To His Coy Mistress
by
Andrew Marvell
(Analysis)
To his Coy Mistress has
been recognized for the past hundred years as one of the finest love-poems in
the English language. Its date of composition is unknown. The poem is composed
in three paragraphs, and appears to be in the form of a syllogism, which can be
reduced to the following bare statements. If we had world enough and time, we
need not hasten to consummate our love: but time and death threaten us
constantly: therefore coyness is a crime and we must enjoy the pleasures of
love.
Yet
any such account of the poem is inadequate, since the tone of the poem is not
that of a syllogism, nor is the poem a simple variation of the old commonplace
that we must take our pleasures while we can. It is a poem of great emotional
intensity, and of an intellectual complexity which becomes more baffling the
more closely one studies it.
The
first section of the poem is witty, fanciful, gay and swiftly-moving:
Had we but World enough,
and Time,
This
coyness Lady were no crime.
Marvell
would stay at home in Hull, which stands on the river Humber, while his
mistress would roam the world:
Thou by the Indian
Ganges side
Should’st Rubies find:
I by the Tide
Of Humber would
complain.
Extravagance is piled
upon extravagance:
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.
In
reading these lines we should remember that, according to the belief of the
times, the conversion of the Jews would take place immediately before the end
of the world. Moreover, we ought not to regard the phrase ‘vegetable Love’ as a
merely comical expression: the vegetable soul (the third in the scale of
rational, sentient and vegetable) was supposed to be the only one possessed by
plants, and was thought to be the principle of generation and of corruption.
Marvell
continues in this vein of extravagance until, suddenly, the poem takes a new
turn. The second section of the poem may indeed be a logical development of the
first, but the tone, the rhythm, the mood are transformed. For, after the
playful tenderness of the opening twenty lines, we are reminded of our
mortality in a passage of sombre magnificence:
But at my back I always
hear
Times winged Chariot
hurrying near:
And yonder all before
us lye
Deserts of vast
Eternity.
Thy Beauty shall no
more be found;
Nor, in thy marble
Vault, shall sound
My echoing
Song ...
The
poet’s mastery of the octosyllabic couplet is superb. Although, metrically, the
lines had we but World enough, and Time, and Deserts of vast Eternity are
identical, the second of these lines appears to be much longer and more solemn
than the first. We should not be deceived by the use of such apparently
abstract words as Virginity, quaint Honour and Lust, for Marvell almost
certainly is referring to the sexual organs of woman and man.
The
second section of the poem ends on a quieter note, which partly recalls the
conceits of the first section, although the mockery is more sardonic, the wit
more deadly:
The Grave’s a fine
and private place,
But
none I think do there embrace.
This
conclusion leads to the final section of the poem, which can be read simply as
a demand that the lovers should consummate their love. But the violence of the
imagery, the fierceness of the passion, and the note of triumph on which the
poem ends, forbid any such straightforward interpretation.
The
images succeed one another with bewildering rapidity for, after comparing
himself and his mistress with ‘am’rous birds of prey’ who will devour Time,
Marvell introduces a new and splendid range of imagery: 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. Thus, though we cannot make our
SunStand still, yet we will make him run.
It
is possible that the reference is to a cannon ball crashing through the gates
of a beleaguered city. It is more likely that Marvell is alluding to the narrow
reach of the river Danube known as the Iron Gates; certainly, his friend
Lovelace employs the word ‘gates’ in a similar physiological sense.
What
is the significance of this sexual passion whose urgency and desperation
Marvell so vividly depicts? Marvell may be saying that sexual union is a kind
of death which destroys the lovers’ strength and sweetness, and that their
ecstasy leads them out of life into death. He may, however, be asserting that
the united lovers are the perfect figure of a ball or a sphere. They speed the
sun on its way, are consumed by it and, like that mythical bird, the phoenix,
rise again from their ashes. Thus, the phrase ‘into ashes all my Lust’ and the
references to ‘morning lew’ (lew: warmth) and to ‘instant Fires’ become intelligible
in the light of the phoenix imagery. The poem also reflects the tradition of
the erotic blazon, in which a poet constructs elaborate images of his lover’s
beauty by carving her body into parts. Its verse form consists of rhymed
couplets in iambic tetrameter, proceeding as AA, BB, CC, and so forth.
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