Today’s Poem: To His Coy Mistress

Andrew Marvell on seizing the day, among other things

Four-horse non-wingèd chariot race (Wikimedia Commons)

Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) was a generation younger, at least, than the great metaphysical poets John Donne (1572–1631) and George Herbert (1593–1633). He was younger, too, than the Cavalier poets who called themselves the “Tribe of Ben,” after their literary idol Ben Jonson (1572–1637), and clustered around the court of the English king Charles I in the years between the king’s 1625 succession to the throne and his deposition and execution in 1649.

Marvell came of age as an age was passing: its poets dying or keeping their heads down, its religious and civic polities upended. He lived to see the succeeding order upended in turn, by the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. Through more than half a century of upheaval and uncertainty, Marvell threaded his way, a chameleonic figure. The immediate heir to two poetic schools, somehow, strangely, he managed to belong to both and to neither. 

His biography suggests a gift for survival by adaptation. To begin with, he might almost have been a Cavalier, albeit a come-lately to that party. As an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, he wrote verses in Latin and Greek — as one did — including a poem celebrating the birth of a child to Charles I and his queen, Henrietta Maria. With the rise of the Protectorate, however, he found a comfortable berth as tutor to Oliver Cromwell’s ward and, later (a position he shared with the blind John Milton) as Latin Secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. Upon the Restoration, he seems to have pivoted successfully enough to have advocated for the Puritan anti-monarchist Milton, averting the Paradise Lost poet’s execution for writings that had become seditious more or less overnight. Though Marvell himself, as a member of Parliament, wrote satirical poems criticizing the corruption of the new Stuart court, he was prudent enough not to let them circulate with his name attached. Ultimately he retired to a quiet but prosperous existence as agent for a shipmasters’ guild. 

Andrew Marvell (Wikimedia Commons)

The same vein of adaptive pragmatism running through Marvell’s public career turns up in his poems as well. His most famous metaphysical-leaning poem, “A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body,” is funny in a way that metaphysical poems almost never are, with the body and soul moaning about what a drag it is to be stuck with the other. It’s an argument that nobody wins, which is perhaps the point that Marvell meant to strike home.   

Meanwhile, today’s poem, “To His Coy Mistress,” seems to spring right from the Cavalier playbook, whose central theme is that there’s never enough time for all the sex you want to have. This playbook derives from the pastoral wooing poetry of the preceding century, of which Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is the chief exemplar, and which in turn looks back to the classical era, to Hesiod and Ovid. At first glance, Marvell’s poem appears to fall right in with this lineage. But again, despite its apparently familiar carpe diem argument, and its tetrameter couplets that directly echo Marlowe’s, “To His Coy Mistress” both engages and inverts the pastoral tropes in a way that is wholly Marvellian.

If the golden hours are flying, says this poem, then there’s no time for strolling by the Ganges picking up rubies. All those Cavalier euphemisms for what at least one of of these two people really wants? Rosebuds, et cetera? No time. If only one had two hundred years to gaze on each perfect breast in turn, but alas (whether the woman in question would find this prospect seductive is beside the point). The one certain eternity is the eternity of the grave, that “fine and private place” where there’s nothing to do but sleep (never mind the suggestion, in a neat disruption of the rhyme scheme, pairing eternity with virginity, that if she doesn’t sleep with him, she’ll sleep alone forever). Since “Time’s wingèd chariot” is always “hurrying near,” the thing to do is drop the poetic niceties. Right now, says the poem, since now is the time we have,  let’s “tear all our pleasures with rough strife” and “like amorous birds of prey,” devour each other.

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To His Coy Mistress

by 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-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.

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