkest imagery found in the poem. This paragraph makes reference to
ashes and dust, another subtle religious echo. The first part of the poem emphasizes lasting emotion,
but the second turns grimly final before leavening these images with what might be the poem’s best
couplet: “The grave’s a fine and private place,/ But none, I think, do there embrace.” The offhandedness
of this quip is intentional. It keeps the mood from becoming too somber, as if the speaker knows he runs
the risk of going too far. He seems almost to be reading his mistress’s expression for clues as he
describes the process of bodily decay.
The word “embrace” sets the final section’s argument in motion. This argument is couched in the most
urgent language of the poem. The section’s initial words—“Now, therefore”—provide the tone. The
word “now” appears twice more in the following few lines, along with such synonymous terms as “at
once.” The emphasis is on the fleetingness of the present moment: “while the youthful hue/ Sits on thy
skin,” “while thy willing soul transpires,” “let us sport us while we may.”
Marvell chooses metaphors and similes that make the lovers seem almost ferociously passionate. The
pores of the skin burn “with instant fires.” The lovers should become, he claims, like “amorous birds of
prey.” They shall “devour” time, roll their combined strength and sweetness “up into one ball,” “tear”
their pleasures with “rough strife,” and so on. Time, still the enemy of their love’s consummation, is
defeated in the poem’s final paradox, as the speaker admits, “Thus, though we cannot make our sun/
Stand still, yet we will make him run.” That is, since they have not the power to stop time, they might at
least control it in another way; indulging in sexual pleasures will make time seem to pass more quickly.
Also, making time run implies that lovers make the universe work.
Love’s other enemy, distance, is overcome as well in this last section. The first two parts of the poem
deal mainly in “you” and “I” constructions, but Marvell concludes the poem with no fewer than ten first-
person plural pronouns, emphasizing with grammatical subtlety the physical union the speaker desires
with this lady. (Such pronouns occur only four times in all of the preceding thirty-two lines.) Then, too,
the lovers are likened to birds of prey rather than the inert vine-and-wall relationship of the first section
or the union of worm and corpse in the second section.
Further thematic shifts should be noted as well, such as the symbolic use of “rubies” and “marble” in the
first and second paragraphs, respectively. The precious, deep-red stones denote tokens of affection and
befit the early catalog of praises; likewise, the more common but still impressive marble seems in
keeping with the mortality theme. Then, in the last section, these find their counterpart in another
element, a metal: iron, a humble enough material, yet one that intimates the lovers’ earthbound reality.
The speaker urges their passage through the “iron gates of life,” a telling contrast to the heavenly gates,
the promise of which presumably forms the reason for the lady’s chastity.

4
For years, Marvell’s poem was taken to be a fairly typical instance of the courtly love poetry popular
among English and European poets of this era. Recently, critics have pointed to the poem’s complex
ambiguities as a hallmark of Marvell’s work in general. One need not, however, turn this seventeenth
century Metaphysical poet into a mystery in order to appreciate this particular poem’s unique gusto and
lyrical grace. Although it employs many features of the traditional lover’s complaint, “To His Coy
Mistress” ranks above nearly all other carpe diem poems because of Marvell’s keen sense of irony,
reversal, and strategic order. Perhaps the sharpest irony of all rests in the poet’s distinctive use of
syllogistic structure, for as logically appealing as the speaker’s argument may be, Marvell could very well
be reminding readers that, in matters of the heart, logic holds little sway.