To His Coy Mistress
Encyclopedia
To His Coy Mistress is a metaphysical poem written by the British author and statesman Andrew Marvell
Andrew Marvell
Andrew Marvell was an English metaphysical poet, Parliamentarian, and the son of a Church of England clergyman . As a metaphysical poet, he is associated with John Donne and George Herbert...

 (1621–1678) either during or just before the Interregnum
English Interregnum
The English Interregnum was the period of parliamentary and military rule by the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell under the Commonwealth of England after the English Civil War...

.

This poem is considered one of Marvell's finest and quite possibly the most well recognized carpe diem
Carpe diem
Carpe diem is a phrase from a Latin poem by Horace that has become an aphorism. It is popularly translated as "seize the day"...

 poem in English. Although the date of its composition is not known, it may have possibly been written in the early 1650s. At that time, Marvell was serving as a tutor to the daughter of the retired commander of Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell was an English military and political leader who overthrew the English monarchy and temporarily turned England into a republican Commonwealth, and served as Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland....

’s army, Sir Thomas Fairfax
Thomas Fairfax, 3rd Lord Fairfax of Cameron
Thomas Fairfax, 3rd Lord Fairfax of Cameron was a general and parliamentary commander-in-chief during the English Civil War...

.

Synopsis

The speaker of the poem addresses a woman who has been slow to respond to his sexual advances. In the first stanza he describes how he would love her if they had an unlimited amount of time. He could spend centuries admiring each part of her body and her refusal to comply would not faze him. In the second stanza, he remembers how short human life is. Once it is over, the opportunity to enjoy each other is gone because no one embraces in the grave. In the last stanza, the speaker urges the woman to comply, arguing that in loving each other with passion they will make the most of the short time they have to live.

Structure

The poem is written in iambic tetrameter
Iambic tetrameter
Iambic tetrameter is a meter in poetry. It refers to a line consisting of four iambic feet. The word "tetrameter" simply means that there are four feet in the line; iambic tetrameter is a line comprising four iambs...

 and rhymes in couplets. The first stanza ("Had we...") is ten couplets long, the second ("But...") six, and the third ("Now therefore...") seven.
The logical form of the poem runs: if... but... therefore...

Although it was written in iambic tetrameter, Marvell was known to primarily write in iambic pentameter.

Critical Receptions and Themes

Until recently, “To His Coy Mistress” had been received by many as a poem that traditionally followed conventions of carpe diem love poetry. However, critics consider Marvell’s use of complex and ambiguous metaphors
Metaphor
A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that uses an image, story or tangible thing to represent a less tangible thing or some intangible quality or idea; e.g., "Her eyes were glistening jewels." Metaphor may also be used for any rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via...

 challenges the perceived notions of the poem. It as well raises suspicion of irony
Irony
Irony is a rhetorical device, literary technique, or situation in which there is a sharp incongruity or discordance that goes beyond the simple and evident intention of words or actions...

 and deludes the reader with its inappropriate and jarring imagery
Imagery
Imagery is used in literature to refer to descriptive language that evokes emotional responses. It is useful as it allows an author to add depth and understanding to his work, like a sculptor adding layer and layer to his statue, building it up into a beautiful work of art.-Forms of imagery :Visual...

.

Some critics believe the poem is an ironic statement on sexual seduction. They reject the idea that Marvell’s poem carries a serious and solemn mood. Rather, the poem’s opening lines——“Had we but world enough, and time/ This coyness, Lady, were no crime”—seems to suggest quite a whimsical tone of regret. In the second part of the poem, there is a sudden transition of imagery that involves graves, marble vaults and worms. The narrator’s intention of using such metaphors to depict a realistic and harsh death that awaits the lovers was to seemingly shock the lady into submission. As well, critics note the sense of urgency of the narrator in the poem’s third section, revealing the alarming comparison of the lovers to “amorous birds of prey.”

Allusions in other works

Many authors have borrowed the phrase "World enough and time" from the poem's opening line to use in their book titles. The most famous is Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the influential literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935...

's 1950 novel World Enough and Time: A Romantic Novel, about murder in early-19th century Kentucky
Kentucky
The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...

. With variations, it has also been used for books on the philosophy of physics (World Enough and Space-Time: Absolute versus Relational Theories of Space and Time), geopolitics (World Enough and Time: Successful Strategies for Resource Management), a science-fiction collection (Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction - Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons
Dan Simmons is an American author most widely known for his Hugo Award-winning science fiction series, known as the Hyperion Cantos, and for his Locus-winning Ilium/Olympos cycle....

), and, of course, a biography (World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell).

Also in the field of science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

, Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin is an American author. She has written novels, poetry, children's books, essays, and short stories, notably in fantasy and science fiction...

 wrote a Hugo
Hugo Award
The Hugo Awards are given annually for the best science fiction or fantasy works and achievements of the previous year. The award is named after Hugo Gernsback, the founder of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, and was officially named the Science Fiction Achievement Awards...

-nominated short story whose title, "Vaster than Empires and More Slow", is a borrowing. Ian Watson
Ian Watson (author)
Ian Watson is a British science fiction author. He currently lives in Northamptonshire, England.His first novel, The Embedding, winner of the Prix Apollo in 1975, is unusual for being based on ideas from generative grammar; the title refers to the process of center embedding...

 notes the debt of the latter story to Marvell, "whose complex and allusive poems are of a later form of pastoral
Pastoral
The adjective pastoral refers to the lifestyle of pastoralists, such as shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasturage. It also refers to a genre in literature, art or music that depicts such shepherd life in an...

 to that which I shall refer, and, like Marvell, Le Guin's nature references are, as I want to argue, "pastoral" in a much more fundamental and interesting way than this simplistic use of the term.".

The phrase "there will be time" occurs repeatedly in a section of T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, commonly known as Prufrock, is a poem by T. S. Eliot, begun in February 1910 and published in Chicago in June 1915. Described as a "drama of literary anguish," it presents a stream of consciousness in the form of a dramatic monologue, and marked the beginning of...

" (1915), and is often said to be an allusion to Marvell's poem. Prufrock says that there will be time "for the yellow smoke that slides along the street", time "to murder and create", and time "for a hundred indecisions ... Before the taking of a toast and tea". As Eliot's hero is, in fact, putting off romance and consummation, he is (falsely) answering Marvell's speaker. Eliot also alludes to the lines near the end of Marvell's poem, "Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball," with his lines, "To have squeezed the universe into a ball / To roll it toward some overwhelming question," as Prufrock questions whether or not such an act of daring would have been worth it. Eliot returns to Marvell in The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...

with the lines "But at my back in a cold blast I hear / The rattle of the bones" (Part III, line 185) and "But at my back from time to time I hear / The sound of horns and motors" (Part III, line 196).

In the movie 25th Hour
25th Hour
25th Hour is a 2002 American drama film directed by Spike Lee and is based on the novel The 25th Hour written by David Benioff, who also wrote the screenplay. The film stars Edward Norton, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Pepper, Rosario Dawson, Anna Paquin, and Brian Cox...

, the last verse of the poem is recited in an English class. Andrew Marvell's poetry plays a significant role in the film The Serpent's Kiss
The Serpent's Kiss
The Serpent's Kiss is a 1997 film directed by Philippe Rousselot. It is a story about a Dutch garden architect named Meneer Chrome who has been hired by a wealthy metalworker to create an extravagant garden. The film also stars Greta Scacchi and Richard E...

, and Thea/Anne recites part of this poem, which is taken as a spell by another character.

Most recently, Audrey Niffenegger
Audrey Niffenegger
Audrey Niffenegger is an American writer, artist and academic.-Writing:A film version of Niffenegger's debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife , starring Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, was released in August 2009.She has also written a graphic novel, or "novel in pictures" as Niffenegger calls it,...

's fiction novel The Time Traveler's Wife
The Time Traveler's Wife
Once their timelines converge "naturally" at the library—their first meeting in his chronology—Henry starts to travel to Clare's childhood and adolescence in South Haven, Michigan, beginning in 1977 when she is six years old...

borrows heavily from Andrew Marvell's poem. The novel focuses on the main character Henry DeTamble, a reluctant time-traveler who proclaims his love for his wife Clare Abshire through the use of the phrase, "World enough and time".

Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish
Archibald MacLeish was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry. He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.-Early years:...

's poem "", alludes to the passage of time and to the growth and decline of empires. In his poem, the speaker, lying on the ground at sunset, feels "the rising of the night". He visualizes sunset, moving from east to west geographically, overtaking the great civilizations of the past, and feels "how swift how secretly/The shadow of the night comes on."

In the Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...

 novel, A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Ernest Hemingway concerning events during the Italian campaigns during the First World War. The book, which was first published in 1929, is a first-person account of American Frederic Henry, serving as a Lieutenant in the ambulance...

, Lt. Henry recites the lines, "But at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrying near", during a scene in chapter 23 where he and Catherine Barkley are eating in a hotel room.

Peter S. Beagle
Peter S. Beagle
Peter Soyer Beagle is an American fantasist and author of novels, nonfiction, and screenplays. His most notable works include the novels The Last Unicorn, A Fine and Private Place and Tamsin, and the award-winning story "Two Hearts".-Career:Beagle won early recognition from The Scholastic Art &...

's novel A Fine and Private Place
A Fine and Private Place
A Fine and Private Place is a fantasy novel written by Peter S. Beagle, the first of his major fantasies. It was first published in hardcover by Viking Press on May 23, 1960, followed by a trade paperback from Delta the same year. Frederick Muller Ltd. published the first United Kingdom hardcover...

has two ghosts falling in love. Ellery Queen
Ellery Queen
Ellery Queen is both a fictional character and a pseudonym used by two American cousins from Brooklyn, New York: Daniel Nathan, alias Frederic Dannay and Manford Lepofsky, alias Manfred Bennington Lee , to write, edit, and anthologize detective fiction.The fictional Ellery Queen created by...

 used Fine and Private Place for one of his novels.

In Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1946 film A Matter of Life and Death, aka Stairway to Heaven, the hero played by David Niven
David Niven
James David Graham Niven , known as David Niven, was a British actor and novelist, best known for his roles as Phileas Fogg in Around the World in 80 Days and Sir Charles Lytton, a.k.a. "the Phantom", in The Pink Panther...

 quotes lines 21-24:("But at my back I always hear" etc.) He then adds: "Andy Marvell - what a marvel!".

In Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
John Wyndham
John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was an English science fiction writer who usually used the pen name John Wyndham, although he also used other combinations of his names, such as John Beynon and Lucas Parkes...

, while driving through the post-apocalyptic outskirts of London, the character Coker, when speaking to the protagonist, quotes Marvell: "and yonder all before us lie, deserts of vast eternity. . ."

Woody Allen
Woody Allen
Woody Allen is an American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, jazz musician, author, and playwright. Allen's films draw heavily on literature, sexuality, philosophy, psychology, Jewish identity, and the history of cinema...

 included the poem's opening two lines in his screenplay for the film What's New Pussycat?
What's New Pussycat?
What's New Pussycat? is a 1965 comedy film directed by Clive Donner and starring Peter Sellers, Peter O'Toole, Romy Schneider, Capucine, Paula Prentiss and Ursula Andress. It was Woody Allen's film debut, as well as his first produced script. The Academy Award-nominated title song by Burt Bacharach...

, in the scene where Peter O'Toole
Peter O'Toole
Peter Seamus Lorcan O'Toole is an Irish actor of stage and screen. O'Toole achieved stardom in 1962 playing T. E. Lawrence in Lawrence of Arabia, and then went on to become a highly-honoured film and stage actor. He has been nominated for eight Academy Awards, and holds the record for most...

 attempts to seduce intellectual stripper Paula Prentiss
Paula Prentiss
Paula Ragusa , better known by her stage name Paula Prentiss, is an American actress well-known for her film roles in Where the Boys Are, Man's Favorite Sport?, The Stepford Wives, What's New Pussycat?, The Black Marble, and The Parallax View and her co-starring role in the television situation...

.

Actor David McCallum
David McCallum
David Keith McCallum, Jr. is a Scottish actor and musician. He is best known for his roles as Illya Kuryakin, a Russian-born secret agent, in the 1960s television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., as interdimensional operative Steel in Sapphire & Steel, and Dr...

, as Russian spy Illya Kuryakin
Illya Kuryakin
Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin is a fictional character from the 1960s TV spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E..The series was remarkable for pairing an American Napoleon Solo and the Russian Kuryakin as two spies who work together for an international espionage organisation at the height of the Cold War...

, declines an offer to spend time with a beautiful lady with the line "Had I but world enough and time" in "The Bow-Wow Affair," an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is an American television series that was broadcast on NBC from September 22, 1964, to January 15, 1968. It follows the exploits of two secret agents, played by Robert Vaughn and David McCallum, who work for a fictitious secret international espionage and law-enforcement...

from 1965.

Brian Kinney
Brian Kinney
Brian Kinney is a fictional character from the American/Canadian Showtime television series Queer as Folk, a drama about the lives of a group of gay men and women living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The character was portrayed by American actor Gale Harold during the show's five year run...

 uses the phrase "Had we but world enough, and time" in Queer as Folk season five's fifth episode when asked to inform all of his sexual partners that they need to be tested.

American science fiction author Joe Haldeman
Joe Haldeman
Joe William Haldeman is an American science fiction author.-Life :Haldeman was born June 9, 1943 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. His family traveled and he lived in Puerto Rico, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Bethesda, Maryland and Anchorage, Alaska as a child. Haldeman married Mary Gay Potter, known...

 used the title "Worlds Enough and Time" for the final volume of his "Worlds" trilogy.

Poet Billy Collins
Billy Collins
Billy Collins is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and is the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida...

 alludes to the last stanza, "iron gates of life," in the poem Carpe Diem from the collection "Ballistics".

The Irish historian Peter Brown
Peter Brown
-Historical figures:*Peter Browne , also spelled Brown, , Pilgrim and English colonist, signer of the Mayflower Compact*Peter Brown -Historical figures:*Peter Browne (Mayflower Pilgrim), also spelled Brown, (1594–1633), Pilgrim and English colonist, signer of the Mayflower Compact*Peter Brown...

 named one chapter of his most famous work "The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity" "a fine and private place".

External links

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