(1681) ANDREW MARVELL – TO HIS COY MISTRESS

 

“Had we had but world enough and time

This coyness, Lady, were no crime”

 

Carpe diem as a pick-up line to get in her pants.

No, seriously, that’s the poem – and why I like it.

That and the worms that makes it a favorite among adolescent students everywhere –

 

“then Worms shall try

That long preserv’d Virginity”

 

Like John Donne, Andrew Marvell is another surprisingly raunchy 17th-century ‘metaphysical’ poet.

Ultimately, he’s something of a one-poem wonder for his most famous and celebrated poem “To His Coy Mistress” – but what a poem! In the word of TV Tropes, it “is pretty much the trope codifier for the more philosophical sort of seduction lyric and contains a bunch of phrases that are hugely quotable, forever appearing in titles and epigraphs”. That seduction lyric is the persuasion of the speaker’s prospective lover by means of a carpe diem philosophy – or YOLO in modern internet slang. Seize the day, baby.

It’s also a popular poem in schools – well, as popular as poems get in schools – where it certainly is fertile ground for lowbrow humor for perpetually adolescent minds like mine. There’s the two hundred years the poet would spend on each of his lover’s breasts, if only they did have eternity. Not to mention, the ages he would devote to every other part, which prompts thoughts of an ass age – heh

And of course there’s the worms (“Can we do the one with the worms again, Miss?” – actual quote reported by teacher).

All lowbrow locker room humor aside, there is something powerfully evocative in Marvell’s vibrant imagery and command of rhyming couplets, particularly in the last stanza where the speaker urges the woman to seize life by the, well, horns.

 

“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.”