A* To His Coy Mistress

This is cut and paste from here, and offers a more complex, contextual reading of the poem.


The masculine assault upon the reluctance of the "coy" woman lies at the heart of Marvell's best-known love poem--perhaps the most famous "persuasion to love" or carpe diem poem in English--"To his Coy Mistress." Everything we know about Marvell's poetry should warn us to beware of taking its exhortation to carnality at face value. Critics from T. S. Eliot on took note of the poem's "logical" structure, but then it began to be noticed that the conditional syllogism in that structure is invalid--a textbook case of affirming the consequent or the fallacy of the converse. Has Marvell made an error? Or does he attribute an error to the speaking persona of the poem? Or is the fallacy part of the sophistry that a seducer uses on an ingenuous young woman? Or is it a supersubtle compliment to a woman expected to recognize and laugh at the fallacy? These alternatives must be judged in the light of the abrupt shifts in tone among the three verse paragraphs. In the opening lines the seducer assumes a pose of disdainful insouciance with his extravagant parody of the Petrarchan blason:

An hundred years should go to praise
Thine Eyes, and on thy Forehead Gaze.
Two hundred to adore each Breast:
But thirty thousand to the rest.
An Age at least to every part,
And the last Age should show your Heart.

Although the Lady is said to "deserve this State," the compliment is more than a little diminished when the speaker adds that he simply lacks the time for such elaborate wooing. It is also likely that most women would be put off rather than tempted by the charnel-house imagery of the poem's middle section where the seducer, sounding like a fire-and-brimstone preacher, warns that "Worms shall try / That long preserv'd Virginity." Finally, the depiction of sexual intimacy at the poem's close, with its vision of the lovers as "am'rous birds of prey" who will "tear our Pleasures with rough strife," is again a disconcerting image in an ostensible seduction poem. The persona's desire for the reluctant Lady is mingled with revulsion at the prospect of mortality and fleshly decay, and he manifests an ambivalence toward sexual love that is pervasive in Marvell's poetry."