To His Coy Mistress- Andrew Marvell

Marvell is one of the most famous metaphysical poets, whose work often uses wit and elaborate conceits to create a poem deep with meaning. A conceit is a metaphor employed by a poet, often of the metaphysical genre, to compare two things wholly unalike and invoke similarity. For example, in John Donne’s poem The Sun Rising, Donne compares the bed he’s lying in to the entire world by saying that all kings “here in one bed lay” and “this bed thy centre is”. Similarly, in To His Coy Mistress, Marvell compares the woman he’s trying to seduce to the entirety of time, saying that “two hundred (years) to adore each breast” and “thirty thousand to the rest”.

To His Coy Mistress has a clear message of 'seizing the day’ or carpe diem as it is known in Latin, and this is represented in the poems structure as well as its language. The poem is split into three stanzas; the first is mostly an admiration of female beauty with the conceit of his “vegetable love” growing “vaster than empires”, which could be interpreted as phallic imagery representing sexual desire. The second stanza sees a distinct change in tone because “time’s winged chariot” is at the narrators back, suggesting that if they do not submit to love and sexual desire before it’s too late they will be left in a marble grave where “none do there embrace.”

The final stanza is a conclusive plea for the end of his mistress’ coyness, asking her to sport while they may like “amorous birds of prey”. Therefore although the poem uses a pleasant rhyming scheme of rhyming couplets throughout, and appeals to the woman’s beauty in the opening stanza, in conclusion it’s merely a call for her relinquishment to his sexual desire. The narrator uses the idea of death and life’s brevity to entice his mistress to have sex with him which in the 17^th century when the poem was written would have led to her becoming ‘damaged goods’ and not fit to marry a gentleman.

The poem opens by declaring that if he and his mistress had all the time in the world, her coyness would be “no crime”, but the fact that it’s referred to as a crime in the first place leads me to the conclusion that the narrator is putting overwhelming pressure on his mistress to sleep with him. This is supported by Marvell’s use of imagery surrounding death to reinforce the importance of sex. Therefore the poem represents a kind of game where the man is growing more and more desperate in an attempt to make his mistress sleep with him.