To His Coy Mistress | A Metaphysical poem | Analysis of To His Coy Mistress

The 'invitation of love' is such a conventional set-piece that one is not surprised to find Marvell beginning his To His Coy Mistress poem with a playful recognition that the man is supposed to 'complain' and the mistress to 'refuse', because these are the rules of the game.

                                                                                           Andrew Marvell | To His Coy Mistress analysis

The essence of secular metaphysical poetry is the predominance of intellect over emotion. 

Even when there is a strong undercurrent of passion, the expression is logical, witty, rational, and the style is marked by conceits. 

To His Coy Mistress aims at persuading the mistress to love her lover, but instead of being lost in ardor and consequently careless about a systematic approach; the lover is here presenting his beloved a neat syllogism.

To His Coy Mistress analysis

The structure is formal. 

The poet offers to the lady a practical syllogism, and if she assents to it, the appropriate consequence, he hopes, will follow. 

T. S. Eliot says, 

'The dialectic of the poem lies not only in or chiefly in the formal demonstration explicit in its three stanzas, but in all the contrasts evoked by its images, and in the play between the immediately sensed and the intellectually apprehended'. 

According to Eliot, the poem consists of a succession of images increasing in imaginative power to the sudden turn and surprise of the image of time and then decreasing to the conclusion. 

To His Coy Mistress summary

But a careful reader finds neither any sudden turn nor surprise in the image of time nor any decrease in the intensity of expression at the end.

A significant point noted by Cunningham is that there is no sensory image in 'my vegetable love', though Eliot and his followers have envisaged some monstrous and expanding cabbage in this phrase. 

This 'vegetable' is no vegetable; it is an abstract and philosophical term known as such to the educated man of Marvell's day. 

Its context is the doctrine of three souls: the rational, the sensitive, and the vegetable. The vegetable soul, the lowest of the three, is the only one that plants possess, and it is the principle of generation and corruption, of augmentation and decay. 

Marvell says that his love, denied the exercise of sense, but possessing the power of augmentation, will increase vaster than empire. 

Donne-like dramatic quality and the witty irony is most evident in lines like, 

`Then worms shall try that long-preserv'd virginity' 

and 

'The grave's a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace' 

Where the poem most resembles Donne and is perhaps more fundamentally indebted to his example than any other of Marvell's poems, is its dramatic tone, in the way in which it makes us feel we are overhearing one of the speakers in dialogue.

To His Coy Mistress Analysis

The tempo in the concluding lines, 

'Let us roll all our .strength...we'll make him run', 

is much faster than any of Donne's Songs and Sonnets, and both in its speed, its mock-serious argument, and its witty hyperbole the poem appears to have a considerable affinity with Donne's tone and manner.

But Marvell's argument more closely resembles that of Catullus whose lines have been paraphrased by Ben Jonson thus:

`Come, my Celia, let.us prove

While we may, the sports of love; Time will not be ours for ever,

He at length our good will sever' 

etc.

Again in the lines 

'An hundred years...show your heart', 

Marvell is giving his version of some lines of Cowley's My Dyet: 

'On a sigh of pity I a year can live... An hundred years on one kind word I'll feast'. 

To His Coy Mistress summary

The lover's speech balances nicely between parody and delightful participation in a make-believe world of stylized courtship.

The speaker does not want to abolish the preparatory stages to the sexual union because after all the lady is beautiful and deserves the praise. 

But the unhurried pace of the opening section gives way to urgent rapidity in the second section. 

The justification for the change of tone follows from the very opening line of the poem:

 `Had we but world enough and time'. 

As the brusque retort of the opening words of the second section insists, the lovers do not have time to waste on protracted courtship rituals:

`But at my back I alwaies hear

Times winged charriot hurrying near'.

The grim, vision of 'vast eternity', resembling an immense desert, makes life and love seem correspondingly brief and urgent. 

The witty manipulation of abstract and concrete in

 "then worms shall try...into ashes all my lust"

both the body and the attitudes which preserved its purity are subject to the worms' outrageous embrace.

To His Coy Mistress analysis

The third section completes the argumentative pattern in couplets of increasing rapidity and excitement. 

The images suggested by 'instant fires', 'birds of prey', and 'at once our time devour', implying a positive action of sensual pleasure, are attended with two metaphysical conceits which evoke both the harmony and physical violence asexual love. 

Here are some 'bold' lines for which metaphysical poetry faced critical attack.

'Let us roll all our strength and all/ our sweetness/ up into one ball'

 

 —here the strength of man and the sweetness of women are united in a sexual embrace. 
The 'ball' may be a pomander or Plato's original Hermaphrodite or a ball-like shape formed by the conjunction of two bodies during sexual intercourse.

The second conceit in 

'tear our pleasure through the Iron Gates of life' 

-is more complicated. It refers to the physical experience of love in which the geography of the woman's body is alluded to by reference to the Danubian Iron Gates.

One feels that Marvell's conquest of time and death by love is no mere verbal victory, but rather a reflection of a powerful emotional desire to live intensely.