To His Coy Mistress

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1681

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Alliance of Body and Soul

As a metaphysical poem, “To His Coy Mistress” seeks to unify the metaphysical and the physical: the soul and the body. If the lovers were immortal, the speaker would devote “An age at least to every part” (Line 17) of the woman’s body. “Age” functions as the length of time he will spend in praise, but also links an immaterial concept of time to a tangible piece of anatomy. Rather than characterizing the body as a sinful place or inconsequential when compared to the metaphysical, Marvell says the body “deserve[s]” (Line 19) this rapt, epochal attention.

After presenting the reality that their time is finite, Marvell returns to the unification of the physical and spiritual. The speaker connects the lady’s skin with her soul. First, the youthfulness of her skin is presented as a “dew” (Line 34). Marvell says the “willing soul transpires / At every pore with instant fires” (Lines 35-36). The complex metaphor at work here uses the botanical meaning of the verb “transpires”: a plant giving off water vapor. The soul vaporizes the dew of youth, expelling itself through the pores. This makes the skin itself infused with the soul. In layman's terms, the body is covered with spiritual sweat.

At the end of the poem, Marvell argues that the alliance of body and soul can give the lovers temporal power. They “cannot make the sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run” (Lines 45-46). The power they gain brings the body to a celestial object: The sun pursues the lovers with anthropomorphic feet. In other valances, they want to “run” out the clock, an object that has parts named after anatomy: hands and face. Their love combats time because it is both physical and metaphysical.

The Power of Time

Time’s power is rooted in its expansiveness; humans only witness a slice of epochal time: time that is measured in ages and epochs. Marvell and his coy mistress can only imagine time that spans from “ten years before the Flood” (Line 8), to “the conversion of the Jews” (Line 10). These Biblical markers of time refer to the great “Flood” that Noah built an ark to survive and the moments before the Last Judgment when the Jewish people will be converted to Christianity: Thousands of years fall in between the two events. Scholars of Marvell’s employer, John Milton, use the term "secular" to refer to the time that spans Biblical events, epochs, and ages. Scholars contrast this construction of the secular with periodic time: the time encompassing a single human life (or the life of a generation).

While Marvell spends the first 20 lines imagining “enough [...] time” (Line 1) to be spurned by and praise his lady, the argument in the poem shifts when he turns to the reality of time. In a human lifespan, time rides a “winged chariot” (Line 22), an image connecting with the poem’s final image of the sun chasing the lovers. In Greek mythology, Helios—the sun god—drives a chariot across the sky. The speed of time--the rising and setting of the sun in sequential days--threatens Marvell and his lady. Time binds human lives in a limited number of sunrises and sunsets.

Marvell’s argument concludes with the idea that this power can be upended. The sun can be made to “run” (Line 46), if the lovers give in to passion and become physically, and metaphysically, intimate. Not waiting is a way to take control of time; the absence of a clock measuring out the moments until they consummate their love gives them power.

Memento Mori: Reminders of Death

The ultimate threat time poses is death. Memento mori refers to visual art, as well as literary works, containing images of mortality such as skeletons and gravesites, which serve as a reminder that everyone will die. As a kind of medieval death-positivity, memento mori posits that death’s inevitability levels the hierarchies of power that exist among the living. Marvell continues the medieval artistic and literary tradition with his images of the “marble vault” (Line 26) and the “grave” (Line 31) that will eventually house his lady’s corpse. Her dead body loses its “beauty” (Line 25) so, Marvell argues, she should act while he can still “embrace” (Line 32) her living flesh. Unlike the later gothic—and arguably necrophiliac—genre, Marvell’s use of memento mori in the carpe diem form emphasizes acting before death (not obsessively loving the dead).

Furthermore, Marvell uses the image of an intrusive worm to connect the metaphysical with the physical in death. (This might recall the worms Shakespeare's Hamlet soliloquizes in his impassioned speeches about death.) The coy lady’s “honor” (Line 29), an immaterial concept, can be physically invalidated by “worms [taking] her long-preserved virginity” (Lines 27-28). That is in the 17th century, conceptions of a woman’s honor are bound to an unbroken hymen, and a worm can break this physical barrier after death. Marvell argues for his beloved to take an active, consensual role: Choose to engage in sex and control her body before death renders her unable to choose for herself.