"Seizing the Moment: On Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress" [by David Lehman]

  The most marvelous seduction poem in the English language combines the logical precision of the mathematician with the wit of a courtier and the passion of a lusty lover. Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” has wowed a regiment of English majors, generations of suitors and their valentines, since it was written three and a half centuries ago. T. S. Eliot liked it so much he raided it twice, lifting an image for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and lampooning a couplet in “The Waste Land.”

          Marvell, one of the great mystery men of English letters, lived a shadowy life on the continent that led to speculation that he was a spy or double agent. An avid fencer, he impressed his friend John Milton with his command of foreign languages. For twenty years he served as a member of Parliament.  His poems operate on “metaphysical” conceits, startling metaphors exquisitely spun out. Some of his poems achieve a maximum of intellectual complexity and ambiguity. 

“To His Coy Mistress” is aggressively straightforward.  It mounts the carpe diem, or “seize the day,” argument that neatly falls into a dialectic you can summarize in eleven words: “If we had forever – but we don’t; therefore, let’s do it.” Each leg of the argument has its own stanza: we start in the subjunctive, move to the indicative, and end with the imperative.

The poem commences: “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime.” The counter-factual here is the realm of the impossible. The stanza is hyperbolic in the way of the Renaissance sonneteer, who would love his lady around the world from before the Flood to Judgment Day, if only time and space were not obstacles [the constraints of time and space did not stand in the way]. His words composed in the north of England would reach her ears in India. “My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow”: this, the oddest couplet in the stanza, retains its strangeness even after the professor explains that Marvell means “vegetable” in strict contrast to “animal” and “mineral.” But you have to admire the way “Vaster than empires, and more slow” rephrases the poem’s opening premise, “world enough and time.” The line ends with a spondee, two stressed feet back to back, which has the effect of slowing the reader – a classic illustration of meter reinforcing meaning. The lines that follow consist of outrageously over-the-top compliments that charm rather than insult the listener because of the wink that accompanies them. The lady is told that her breasts alone deserve two centuries of contemplation and praise. “For Lady, you deserve this state. / Nor would I love at lower rate.”

The poem pivots memorably, decisively, at the start of stanza two: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near.” (This is the couplet that haunted Eliot.) The tone moves speedily [quickly] from jovial to threatening:

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: then worms shall try
That long preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:

The worms that “try / That long preserved virginity” make as nasty an image as anything the Rolling Stones snarled at backstreet girls. But then Marvell’s flair for humor takes over. Even if you didn’t know that Chaucer used “quaint’ (or “queynte”) as the profane term for the female genitalia and Marvell was following suit [that the etymology of “quaint” traces it back to the profane term for the female genitalia], you would be struck by the elegant chiasmus in which dust succeeds honour and ashes are the leavings of lust [dust and ashes succeed honor and lust]. The stanza’s sardonic closing couplet is irresistible.

The grave’s a fine and private place
But none, I think, do there embrace.

          Beginning “Now therefore,” the poem’s third stanza clinches the argument by celebrating the joy of connubial bliss. Even here there is something to tantalize the intellect -- the ironic comparison of lovers to “birds of prey”: “Now let us sport us while we may, / And now, like amorous birds of prey, / Rather at once our time devour / Than languish in his slow-chapt power.” Time is the enemy of YOUTH. We can prevail if we dare to love. The image of the lovers rolled into a ball – the image that bedevils the would-be lover in Eliot’s “Prufrock” -- concludes the poem in an outburst of controlled violence:

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Unlike the biblical Joshua, we cannot make the sun stand still; we cannot stop time, but we can “devour” experience rather than be consumed by time’s “slow-chapt power.”

          It is enjoyable to read Marvell’s poem side by side with John Donne’s entry in the seduction sweepstakes, “To His Mistress Going to Bed.” Donne’s poem is full of extravagant similes and self-delighting puns.

License my roving hands and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! my Newfoundland. . .

Donne is bossy and direct, an explorer who measures his desire in continents. The double meaning of the poem’s last line brings wit to a sublime ideal: “To teach thee, I am naked first; why, then, / What need’st thou have more covering than a man?”

Equally brilliant, Marvell’s poem is less robust, more like a legal brief, subtle in its shading. The couplets in iambic tetrameter (four strong beats a line), distributed in three symmetrical stanzas, achieve a rare elegance that should make it must-reading for speechmakers. Here is rhetoric put to persuasive use. Dichotomies are notoriously inexact, but you might say that Donne’s pitch is to the body; Marvell’s is to the mind.  His are the words of a lover who wants to enlist the beloved in a triumphant conspiracy of two.

Ed. note: First published as a masterpiece column in the Wall Street Journal (July 11, 2014) under the heading "'Carpe Diem' in 46 Immortal Lines: With the wit of a courtier and the passion of a lusty lover."

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-1-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html 

Comments

[Michael C. Rush]

A great read for this morning!

Typo alert: "But none, I think, do there embrace."

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Michael.

[Joel Weiner]

This is an exceptional critique of two poems...and i even learned a new word today, chiasmus. Par example:
“By day the frolic, and the dance by night.” - Samuel Johnson, “The Vanity of Human Wishes”

Thank you, David.

[Jack Skelley]

"Snarled" is the perfect word to describe MicK Jagger's singing !

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Joel. Samuel Johnson is a master of the chiasmus, as is Yeats -- for example, in "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death": "The years to come seemed waste of breath, / A waste of breath the years behind."
And thank you, Jack.

[Jemmon Foo]

I read this while listening to Laura Fygi sing "Girl Talk." What an amazing coincidence.