To His Coy Mistress

By Andrew Marvell

This poem’s argument to the coy mistress begins with an if/then proposition: if we had unlimited time, then we could stretch our courtship out so that it would take on a historical and global scale, spanning the great cultures of the world and outlasting the growth of empires.

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

Marvell plays on the blason, a type of poem in which the speaker praises his lover by enumerating the beauty of her various parts. In this hypothetical situation of timeless love, Marvell’s speaker could stretch his blason out over eons. He imagines spending a hundred years describing his lover’s beautiful eyes, and then saves two hundred years each to praise her breasts, which might provide some hint about where his argument is headed.

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.

The word but marks a shift in the argument structure of the poem. The second verse paragraph insists that the “if” of the previous statement can’t hold: time will not slow down for the lovers, and none of the fantasies of passing years where they would enjoy love at leisure can become a reality.

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 honor 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 the 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

Though the poem begins with the idea of stretching a love affair out over a long timeline, Marvell ends with a contrasting image of the “sweetness” of love bunched up into a concentrated “ball.”

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Thorough the iron gates of life:

In line 22, Marvell refers to the Greek god Apollo’s “wingèd chariot,” which carries the sun from east to west, guiding the passage of each day. He returns to this idea of the sun’s movement at the end of the poem. Apollo does not stop on his appointed path, no matter how much the lovers might want him to “stand still,” so they might as well enjoy the pleasures that make days pass even faster.

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.