‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell
My favourite poem in the English canon is ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell, written, most scholars agree, around 1649, when Marvell was employed as a tutor to Maria Fairfax, the daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax, commander-in-chief of the Parliamentary Army during the recent Civil War between the King and Parliament, but only published posthumously. It is a poem that is often found in anthologies, both for schools and colleges, all around the English-speaking world. Marvell wrote many other lyric poems, but most readers know his work only by this poem.
It is my favourite because its imagery and the development of thought in it is so original and striking. I like the fact that it is structured as an argument with a hypothesis (lines 1 – 20), an antithesis (lines 21 – 32) and a final thesis (lines 33 – 46). Marvell’s theme is quite a cliché: it is a ‘carpe diem’ poem, and many poets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrote this type of poem. ‘Carpe diem’ is a Latin phrase that means ‘Seize the day’, and so a carpe diem poem is one which points out how quickly human life may be taken away from us and how precarious our existence is, and, therefore, we should make the most of our time while we have it and ‘seize the day.’ However, while many of his contemporaries wrote about daffodils or roses and how quickly they fade as a symbol for human life, Marvell puts his poem in a firmly human context of a lover trying to persuade his female mistress to sleep with him. In the seventeenth century ‘mistress’ did not have the connotations it has now, and it meant merely his lover. The first section of the poem is funny because Marvell uses hyperbole to describe how he would love his mistress if they could live forever; he comically juxtaposes the Humber (Marvell was born in Hull which is on the Humber) a provincial English river with the Ganges – which at the time of writing must have been very exotic, since only a handful of Englishmen would have even seen the river or traveled to India. The second section uses gruesome imagery to remind us that death is frightening and inevitable, and the final section presents the solution: they should consummate their love as soon as possible. The rhythm of the poem gets quicker and quicker: in the opening section it is slowed down by the frequent punctuation, and this slowness reflects what would happen if they knew they could live forever: the final section, by contrast, is very fast because Marvell is in a hurry (note the lack of punctuation and the enjambment); he is in a hurry because he has shown in the second section that death may come at any time to turn her “honor” to “dust” and his “lust” into “ashes.”
This poem adds originality to a conventional form- so that is its chief contribution to the canon. It is a perfect match of form to content: by that, I mean that the imagery and the rhythm both work together to enhance and reinforce the meaning. The three sections also capture very effectively three completely different tones and emotional states. It is also one of the few poems in the canon that is about love, but which is also openly about sex and the question of desire. In fact, one might argue that it is not a love poem at all, but a lust poem.
Its position in the canon, I think, has prevented some readers from seeing the full significance of the poem. It is very famous and often quoted, because it is in the canon, but very rarely completely understood – because it is in the canon! Readers accept its greatness without fully analysing it. Therefore, the full sexual implication of the imagery is sometimes obscured or not given full credit. Marvell’s “vegetable love” which will “grow vaster than empires and more slow” is typical male boasting. The image of the worms trying “that long-preserved virginity” is shocking and gruesome, and “quaint” – if you research its meaning and spelling history - becomes one of the crudest puns in English language. In the third section the rhythm speeds up and up and reaches a climax, because his mood is one of urgency, certainly, but also because Marvell is trying, through the rhythm, to remind us of the rhythm of the sexual act.
