To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

Episode 67

To His Coy Mistress by Andrew Marvell

Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell.

https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/67_To_His_Coy_Mistress_by_Andrew_Marvell.mp3

Poet

Andrew Marvell

Reading and commentary by

Mark McGuinness

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.

---

Podcast transcript

This is a seductive poem in every sense. It’s pretty up front about its seductive intentions – it’s in the voice of a 17th century gentleman, addressing a ‘coy mistress’, and entreating her to less careful of her ‘honour’ and to seize the pleasures of the fleeting day.

And the poem also seduced me, when I was leafing through my copy of Marvell’s poems and deciding which one to read for you on the podcast. I remember thinking, ‘I’m not going to do that one, it’s so well known, it’s too famous for its own good’.

It’s one of the most quoted poems in English, phrases like ‘time’s wingèd chariot’ and ‘world enough, and time’ are everyday figures of speech. And it’s been plundered for titles of not only novels and movies, but also episodes of Star Trek and Dr Who, not to mention the countless allusions to the poem by other poets, novelists and screenwriters.

But then I was leafing through the book and I read the first few lines, and I was drawn in, and found myself marvelling – if you’ll excuse the pun! – marvelling all over again at this poem. At its wit, its elegance, its darkness, and also its sense of the urgency and precariousness and preciousness of life. So here we go.

The idea that life is short and we should make the most of it while we can is hardly an original thought, and it’s found in some of the earliest recorded poetry, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Ancient Egyptian ‘Song of the Harper’, both of which date from around 2,000 BC.

By Roman times, ‘carpe diem’, meaning ‘seize’ or ‘pluck the day’, was a well-known phrase from the poet Horace, who wrote lots of verse on this theme. And in the 17th century, when Marvell was writing, it was a common theme, in poems such as Robert Herrick’s, ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ and Edmund Waller’s ‘Go, lovely rose’.

And boys being boys, many male poets have seized on the carpe diem motif as an attempt to persuade coy maidens to – well, to stop being coy maidens.

And ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is the exemplar of this kind of poem, balancing the conventions of courtly love with philosophical musings on time, death and eternity. Is it a profoundly metaphysical poem that meditates on the ephemeral nature of love and life? Or a shameless attempt to enlist high-falutin concepts in the service of carnal instincts? Well, if I’ve learned one thing from reading Marvell over many years, it’s not to jump to conclusions.

So the poem is written in three verse paragraphs, which correspond to three stages of an argument, which has been described as ‘If… But… Therefore…’, and which we can summarise thus:

IF we had ‘world enough and time’, then I’d love to take my time about wooing you.

BUT at my back I always hear / Times wingèd chariot hurrying near’ – in other words, life is short, so we don’t have time to be patient.

THEREFORE we should ‘tear our pleasures with rough strife / Thorough the iron gates of life’ — and tear each other’s clothes off before its too late.

And let’s give the poet his due, there is more than a grain of truth in this argument. None of us are here forever, so why not make hay while the sun shines?

But of course, just because we might be tempted to make some hay, it doesn’t necessarily follow that we’d want to do it with the nearest person to hand. But the speaker of the poem glides smoothly over this fact, and presents his ‘mistress’ with a binary choice: come to bed with me or regret your virginity for all eternity.

So what the poem presents us with is a syllogism, a technical philosophical term which has come to mean a specious argument, where the conclusion may sound plausible, but doesn’t necessarily follow from the premise. And it’s all very well saying so, but it doesn’t really prepare us for the seductive power of the poem itself.

Let’s take the opening two lines, which posit the ‘if’ on which the argument of the whole poem depends:

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.

I can really hear the speaker’s voice here, as if we were overhearing him talking to the lady, strolling along in an elegant frock coat and wig, in the beautifully designed garden of an English country house. Marvell wrote lots of beautiful descriptions of such gardens in his other poems, so that every time I visit a country house, it feels like I’m inside a Marvell poem. So I can’t help picturing this poem being spoken on a leisurely walk among the flowers and quinces and pears and topiary, with an ornamental lake in the distance.

And the speaker’s tone is very relaxed, friendly, and charming – but also slightly mocking and ironic. And the statement sounds perfectly reasonable and plausible, until we take a closer look.

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.

So he’s saying, ‘If we had all the time in the world, your coyness, your modesty, your unwillingness to entertain my advances, would not be a crime’. And notice how he’s slipped that word ‘crime’ into the sentence, right at the end. He’s using the rhetorical technique of presupposition – talking about coyness as a crime, as if that were an established fact. Whereas in fact, it’s nothing of the sort – coyness and modesty were conventionally considered virtues, within the moral and gender norms of Marvell’s day.

And of course, the speaker knows this. And I think we can safely assume his mistress knows this too. so I don’t think we’re meant to take this at face value. It is transparently deceptive. But transparent deception is a paradox. So within two lines and one sentence, we’re already dealing with multiple layers of irony. He’s joking, but he’s also serious. And she knows this, and he knows that she knows this, and so on…

And Marvell is not just relying on his flimsy logic. He is bolstering his argument with all the cunning arts of poetry. Listen again:

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.

Can you hear that? That regular, lulling, hypnotic metre is iambic tetrameter, ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM. He kicks it off with a reversed foot, TUM ti, ‘Had we’, as if he were stepping out at the start of his walk, and offering the lady his arm. And then it becomes as regular as a slow and steady walking rhythm:

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.

Notice how the full rhyme of ‘time’ and ‘crime’ create the illusion of clinching the argument, making it sound truer than true. And I think this illusion of conclusiveness is one reason for the growing popularity of the couplet form in the late 17th century and into the 18th century. This was the Age of Reason, when writers wanted to sound rational and convincing. They liked to wrap things up in a little neat bow, and couplets are a great way to do this. So much so, that I think they should almost come with an advisory warning – reader beware! This poem is not necessarily to be trusted.

Anyway. We’re only two lines in, and we’re already in danger of falling under Marvell’s spell.

So having kicked off by wishing he had all the time in the world, the speaker tells his mistress what he would love to do in that case:

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.

In this scenario, where time is no object, they will be free to pass their ‘long love’s day’ – what a beautifully languorous phrase – in the most extravagant fashion. In true courtly love style, he could ‘complain’, mope about in love, by the Humber estuary, in the city of Hull, where Marvell grew up and later served as a Member of Parliament. And all this while she could be far away in India.

He would love her from before the Biblical flood, a proverbially long time ago, until ‘the conversion of the Jews’, which 17th century Christians rather arrogantly assumed would happen just before the destruction of the world, on the Day of Judgment. In other words, the two of them could stretch out their courting from ancient times until the end of the world.

Next, we get this startling couplet:

My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;

There are a lot of weird images in Marvell, and ‘vegetable love’ is a prime exhibit, suggesting the slower timescale of the plant world compared to humans. And perhaps other things too.

Then we get another feature of courtly love poetry, which we’ve seen before, in Episode 50 about Christopher Smart’s Cat Jeoffry – the catalogue of the beloved’s attributes:

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.

But if the catalogue had been done a thousand times before – and rest assured it had, even by the 17th century – it can rarely have been done with such wit or such elegance, or with such naughty humour as that rhyme of ‘breast’ with ‘the rest’.

And then Marvell ends the first verse paragraph, the ‘IF’ section of the poem, by underlining his faux reluctance to ask her to hurry:

For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

And on the subject of witty rhymes, isn’t that a marvellously abrupt descent? From ‘state’ to ‘rate’? I guess it’s possible to read ‘rate’ as relating to speed, but the connotations of ‘price’ are hard to ignore; on the one hand he’s saying ‘you are a high class lady’, but it comes dangerously close to ‘high maintenance’, or even ‘high ticket’.

So he’s saying that of course she deserves this ‘state’, this absurdly protracted wooing. But what can he do?

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

So we are now entering the BUT section of the poem, in the middle paragraph. Where he says he would love to wait, but time waits for no man – nor woman neither, as Hamlet would say. And time arrives in a splendid ‘wingèd chariot’, and I’m sure Marvell would appreciate the irony of that wonderful phrase granting immortality to this line about ephemerality.

And the swiftness of time means that the speaker and his mistress will soon be lost in the ‘Deserts of vast eternity’, a wonderful description of death that manages to be both a euphemism and horrifying.

Now strictly speaking, it’s nonsense to say ‘eternity’ lies ‘before us’, because eternity is outside of time, it has no beginning and no end. But as creatures of time, this is how it appears to us when we contemplate death. So I’m pretty sure Philip Larkin had these lines at the back of his mind when he wrote his devastating poem about death, ‘The Old Fools’.

Anyway. Faced with this memento mori, Marvell’s speaker does not, as we might expect, start to think about the state of his soul, or reach for philosophical consolation. No, he’s far more concerned that the two of them are in danger of missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for pleasure:

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;

And once again, it’s really hard to describe the tone of this, there’s nothing else quite like it in English poetry. It begins with a genuine sense of mortality, and even mourning, with the poet’s ‘echoing song’ in the ‘marble vault’. But it’s flipped almost immediately into a blatant attempt to lure his mistress into bed. There’s a kind of macabre, mocking humour that at the same time is weirdly compelling.

And perhaps most weirdly of all, none of this stops this being a genuinely moving and thought-provoking poem about the transience of life. T. S. Eliot put it better than I can, when he described tone of this poem as an ‘alliance of levity and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified)’.

And there is at least one extremely rude pun in these lines, that I won’t dare to elucidate, even with my Apple Podcast explicit tag switched on. If you’re a Chaucer fan, you’ll know exactly what I mean; but if you are offended by crude language, then look away now.

OK, here are the final lines of the second section, the ‘BUT’ section:

The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

There’s a delicious horror to this, isn’t there? At a later date, this kind of thing would be called Gothic. And it partly works because of something I learned when I was a hypnotherapist, and that is negative suggestion.

So if I say, ‘Don’t think of a pink elephant’, what do you think of? That’s right! A pink elephant. Maybe you imagine an X crossing it out, but the pink elephant is there as an image in your mind, because there’s no way to picture the opposite of an image.

And so when Marvell writes, ‘But none, I think, do there embrace’, it conjures up the image of two dead bodies or skeletons embracing in the grave. Which is a pretty horrifying image. And I’m sure the speaker knows exactly what he’s doing here. He’s putting the frighteners on her, which makes the image even more dark and disturbing, within the world of the poem. But outside of that world, when we consider this as a piece of poetry, then it’s frankly superb. It’s no wonder these lines are so famous, and so widely quoted.

In the history of poetry, this feels like a mid-point, between the earlier Jacobean metaphysics of John Donne, and the emerging elegance of the heroic couplet, in poets including Marvell’s contemporary John Dryden and later on, Alexander Pope. So heroic couplets are written in iambic pentameter, slightly longer than the iambic tetrameter Marvell is using here. And Dryden and Pope have a comparable wit and eloquence to Marvell, but they don’t have the heart of darkness that we find at the centre of ‘To His Coy Mistress’.

And yet the poem doesn’t end with darkness, but with light. In the third and final section, the ‘THEREFORE’ section, Marvell’s speaker proposes a solution to the riddle of death:

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.

We’re still young, he says, so ‘let us sport us while we may’. Which is a fairly conventionally poetic way of putting it. But then we get this slightly troubling comparison to ‘amorous birds of prey’. Now birds are nice and romantic, but why do they need to be birds of prey? It’s a bit disturbing, isn’t it? Especially when followed by the images of ‘devouring’ and the ‘slow-chapped power’ of the jaws of time. So in spite of his evident enthusiasm, it suggests at least an ambivalence about sex, and maybe an undercurrent of violence as well as desire.

And then the poem ends with this extraordinary image:

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life:

So Marvell was very far from being the first poet to wish the sun would stand still, so he would have more time with his lover. On this podcast, we’ve already heard John Donne asking the rising sun, ‘must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?’. And Marvell’s contemporary, Robert Herrick, in his ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ poem, reminds ‘coy’ lovers that the sun’s ‘race’ will soon be run. But this is a very idiosyncratic treatment of the theme, even by Marvell’s standards.

At first, it’s not even clear that he’s talking about the sun. He invites his mistress to join him in rolling ‘all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball’, which sounds like they’re going to make a giant snowball together. Then he wants to ‘tear our pleasures with rough strife / Thorough the iron gates of life’. So with the ball image still firmly in our minds, this conjures up a picture of the lovers pushing a giant ball through a pair of iron gates, which is frankly bizarre. It sounds like something out of James and the Giant Peach or Takeshi’s Castle.

As we have seen, Marvell’s verse abounds in disconcertingly strange imagery. And in his essay on Marvell, T. S. Eliot says he doesn’t always get away with it. But in this instance, I think he does. It’s ridiculous, but somehow it works, even though I can’t quite work out why. And it reaches a terrific conclusion:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

There’s an acceleration in that final line, which means the poem takes off, just as it looks like its running out of road. The ‘If’ and ‘But’ have been transmuted into ‘even though’. After spending 45 lines resisting the forward momentum of time and of the sun, the poem suddenly decides to gowith it.

And on one level, it’s a facile ploy, a part of the speaker’s transparent seduction technique. But at one and the same time, as we have seen, this frivolously erotic poem is also a genuine meditation on death. So I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to also read this ending as a joyful assent to life itself.

So, that is Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. And if ever a poem was begging for a response, it’s this one, isn’t it? Because we never hear from the mistress herself, or even glimpse her, so it’s anybody’s guess what she made of it.

And inevitably, other poets have risen to the challenge, and written responses in the voice of the mistress. Annie Finch has a delightfully terse reply in her poem ‘Coy Mistress’, and A. D. Hope’s ‘His Coy Mistress to Mr Marvell’ is a take-down that is even longer than the original.

I’ll include links to both of those poems in the show notes on the website, and if you know of any other poems written in the voice of the Coy Mistress, I’d love to hear them!

But I don’t think it was an oversight that Marvell doesn’t include the Coy Mistress’s perspective in the poem, and it feels a bit too easy to dismiss this as chauvinistic disregard for her point of view. A poet as clever as Marvell would have been well aware that he’d presented readers with one half of a dialogue, and that we would naturally start to fill in the other half with our imagination.

Nowadays, we’re used to reading poems as if the ‘I’ of the poem is the same as the ‘I’ of the poet. And it’s certainly possible that the poem was inspired by a real woman Andrew Marvell knew. Even in that case, it’s pretty clear that the speaker of the poem sees courtship as a game, and his ambiguous tone suggests it’s finely balanced whether he’s playing to win, or simply for the fun of it.

And it’s also possible to read this poem as a dramatic monologue, written more for its effect on the reader, than to express a private passion. In which case, it’s hard to escape the feeling that this most subtle of poets is playing a delightful and disconcerting game with us.

---

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.

---

Andrew Marvell

Andrew Marvell was an English poet and politician who was born in 1621 and died in 1678. Many of his poems reveal surprising depths in relatively minor subjects, as in the seductive ‘To His Coy Mistress’, or his descriptions of gardens and pastoral scenes. Marvell served as Member of Parliament for Hull during the English Civil War and later the Restoration. The nimbleness required to navigate such changing times is reflected in the ambiguous tone of his ‘Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’. He served as Latin Secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State, alongside John Milton, and contributed a poem, ‘On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost’ to the second edition of his friend’s great poem.

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