"To His Coy Mistress" is a poem by the English poet Andrew Marvell. Most likely written in the 1650s in the midst of the English Interregnum, the poem was not published until the 1680s, after Marvell's death. "To His Coy Mistress" is a carpe diem poem: following the example of Roman poets like Horace, it urges a young woman to enjoy the pleasures of life before death claims her. Indeed, the poem is an attempt to seduce the titular "coy mistress." In the process, however, the speaker dwells with grotesque intensity on death itself. Death seems to take over the poem, displacing the speaker's erotic energy and filling the poem with dread.
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The message of "To His Coy Mistress" is that human life is brief, that time passes swiftly, and that the speaker's mistress should accept his amorous advances now, before mortality makes pleasure impossible.
"In the poem, "To his Coy Mistress," is the poet angry at and disgusted by his mistress?" eNotes Editorial, 31 Oct. 2011, -help/poem-his-coy-mistress-poet-angry-disgusted-his-290739.Accessed 9 Feb. 2023.
This poem is considered one of Marvell's finest and is possibly the best recognised carpe diem poem in English. Although the date of its composition is not known, it may have been written in the early 1650s. At that time, Marvell was serving as a tutor to the daughter of the retired commander of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax.[3]
The speaker of the poem starts by addressing a woman who has been slow to respond to his romantic advances. In the first stanza he describes how he would pay court to her if he were to be unencumbered by the constraints of a normal lifespan. He could spend centuries admiring each part of her body and her resistance to his advances (i.e., coyness) would not discourage him. In the second stanza, he laments how short human life is. Once life is over, the speaker contends, the opportunity to enjoy one another is gone, as no one embraces in death. In the last stanza, the speaker urges the woman to requite his efforts, and argues that in loving one another with passion they will both make the most of the brief time they have to live.
The poem is written in iambic tetrameter and rhymes in couplets. The first verse paragraph ("Had we...") is ten couplets long, the second ("But...") six, and the third ("Now therefore...") seven.The logical form of the poem runs: if... but... therefore....
Until recently, "To His Coy Mistress" had been received by many as a poem that follows the traditional conventions of carpe diem love poetry. Some modern critics, however, argue Marvell's use of complex and ambiguous metaphors challenges the perceived notions of the poem. It as well raises suspicion of irony and deludes the reader with its inappropriate and jarring imagery.[4]
At least two poets have taken up the challenge of responding to Marvell's poem in the character of the lady so addressed. Annie Finch's "Coy Mistress"[5] suggests that poetry is a more fitting use of their time than lovemaking, while A.D. Hope's "His Coy Mistress to Mr. Marvell" turns down the offered seduction outright.[6]
Many authors have borrowed the phrase "World enough and time" from the poem's opening line to use in their book titles. The most famous is Robert Penn Warren's 1950 novel World Enough and Time: A Romantic Novel, about murder in early-19th-century Kentucky. With variations, it has also been used for books on the philosophy of physics (World Enough and Space-Time: Absolute versus Relational Theories of Space and Time), geopolitics (World Enough and Time: Successful Strategies for Resource Management), a science-fiction collection (Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction), and a biography of the poet (World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell). The phrase is used as a title chapter in Andreas Wagner's pop science book on the origin of variation in organisms, "Arrival of the Fittest".[7] The verse serves as an epigraph to Mimesis, literary critic Erich Auerbach's most famous book. It is also the title of an episode of Big Finish Productions's The Diary of River Song series 2, and of part 1 of Doctor Who's Series 10 finale. It is the title of a Star Trek New Voyages fan episode where George Takei reprises his role as Sulu after being lost in a rift in time.
Also in the field of science fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a Hugo-nominated short story whose title, "Vaster than Empires and More Slow", is taken from the poem. Ian Watson notes the debt of this story to Marvell, "whose complex and allusive poems are of a later form of pastoral to that which I shall refer, and, like Marvell, Le Guin's nature references are, as I want to argue, "pastoral" in a much more fundamental and interesting way than this simplistic use of the term."[8] There are other allusions to the poem in the field of Fantasy and Science Fiction: the first book of James Kahn's "New World Series" is titled "World Enough, and Time"; the third book of Joe Haldeman's "Worlds" trilogy is titled "Worlds Enough and Time"; and Peter S. Beagle's novel A Fine and Private Place about a love affair between two ghosts in a graveyard. The latter phrase has been widely used as a euphemism for the grave, and has formed the title of several mystery novels.
The phrase "there will be time" occurs repeatedly in a section of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), and is often said to be an allusion to Marvell's poem.[10] Prufrock says that there will be time "for the yellow smoke that slides along the street", time "to murder and create", and time "for a hundred indecisions ... Before the taking of a toast and tea". As Eliot's hero is, in fact, putting off romance and consummation, he is (falsely) answering Marvell's speaker. Eliot also alludes to the lines near the end of Marvell's poem, "Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball", with his lines, "To have squeezed the universe into a ball / To roll it toward some overwhelming question," as Prufrock questions whether or not such an act of daring would have been worth it. Eliot returns to Marvell in The Waste Land with the lines "But at my back in a cold blast I hear / The rattle of the bones" (Part III, line 185) and "But at my back from time to time I hear / The sound of horns and motors" (Part III, line 196).
Archibald MacLeish's poem ".mw-parser-output .vanchor>:target.vanchor-textbackground-color:#b1d2ffYou, Andrew Marvell",[11][12] alludes to the passage of time and to the growth and decline of empires. In his poem, the speaker, lying on the ground at sunset, feels "the rising of the night". He visualizes sunset, moving from east to west geographically, overtaking the great civilizations of the past, and feels "how swift how secretly / The shadow of the night comes on."
Primo Levi roughly quotes Marvell in his 1983 poem "The Mouse," which describes the artistic and existential pressures of the awareness that time is finite. He expresses annoyance at the sentiment to seize the day, stating, "And at my back it seems to hear / Some winged curved chariot hurrying near. / What impudence! What conceit! / I really was fed up."
The poem, along with Marvell's 'The Definition of Love', is heavily referenced throughout the 1997 film The Daytrippers, in which the main character finds a note she believes may be from her husband's mistress. In several scenes, the two Marvell poems are alluded to, quoted, and sometimes directly discussed.
A word is one of the most powerful means for a person to express his or her attitude, to share information, or to show admiration. A poem is a powerful combination of words that is devoted to numerous themes, which are so important in this life, and poetry about women serve as an excellent example of the evaluation of female place and roles in this world, their duties, and their significance.
Marvell is not so boastful as to refer to a marrow, I am sure he would have been happy to have it likened to a courgette and I am certain his coy mistress would have been happy with a carrot if it was a good looking one. Anyway it is a lovely poem and it would have turned my head no matter what his vegetable matter.
Reblogged this on Writing hints and competitions and commented:Another Marvell-ous poem and interpretation. By far this is my favourite poet, his words span the centuries and are the encouragement and embodiment of all that poetry stands for. Only my opinion of course.
The Sun here stands as a symbol of time, as people in the seventeenth century thought that time was controlled by the Sun. Instead of running from time, the speaker now believes he can make it do what he wants. If they cannot stop time altogether, they can at least gain control over it by doing what they want to do instead of what society wants them to. The power of time is thus taken from death and given to the speaker and his mistress.
As the poem progresses, he uses symbolism and metaphor to tell her what will happen if they don't have sex. Essentially, they're going to die and everything they once cared about will be meaningless. He uses metaphor to compare empty, lifeless deserts to time:
What do you make of this? Do you think that all he wants is to have sex with her? Or do you think he does want an emotional relationship with her, too? Do you find this poem misogynistic in some way? Do you think the speaker is coming off a bit creepy and predatory?
Assonance and consonance control the rhythm of the poem along with alliteration and end rhyme. Consider the assonance in line 9: "And you should, if you please, refuse." The repetition of the hard "U" creates an inherent rhythm that makes the line memorable. It also stands out as the only line in which the speaker gives his mistress any agency in making the choice whether or not to have sex with him.
In addition to spanning physical distance, the speaker states that their love would span throughout time. "Before the flood" is an allusion to the Biblical flood that caused Noah to build an ark, showcasing how far back his love would go if it could. And their love would stretch to the future, with the conversion of the Jews to Christianity (which, as we know 350 years in the future, still has not happened). The use of allusion depicts how deeply he would love his mistress if he could. 2ff7e9595c
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