The Full Text of “To His Coy Mistress”
1Had we but world enough and time,
2This coyness, lady, were no crime.
3We would sit down, and think which way
4To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
5Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
6Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
7Of Humber would complain. I would
8Love you ten years before the flood,
9And you should, if you please, refuse
10Till the conversion of the Jews.
11My vegetable love should grow
12Vaster than empires and more slow;
13An hundred years should go to praise
14Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
15Two hundred to adore each breast,
16But thirty thousand to the rest;
17An age at least to every part,
18And the last age should show your heart.
19For, lady, you deserve this state,
20Nor would I love at lower rate.
21 But at my back I always hear
22Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
23And yonder all before us lie
24Deserts of vast eternity.
25Thy beauty shall no more be found;
26Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
27My echoing song; then worms shall try
28That long-preserved virginity,
29And your quaint honour turn to dust,
30And into ashes all my lust;
31The grave’s a fine and private place,
32But none, I think, do there embrace.
33 Now therefore, while the youthful hue
34Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
35And while thy willing soul transpires
36At every pore with instant fires,
37Now let us sport us while we may,
38And now, like amorous birds of prey,
39Rather at once our time devour
40Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
41Let us roll all our strength and all
42Our sweetness up into one ball,
43And tear our pleasures with rough strife
44Through the iron gates of life:
45Thus, though we cannot make our sun
46Stand still, yet we will make him run.
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“To His Coy Mistress” Introduction
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"To His Coy Mistress" is a poem by the English poet Andrew Marvell. Most likely written in the 1650s in the midst of the English Interregnum, the poem was not published until the 1680s, after Marvell's death. "To His Coy Mistress" is a carpe diem poem: following the example of Roman poets like Horace, it urges a young woman to enjoy the pleasures of life before death claims her. Indeed, the poem is an attempt to seduce the titular "coy mistress." In the process, however, the speaker dwells with grotesque intensity on death itself. Death seems to take over the poem, displacing the speaker's erotic energy and filling the poem with dread.
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“To His Coy Mistress” Summary
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If we had all the time in the world, your prudishness wouldn't be a problem. We would sit together and decide how to spend the day. You would walk by the river Ganges in India and find rubies; I would walk by the river Humber in England and write my poems. I would love you from the very start of time, even before the Biblical Flood; you could refuse to consummate our relationship all the way until the apocalypse. My slow-growing love would gradually become bigger than the largest empires. I would spend a hundred years praising your eyes and gazing at your forehead and two hundred years on each of your breasts. I would dedicate thirty thousand years to the rest of your body and give an era of human history to each part of you. In the final age, your heart would reveal itself. Lady, you deserve this kind of dedication—and I don't want to accept any lesser kind of love.
But I am always aware of time, the way it flies by. For us, the future will be a vast, unending desert for all of time. Your beauty will be lost. In the grave, my songs in praise of you will no longer be heard. And worms will take the virginity you so carefully protected during life. Your honor will turn to dust and my desire will turn to ashes. The grave may be a quiet, private place—but no one has sex there.
Therefore, while your beauty sits right at the surface of your skin, and every pore of your body exudes erotic passion, let's have sex while we can. Let's devour time like lovesick birds of prey instead of lying about letting time eat away at us. Let's put together our strength and our sweetness and use it as a weapon against the iron gates of life. We may not be able to defeat time in this way, but at least we can make it work hard to take us.
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“To His Coy Mistress” Themes
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Love and Death
“To His Coy Mistress” is a love poem: it celebrates beauty, youth, and sexual pleasure. However, the speaker of the poem is haunted by mortality. Though he imagines a luxuriously slow love that takes thousands of years to reach consummation, he knows such a thing is impossible: he will die before it can be accomplished. Death cannot be delayed or defeated; the only response to death, according to the speaker, is to enjoy as much pleasure as possible before it comes. He urges the woman he loves not to wait, to enjoy the pleasures of life without restraint. The poem draws a contrast between two kinds of love: the full, rich love that would be possible if everyone lived forever, and the rushed, panicked love that mortal beings are forced to enjoy.
The first stanza of the poem poses a question and explores a hypothetical world: what would love be like if humans had infinite time to love? In response, the speaker imagines a world of unlimited pleasure. For example, he describes his mistress finding precious stones on the banks of the Ganges; he describes himself spending two hundred years praising a single part of her body.
The key to this paradise, then, is that the normal limitations of human life have been removed. The sheer length of the mistress's and the speaker's lives allows them to delay consummation of their love indefinitely: the speaker announces that his mistress might “refuse / ‘Till the conversion of the Jews”—which, in the Christian theology of Marvell’s time, was expected to occur during the biblical Last Days. In this ideal world, the speaker feels no urgency to consummate their relationship.
The speaker has no questions about whether his mistress deserves this long courtship, but he does have qualms about its viability. He is, he notes at the start of stanza 2, always conscious of the passage of time—and thus of the fact that both he and his mistress will eventually die. Stanza 2 diverges from the beautiful dream of stanza 1, reflecting instead on the pressing, inescapable threat of death.
Death, as the speaker imagines it, is the opposite of the paradise presented in stanza 1: instead of endless pleasure, it offers “deserts of vast eternity.” The speaker’s view of death is secular; he is not afraid of going to Hell or being punished for his sins. Instead, he fears death because it cuts short his and his mistress’s capacity to enjoy each other. In death, he complains, her beauty will be lost and—unless she consents to have sex before she dies—her virginity will be taken by worms. The language of this stanza is grotesque. This is a poem of seduction, but it feels profoundly unsexy. The speaker’s horror of death overshadows his erotic passion, but it also makes the speaker seem more sincere: while at first it might seem that the speaker is saying all these things primarily because he just wants to have some sex, the despair in the poem implies that the speaker's arguments are not mere rhetorical statements but rather deeply held beliefs and fears.
In the final stanza of the poem, the speaker finally announces his core argument: since death is coming—and since it will strip away the pleasures of the flesh—his mistress should agree to have sex with him soon. What's more, he imagines that their erotic "sport" will offer compensation for the pain and suffering of life. “Our pleasures,” he argues, will tear through “the iron gates of life.” Though he does not imagine that their pleasure will defeat death, he does believe that pleasure is the only reasonable response to death. Indeed, he even says that enjoying pleasure is a way to defy death. However, the grotesque language of stanza 2 may overwhelm the poem’s insistence on the power of pleasure. If sexuality is a way to contest the power of death, it nonetheless seems—even in the speaker's own estimation—that death is an overwhelming, irresistible force.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “To His Coy Mistress”
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Lines 1-2
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.In the first two lines of "To His Coy Mistress," the poem establishes its form and its central concern. The speaker addresses someone directly, whom he calls "Lady." (This introduces one of the poem's key devices, apostrophe: the rest of the poem will be an apostrophiac address to the Lady). His tone is familiar, teasing, and also a bit stern. Though the speaker seems to know the Lady well, he nonetheless disapproves of her choices, and wants to convince her to change, to live differently. The lady that the speaker address is the same woman mentioned in the title, "His Coy Mistress." The word "mistress" means something different now than it did in Marvell's time. Though contemporary speakers use the word to describe a woman who has an affair with a married man, Marvell uses the word in a much more general sense: it simply describes a woman who holds authority of some kind, such as a female head of household.
The reader may wonder what authority the mistress of Marvell's poem holds. It's a tricky question to answer, because the poem doesn't tell its readers much about her. In fact, at most, the reader knows that she is "coy:" she is flirtatious, but she has refused the speaker's advances. The speaker begins the poem by reproaching her for doing so. He emphasizes, though, that her reticence and delay is not a crime in and of itself: if the two "had...world enough and time" it would be perfectly acceptable. In other words, if both the speaker and the mistress were immortal, then the mistress could flirt and delay as long as she wanted to. But, the speaker implies, since they are not immortal—since they can and will die, perhaps soon—it is a "crime" to delay, to flirt, as the mistress has seemingly done in the past.
The first two lines stand as a formal unit. Each line is in flawless iambic tetrameter, and the lines rhyme with each other in an AA scheme. Further, the first line introduces a thought which the second line completes. This establishes a pattern for the poem: the speaker's thoughts often fall into two-line rhyming units, or couplets. When they do not—that is, when a thought ends halfway through the second line or continues into a third—this is a potentially significant variation in the formal structure of the poem. The poem binds together the various concepts it introduces in these opening lines through alliteration, for example using a repeated /w/ sound, which stretches into line 4. The opening lines of the poem also establish the poem's logical structure, which is a syllogism: introducing its major premise: if we had all the time in the world to love each other, you could be as coy as you want.
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Lines 3-7
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.
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Lines 7-12
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; -
Lines 13-18
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. -
Lines 19-22
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; -
Lines 23-27
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; -
Lines 27-32
then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace. -
Lines 33-37
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may, -
Lines 38-40
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power. -
Lines 41-46
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
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“To His Coy Mistress” Symbols
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Heart
The speaker spends much of stanza 1 imagining that he will spend eternity slowly, luxuriously describing and praising each part of his mistress's body. His focus is on physical features and physical beauty: her forehead, eyes, and breasts. In line 18, however, the speaker turns to the mistress's "heart." One hopes this is not literal: that he does not plan to cut into her chest and describe the organ itself. Rather, the heart functions symbolically here, representing the mistress's innermost character. The use of the symbol—and the timing of its introduction—suggest some important things about the utopian world the speaker imagines in this stanza. In this world, the mistress can delay revealing her true self until the very end of time. Though the speaker continues to love her, passionately, she does not have to reciprocate until she's good and ready. It also suggests something about what's at stake for the speaker: he wants to have his mistress's heart, hinting at a genuine romantic love rather than simple lust. This is a rather chaste desire: the rest of the poem is much more explicit. The speaker withholds the full force of his desire here, early in the poem, restraining his more sexual ambitions until much later.
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Deserts of vast eternity
In line 24, the speaker compares death to "deserts of vast eternity." The deserts he has in mind are not literal spaces. Instead, they represent time itself, symbolically. In using this symbol, the speaker draws on a key tradition in western thought. Deserts are important spaces in western religion and art. In Christianity, for example, the desert is often a space of trial and tribulation. Jesus, for example, is tempted by Satan in the desert. (This temptation forms the subject of a poem by Marvell's close friend, John Milton—Paradise Regained). And the early saints of Christianity often retreated to the desert to attain spiritual clarity and to live free of sin.
Marvell's speaker, however, consciously rejects this tradition: instead of being a space of religious meaning, it is a blank and empty space, devoid of pleasure, devoid of content. It does not contain either the punishment or the paradise that Christians expect after death. It belongs, in other words, to a surprisingly secular worldview: one in which death is an absolute end with nothing beyond it. This view of the world suits Marvell's speaker, since he wants to convince his mistress to have sex with him immediately, without saving her honor for the afterlife. The desert thus symbolizes the speaker's nihilistic, even atheistic beliefs about the afterlife, and it also marks the extent to which he has turned his back on the traditional images of Christianity.
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Dust and Ashes
At the end of stanza 2, the speaker notes that, in the grave, his mistress's virginity (and the honor it represents) will "turn to dust." Death reduces something vital and living to an inert substance. Dust is an important symbol of death and decay in the history of western thought: for example, casting Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, God announces to them, "For dust thou art and to dust thou shall return." To be mortal, in this Biblical framework, is to be made of dust. Life itself is only a temporary escape from being dust. The speaker extends and even subverts this traditional symbol. In his account, it is not the mistress's body but her honor which is dust. Honor is an abstract concept, a social convention, rather than something physical. But the speaker's use of the symbol suggests that it does have material value. He makes this claim strategically, to support his argument. Honor, he suggests, is just as fragile as the body. Like the body, it will be devoured by death. There is no sense in trying to preserve it, since it will turn to nothing as soon as death comes.
In this sense, the symbol is similar to, but also different from, the "ashes" that appear in the next line. It is traditional to invoke ashes when discussing lust: lust is like a fire, and like a fire it burns out. Like the dust in the previous line, death reduces a vital, living force to an inert substance. However, Marvell is content to employ the symbol of ashes in a relatively traditional way, in contrast to his subversive discussion of dust in the previous line.
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Morning dew
In line 34, the speaker compares the mistress's youthful skin to "morning dew." Dew is often used as a symbol for youth—and for fragility. Dew is a liquid that appears on plants and grasses in the morning, as the temperature changes. It generally evaporates as the sun rises, disappearing by mid-morning. These properties make it an attractive symbol for poets to use. Human life is often compared to a day, with the morning symbolizing youth and the evening symbolizing old age. The dew seems almost an ideal symbol for youth itself: the way it is beautiful and delicate; the way it evaporates quickly as life progresses. Here, the speaker uses the symbol in this traditional—indeed, almost clichéd—sense.
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“To His Coy Mistress” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Personification
In "To His Coy Mistress" the speaker uses personification to describe time as though it has the human qualities of power, agency, and intelligence. For instance, in line 40 the speaker describes time as having "slow-chapped power"—suggesting that it has the capacity to break things apart. Similarly, in line 22, time is described as having a "wingèd chariot." In the poem, time owns things, moves around, drives horses.
Even as the speaker describes time as an inexorable force, he also describes time as a character, with intelligence and power. In this sense, the poem comes to seem like a drama, a fight between two kinds of intelligence, human and non-human. In this battle, the speaker seems almost ready to concede defeat: as a character, time seems in this poem omnipotent, incapable of being defeated. One might read this as part of the speaker's strategy: he wants to seduce his mistress by showing her she has no better option. But the personification of time also makes its power seem overwhelming, so much so that one might imagine the speaker is making his case so strongly that the mistress's reaction might be one of panic and existential dread, rather than erotic pleasure.
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Metaphor
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Simile
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Enjambment
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End-Stopped Line
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Caesura
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Apostrophe
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Allusion
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Hyperbole
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Syllogism
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“To His Coy Mistress” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Coyness
- Ganges
- Humber
- Flood
- Conversion of the Jews
- Vegetable
- Time's Wingèd Chariot
- Quaint
- Transpire
- Sport
- Amorous
- Birds of prey
- Languish
- Slow-chapped
- Strife
Coyness-
The word "coy" describes a series of contradictory behaviors. Someone who's being coy is simultaneously flirtatious and withholding, expressing interest but refusing to act on it. In contemporary English, one might describe it as "playing hard to get"—which is certainly how the speaker of the poem interprets the mistress's behavior. However, coyness is a matter of interpretation: one might plausibly wonder if the mistress is truly being coy or simply trying to let the speaker down easily. Since the speaker gives us little information about the mistress, it is difficult for a reader to judge her intentions or her behavior.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “To His Coy Mistress”
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Form
"To His Coy Mistress" is a poem in rhyming iambic tetrameter couplets, as the poem's first two lines establish. There are no evident restrictions on the stanza length: some stanzas are longer than others. Though the poem is in form, it is not in a fixed or inherited form; Marvell seems to have generated the form specifically for the poem. Indeed, the poem seems to playfully resist the expectations that its early readers would've had about proper form. In the 17th and 18th centuries, English poets often wrote in a form called "heroic verse:" rhymed iambic pentameter couplets. As its name suggests, this kind of verse was often reserved for heroic subjects: battles, epic journeys, etc. Marvell's poem falls just short of this heroic meter. Marvell seems to be winking at his reader. The poem is almost heroic: he comes close to taking himself seriously, but backs off. In contrast with heroic verse, which often feels stately and dignified, "To His Coy Mistress" seems punchy and fast-paced: the missing foot in each line makes the poem feel lighter, smoother, and less serious.
Though the poem contains a number of metrical variations, it maintains its light, fast-paced rhythm throughout, coupling this rhythm with strong end rhymes The slight hiccups in the rhythm exist mostly for variety and do not significantly affect the reader's experience of the poem. More interesting are the variations in the poem's conceptual organization. Frequently, the speaker organizes his thoughts into two-line segments, again shown in the poem's first two lines. Notice that the speaker's thought begins at the start of line 1 and ends at the end of line 2. A new thought begins at the start of line 3. (Occasionally, the speaker will extend his thought beyond the boundaries of the couplet—while maintaining the couplet as the basic structure of his ideas. This happens in lines 41-44, which make one complete thought, broken up into two parts, with a couplet for each). The speaker breaks this pattern occasionally in the poem, sometimes in moments when he loses his composure, or when he wants to emphasize a point. One can find a case of the latter in line 37: "Now let us sport us while we may." The line is conceptually discrete from the lines around it. It sticks out. And for good reason: it is the poem's thesis statement, its main point. The speaker isolates it exactly so that it stands out.
In addition to the careful conceptual organization of the poem's ideas into couplets, the poem's overall argument is organized into three sections, each of which gets its own stanza. The poem functions like a syllogism. In the first stanza, the speaker proposes a hypothetical: "What if..." In the second stanza, he demonstrates why the hypothetical is impossible: "But..." In the final stanza, he demonstrates the consequences of his demonstration: "Therefore..." The poem thus reads like a three-part sentence: "If...but...therefore." This structure contributes to the feeling that the poem is trying to persuade; it takes the form of a logical argument.
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Meter
"To His Coy Mistress" is in iambic tetrameter throughout—an unusual meter on its own. (It does commonly appear in ballad meter, where it alternates with lines of iambic trimeter). The poem's meter is relatively smooth. Indeed, long passages of the poem are perfectly metrically regular, as in the poem's first four lines:
Had we | but world | enough | and time,
This coy- | ness, lad-| y, were | no crime.
We would | sit down, | and think | which way
To walk, | and pass | our long | love’s day.The lines are almost monotonous in their regularity—a monotony that the speaker eventually needs to break. Metrical variation is inevitable—even necessary—in a poem as long as "To His Coy Mistress." Marvell's metrical variations tend to be inobtrusive and, for the purposes of interpreting the poem, not particularly significant. For example, Marvell is found of using a trochee instead of an iamb in the first foot of his lines, as in line 5:
Thou by the | Indian | Ganges' | side
The line opens with two dactyls rather than the expected iambs and follows these feet with a trochee, plus the extra syllable "side" at the end of the line. However, the reader hardly notices this irregularity. The variations keep the rhythm of the poem lively but they do not significantly affect the reader's experience of it.
Arguably, there is a more significant and pervasive metrical variation at work in the whole poem. With its rhymed iambic tetrameter couplets, "To His Coy Mistress" closely approximates a prestigious and widely used verse form in the Renaissance: heroic couplets. However, "To His Coy Mistress" is consistently one foot short of being proper heroic couplets: its tetrameter lines are eight syllables long, where a Renaissance reader—well-versed in heroic couplets—would expect ten. The poem consistently feels like it's falling short, failing to achieve the placid, dignified smoothness a reader expects in heroic couplets. This is a kind of mea culpa on Marvell's part: he admits that his poem is not quite as serious as a poem on a heroic subject should be. But it's also an advantage: what the poem loses in dignity and seriousness it makes up for in lightness and playfulness.
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Rhyme Scheme
"To His Coy Mistress" is organized into rhyming couplets. Each couplet has its own rhyme; after Marvell completes one rhyme, he moves on to the next. One can see this pattern in the first 10 lines of the poem, which are rhymed aabbccddee. The couplets are designed to feel separate—and not just in terms of their rhyme. Many of the couplets in the first ten lines are conceptually distinct from each other. For example, the first two lines of the poem are a complete sentence, a complete thought:
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.Notice that the speaker's thought begins at the start of the first line and ends at the end of the second line. In the third and fourth lines, he embarks on a new thought. The unit of rhyme thus serves to divide the poem both formally and conceptually.
The poem also contains a number of rhymes that look like slant or half rhymes: for example, "try" and "virginity" in lines 27-28. However, English pronunciation has shifted since Marvell's time. Though they may sound off to contemporary readers, for Marvell these were strong, full rhymes.
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“To His Coy Mistress” Speaker
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The speaker of "To His Coy Mistress" is an anonymous lover, though he may be a stand-in for Marvell himself. He spends the poem trying to convince his "mistress" that she should have sex with him. Over the course of his passionate argument, however, the reader learns little about either the mistress or the speaker. At the end of the poem, the reader may be left wondering about the most basic details of their relationship—how they met, why they love each other, their relative social classes, the history of their relationship. Indeed, the reader doesn't even know how long the mistress has been refusing or putting off the speaker. The poem seems little concerned with providing this kind of personal information. Instead, its two central figures—the speaker and his mistress—are ultimately generic figures: they stand in for all lovers, in all times. It seems that this is a poem that is meant to apply to lovers in all ages, regardless of the political and personal circumstances of their relationship.
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“To His Coy Mistress” Setting
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The setting of "To His Coy Mistress" is, broadly speaking, the earth. Indeed, in the first stanza, the speaker imagines himself and his mistress wandering across the whole earth, from East Yorkshire (where the poet was born) in England to the Ganges River in India. Despite these geographical references, the poem doesn't say much about the cultural or political context in which it was written. Mostly likely composed during the 1650s—though it was not published until the 1680s, after Marvell's death—"To His Coy Mistress" was written during a tumultuous period in English history. The English Civil War had concluded recently, with King Charles I being executed by a revolutionary group, and the English state was under the control of a party known as the Parliamentarians because they supported Parliament over the King. Marvell was an active, if sometimes reluctant, participant in these momentous political events; indeed, he sat in Parliament for much of the 1650s.
"To His Coy Mistress," however, does not acknowledge this political turmoil. Though the speaker makes reference to "empires" and "power," the "empires" and "power" he invokes are highly general; they are not tied to any political event or party, or even any nation. The poem may thus be said to retreat from the political complications of its time. It imagines sexuality—and love itself—as though they are free from politics and nationhood, or perhaps even a refuge from those burdens. The distance that the poem puts between itself and its historical context serves in large part to make its message universal; it seems that the speaker and his mistress could be any lovers living in any setting.
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Literary and Historical Context of “To His Coy Mistress”
Literary Context
Andrew Marvell belonged to a literary group known as the "metaphysical poets." Metaphysical poetry developed in the 1590s and early 1600s, and its most prominent early practitioners included poets like John Donne. Metaphysical poetry is marked by its philosophical intensity: it often takes up big topics and tries to think through them in poetry. But, it is also marked by its playfulness and its willingness to use irony, everyday language, and elaborate, strange metaphors and similes. Marvell belongs to the second generation of metaphysical poets, alongside poets like Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughn; Donne himself had been dead for more than twenty years by the time Marvell wrote "To His Coy Mistress." The poem thus reflects the influence of the metaphysical poets, while also drawing on other poetic traditions. For example, in the first stanza, the speaker imagines spending more than thirty thousand years praising each part of his mistress's body. This is a rhetorical tactic similar to a blazon, a literary technique drawn from the tradition of Petrarchan love sonnets in Italian, French, and English. "To His Coy Mistress" thus draws on a variety of poetic sources, cobbling together several different traditions of love poetry.
Historical Context
"To His Coy Mistress" was likely written in the 1650s, during a period of significant political turmoil in English society. In the 1640s, the nation had endured a bloody civil war. The civil war was provoked by religious and political tensions, especially between radical Protestants and more conservative Anglicans. But it quickly became a broader conflict over the nature of government itself, with Royalists—who supported the monarchy and the Anglican Church—pitted against Parliamentarians—who supported a democratic form of government and a Puritan church. The civil war culminated with the execution for treason of the King, Charles I, in 1649. Oliver Cromwell, a Parliamentarian, assumed control of the government for most of the 1650s—a period called the "Interregnum." Marvell himself was an active participant in these events. Though he spent the war in Italy and France, working as the tutor for a noble British family, he returned to England in the early 1650s, living for several years at Nun Appleton Hall near York (where he wrote his famous poem, "Upon Appleton House") and later served as Latin Secretary, alongside the poet John Milton—an important role in Cromwell's national government. He joined Parliament in 1659, representing Kingston-Upon-Hull. After the restoration of the monarchy in the 1660s, Marvell managed to escape punishment for his participation in the revolutionary government, and he worked to prevent the new king, Charles II, from executing John Milton. Important as this political turmoil is to Marvell's life—and his writing—it is notably absent from "To His Coy Mistress." In the poem, Marvell's speaker seems to have withdrawn from all such political complications; he experiences love apart from the politics of the world in which he lives.
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More “To His Coy Mistress” Resources
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External Resources
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"To His Coy Mistress" read by Tom Hiddleston — The full text of "To His Coy Mistress" read by Tom Hiddleston.
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Arts & Ideas: "To His Coy Mistress" — An episode of BBC Radio 3's podcast Arts & Ideas dedicated to "To His Coy Mistress."
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An Early Manuscript Copy of "To His Coy Mistress" — Images of an early manuscript copy of "To His Coy Mistress" from the British Library.
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Metaphysical Poetry — A brief guide to metaphysical poetry from the Poetry Foundation, with links to the work of other metaphysical poets and an extended essay on metaphysical poetry by Stephanie Burt.
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Allen Ginsberg on "To His Coy Mistress" — Twentieth century beat poet Allen Ginsberg lectures on "To His Coy Mistress."
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Andrew Marvell
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