To His Coy Mistress

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1681

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

“To His Coy Mistress” is a carpe diem poem. According to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, it is “the best known example in English” (209) of a carpe diem poem used to persuade a lover. Carpe diem is Latin for "seize the day" and originates in Horace’s Odes. Other poems that use this form advocate for a variety of hedonistic activities (e.g. eat, drink, and be merry). Marvell emulates other carpe diem poets in his themes of fleeting time and the inevitable approach of death.

In each line, Marvell uses iambic tetrameter: eight syllables, or four feet. A metric foot combines an unstressed syllable with a stressed syllable. Many people argue that iambic meters are the closest to common speech because of the alternating stresses, and they produce a song-like cadence. Tetrameter is second only to pentameter (five feet in ten syllables) in its popularity in English poetry. Tetrameter lines take up less than half a standard page, giving printers of Marvell’s poem a large amount of white space with which to horizontally play.

Marvell does not follow any formal guidelines for the number of lines or indented breaks in this poem. The number of tetrameter lines, 46, makes “To His Coy Mistress” longer than a standard modern book page, but the poem would probably fit on a 17th century folio page (or a modern broadsheet, letter, or legal-sized page), which has more vertical space.

Syllogism

Marvell uses a form of logical argumentation called a syllogism: two premises that form a conclusion. His first premise consists of a hypothetical situation of what would occur if time and geography were no object; here, in this imaginary space, coyness is not “a crime” (Line 2) or a problem. The second premise is that time and death are, in fact, coming for us all, which makes coyness criminal. Marvell’s conclusion asserts that the lady not being coy but rather acting upon her passions will defeat time.

This two-element form is further complicated by its structure as an argument by negation. Argument by negation involves establishing the conditions required for a conclusion (that time doesn’t exist), proving that condition is false (time does exist), and using that to demonstrate that the conclusion is false (coyness is criminal). Argument by negation is an example of circuitous reasoning--logic that moves around a conclusion rather than directly to it. This kind of intellectual argumentation distinguishes the genre of metaphysical poetry from less heady, complex genres.

Blazon/Catalogue

“To His Coy Mistress” contains a catalogue, or list, of the beloved’s physical features. This draws from a medieval literary device called a blazon (or blason) that came back into vogue during the English Renaissance. Some examples of English blazon poetry that Marvell would have had access to were Thomas Campion’s 1601 poem “There is a Garden in her Face” and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, published in 1609. Traditionally, blazon poetry makes comparisons between female features and objects (e.g. her cheeks are like roses) and, at its most intricate, the list includes a large number of features (e.g. forehead, eyes, nose, cheeks, lips, chin, etc.).

However, Marvell, rather than comparing his lady’s “eyes” and “forehead” (Line 14) to objects, lists the features in terms of how long he would spend praising them. Eyes and forehead would get “a hundred years” (Line 13), if there were but “world enough, and time” (Line 1). Shakespeare turned the convention on its head by describing a lady with a dark complexion (his famous dark lady) in Sonnet 130, but Marvell takes his version a step further—his lines could universally be applied to a woman of any complexion because they are focused on time rather than color-based comparisons.