Poem of the week: Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”

To His Coy Mistress

Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, lady, would be 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;

A 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 winged 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 its slow chapped 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.

At first glance, Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is not a poem that invites strenuous interpretative efforts. Drawing from well-established reserves of carpe diem rhetoric, the poem’s familiar motif and discursive language, however, belies its complexity and muted irony.

Allow me to illustrate by presenting you another poem, also very well-known, written just three decades prior by poet Robert Herrick:

To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time

Robert Herrick

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today

Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

The higher he’s a-getting,

The sooner will his race be run,

And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,

When youth and blood are warmer;

But being spent, the worse, and worst

Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,

And while ye may, go marry;

For having lost but once your prime,

You may forever tarry.

Languorous, relaxed and inviting, the opening lines of Andrew Marvell’s poem are set to the carefree swing of an iambic tetrameter, drawing us into a utopian world in which time is “enough”. We are encouraged to linger on the rounded vowel of “world” and be indulge in the sweetness of Marvell’s rhyming couplets. Despite the speaker’s ostensible objection to the idea of “languish[ing]” in time’s “slow chapped power”, the musicality and aural agreeability of the first stanza sprinkles a fine layer of irony on the poem. Through the proliferation of soothing, liquid semivowels in the alliteration of “which way to walk” and “long love’s day”, Marvell creates an ambient atmosphere which may be later contrasted with the grating, cacophonous sounds of the last stanza.

The last eight lines of the poem — in which the speaker attempts to seduce his silent auditor — are as violent in their sounds as they are in their content and imagery. Rife with guttural r’s and cutting t’s, the sounds literally “tear our pleasures with rough strife”. This paradoxically inclines the reader towards the prospect entertained in the first stanza, in which time is of no consequence.

This paradoxical vein runs also runs through the entire last stanza, in which binary opposites — sweetness and strength, pleasure and rough strife, stillness and movement — are “roll[ed]…up into one ball”, creating a cognitive dissonance that casts shadows of doubt on Herrick’s interpretation of carpe diem.

Thus, when viewed through the lens of irony, Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” becomes infinitely more ambiguous as it renders Herrick’s poem problematic. For not only does Marvell implicitly mock the notion that one should “use your time…to go marry” before you “lose your prime” — an incredibly androcentric and superficial point of view. Whereas Herrick’s poem, as an artificial construct, is an inadequate substitute for real experience, therefore recommending that by which its form it denies, Marvell partially counters this problem by creating a rich sensory experience out of the act of reading itself. We are able to experience, vicariously, through the texture of sounds and montage of images, the different emotions encapsulated within each successive stanza — the leisurely ambiance of the first stanza, the hyperbolical and somewhat comical gravitas of the second stanza, and the aggressive, animalistic energy that drives the poem to its finish. Language is thus able to contain experience (to an extent. Through the frequent use of enjambment and caesura, Marvell takes the phrases beyond its metrical bounds, infusing the poem with a greater sense of freedom and liveliness:

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.

In contrast, if we treat Herrick’s poem as a backdrop against which Marvell’s subversiveness may be more clearly seen, then we can start by noticing the way in which the form of “To the Virgins” is counterproductive to its purported message. Alternating between iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter with catalexis, Herrick’s rhythmically complacent poem contravenes the urgency it attempts to engender in the reader. With the exception of “Gather ye rosebuds”, in which a trochee is substituted for an iamb in “gather”, there is a complete lack of metrical variation in the poem, thus creating a sense of monotony and repetitiveness further exacerbated by the general absence of enjambment. Elegant though it may be, the poem refuses to be goaded into verbal energy or originality. Instead, the poem exhibits a contrary “entropic” movement, as the feminine endings produced by the catalexis in every second line enact a “falling” trajectory, echoed also in the image of the “dying” flower and “setting” sun.

Despite being a paradox, Marvell’s poem is congruous in its overall message. Rather than perpetuating a superficial and clichéd interpretation of carpe diem, Marvell encourages the reader to embrace life, not by getting married, but by experiencing each moment deeply and to the fullest. In the same way that we can better appreciate the poem by being tuned in to our senses, so the same is with life. “To His Coy Mistress” self-reflexively draws attention to both the inefficacy and power of language to represent reality and embody experience, respectively.