‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell
Content
The speaker attempts to seduce his mistress using the argument that life is fleeting and that
they have no time for a long courtship.
Theme
Love, lust, passion, persuasion, mortality, passage of time.
Persona
The poem is written from the first-person perspective, as evidenced by the use of the collective
pronoun ‘we’ in the opening line, and uses direct address to speak directly to the woman the
speaker is trying to seduce, as seen in the line ‘This coyness, lady, were no crime’.
Context
The poem was written in the seventeenth century, when there were strict rules governing
contact between courting couples and women were expected to guard their virginity and fend
off the advances of their suitors. Marvell challenges the Puritanical ideas of his time, which
taught the importance of denying earthly pleasures in order to prepare for the afterlife, by
arguing the need to make the most of life and enjoy the transient pleasures it has to offer.
Form & Structure
• The poem is a dramatic monologue consisting of three stanzas, written in rhyming couplets
of iambic tetrameter (eight syllables per line).
• The poem’s strong, regular metre serves to underscore the forcefulness of the speaker’s
arguments about why he and his mistress should consummate their relationship by
enhancing the direct, confident tone of his message. For instance, the steady iambic
pentameter of the lines ‘But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying
near’ creates a strong sense of momentum which on a metaphorical level reinforces the
speaker’s message about the need for urgency and haste.
• The use of rhyming couplets also invests the speaker’s argument with a sense of rightness
and aptness and the sense that he is pointing out self-evident truths, due to the way the
rhymes fit together. This effect can be seen in lines such as ‘Thus, though we cannot make
our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run’, where the heroic couplets create a clinching
feeling and a tone of resolution that enhances the persuasive force of the speaker’s
arguments about making the most of the present moment.
• Marvell uses caesurae to control the pace of the poem and reinforce his message about the
passage of time. The semi-colon at the end of the line ‘Thy beauty shall no more be found;’
creates a pause which invites the mistress (and the reader) to reflect on her impending death
and emphasizes the finality of death in contrast to the brevity of life.
Language & Imagery
• In the first stanza, Marvell uses hyperbole and the conditional tense to convince his mistress
of his devotion to her, assuring her that if they could live forever, he would devote unlimited
time to wooing her, as seen in the line ‘An hundred years should go to praise / Thine eyes’.
• Marvell uses the metaphor of ‘Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’ to emphasise how
quickly time is passing by representing it as a speeding vehicle. His use of the verb
‘hurrying’ adds to the sense of speed and urgency generated by this chariot metaphor.
