To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
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.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
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 grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
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-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
"To His Coy Mistress" is a poem by the English poet Andrew Marvell. Most likely written in the 1650s in the midst of the English Interregnum, the poem was not published until the 1680s, after Marvell's death. "To His Coy Mistress" is a carpe diem poem: following the example of Roman poets like Horace, it urges a young woman to enjoy the pleasures of life before death claims her. Indeed, the poem is an attempt to seduce the titular "coy mistress." In the process, however, the speaker dwells with grotesque intensity on death itself. Death seems to take over the poem, displacing the speaker's erotic energy and filling the poem with dread.
Summary
If we had all the time in the world, your prudishness wouldn't be a problem. We would sit together and decide how to spend the day. You would walk by the river Ganges in India and find rubies; I would walk by the river Humber in England and write my poems. I would love you from the very start of time, even before the Biblical Flood; you could refuse to consummate our relationship all the way until the apocalypse. My slow-growing love would gradually become bigger than the largest empires. I would spend a hundred years praising your eyes and gazing at your forehead and two hundred years on each of your breasts. I would dedicate thirty thousand years to the rest of your body and give an era of human history to each part of you. In the final age, your heart would reveal itself. Lady, you deserve this kind of dedication—and I don't want to accept any lesser kind of love.
But I am always aware of time, the way it flies by. For us, the future will be a vast, unending desert for all of time. Your beauty will be lost. In the grave, my songs in praise of you will no longer be heard. And worms will take the virginity you so carefully protected during life. Your honor will turn to dust and my desire will turn to ashes. The grave may be a quiet, private place—but no one has sex there.
Therefore, while your beauty sits right at the surface of your skin, and every pore of your body exudes erotic passion, let's have sex while we can. Let's devour time like lovesick birds of prey instead of lying about letting time eat away at us. Let's put together our strength and our sweetness and use it as a weapon against the iron gates of life. We may not be able to defeat time in this way, but at least we can make it work hard to take us.
Themes
Love and Death
“To His Coy Mistress” is a love poem: it celebrates beauty, youth, and sexual pleasure. However, the speaker of the poem is haunted by mortality. Though he imagines a luxuriously slow love that takes thousands of years to reach consummation, he knows such a thing is impossible: he will die before it can be accomplished. Death cannot be delayed or defeated; the only response to death, according to the speaker, is to enjoy as much pleasure as possible before it comes. He urges the woman he loves not to wait, to enjoy the pleasures of life without restraint. The poem draws a contrast between two kinds of love: the full, rich love that would be possible if everyone lived forever, and the rushed, panicked love that mortal beings are forced to enjoy.
The first stanza of the poem poses a question and explores a hypothetical world: what would love be like if humans had infinite time to love? In response, the speaker imagines a world of unlimited pleasure. For example, he describes his mistress finding precious stones on the banks of the Ganges; he describes himself spending two hundred years praising a single part of her body.
The key to this paradise, then, is that the normal limitations of human life have been removed. The sheer length of the mistress's and the speaker's lives allows them to delay consummation of their love indefinitely: the speaker announces that his mistress might “refuse / ‘Till the conversion of the Jews”—which, in the Christian theology of Marvell’s time, was expected to occur during the biblical Last Days. In this ideal world, the speaker feels no urgency to consummate their relationship.
The speaker has no questions about whether his mistress deserves this long courtship, but he does have qualms about its viability. He is, he notes at the start of stanza 2, always conscious of the passage of time—and thus of the fact that both he and his mistress will eventually die. Stanza 2 diverges from the beautiful dream of stanza 1, reflecting instead on the pressing, inescapable threat of death.
Death, as the speaker imagines it, is the opposite of the paradise presented in stanza 1: instead of endless pleasure, it offers “deserts of vast eternity.” The speaker’s view of death is secular; he is not afraid of going to Hell or being punished for his sins. Instead, he fears death because it cuts short his and his mistress’s capacity to enjoy each other. In death, he complains, her beauty will be lost and—unless she consents to have sex before she dies—her virginity will be taken by worms. The language of this stanza is grotesque. This is a poem of seduction, but it feels profoundly unsexy. The speaker’s horror of death overshadows his erotic passion, but it also makes the speaker seem more sincere: while at first it might seem that the speaker is saying all these things primarily because he just wants to have some sex, the despair in the poem implies that the speaker's arguments are not mere rhetorical statements but rather deeply held beliefs and fears.
In the final stanza of the poem, the speaker finally announces his core argument: since death is coming—and since it will strip away the pleasures of the flesh—his mistress should agree to have sex with him soon. What's more, he imagines that their erotic "sport" will offer compensation for the pain and suffering of life. “Our pleasures,” he argues, will tear through “the iron gates of life.” Though he does not imagine that their pleasure will defeat death, he does believe that pleasure is the only reasonable response to death. Indeed, he even says that enjoying pleasure is a way to defy death. However, the grotesque language of stanza 2 may overwhelm the poem’s insistence on the power of pleasure. If sexuality is a way to contest the power of death, it nonetheless seems—even in the speaker's own estimation—that death is an overwhelming, irresistible force.
그의 수줍은 여인에게
우리에게 충분한 세상과 시간이 있다면,
그대여, 이 수줍음은 조금도 부끄러워할 일이 아닐 테요.
우리는 앉아, 어느 길로 갈지 생각하며,
우리의 오랜 사랑의 나날을 보냈을 테요.
당신은 인도의 갠지스 강가에서 루비를 찾고
나는 조류가 이는 험브강에서 하소연을 할 테요.
노아의 홍수가 있기 10년 전에 그대를 사랑했을 테요.
그대가 진정 원하신다면, 그대는 유대인의 개종 때까지 거절했겠지요.
나의 단조로운 사랑은 제국보다도 광대하고, 더 천천히 자랐겠지요.
백년의 시간은 그대의 두 눈동자를 찬미하고
그대의 이마를 바라보았을 테요.
2백년의 시간은 그대의 두 젖가슴을 흠모할 테요.
나머지 부분에 3만년, 모든 부분에 적어도 한 시대가 걸려
그리고 마지막 시대에 그대의 마음을 볼 테요.
그대여, 당신은 이 위엄을 받을 만하기에,
나는 이보다 낮게는 사랑하지 않을 테요.
그러나 등뒤에서 나는 언제나 듣는 다오.
시간의 날개 돋친 마차가 가까이 다그쳐 오는 것을.
그리고 우리 앞에 저만치 광막한 영원의 사막이 가로놓여 있다는 것을.
그대의 아름다움은 더 이상 찾을 수 없을 테고
그대의 대리석 무덤에서 나의 울려 퍼지는 노래도 들리지 않을 테고
그리고 나면 벌레들은 오랫동안 지켜 온 동정을 시험할 테고
그대의 우아한 순결은 먼지가 되고, 내 모든 열정도 재가 되버릴 테요.
무덤은 멋지고 은밀한 곳이나, 아무도 그 곳에서 껴안지는 않을 테요.
그러니 이제, 청춘의 빛깔이 아침 이슬 같은 그대의 살결에 내릴 동안,
*그리고 활기찬 영혼이 찰나의 불길로 모든 숨구멍에 뿜어낼 동안,
이제 우리 젊음이 있는 동안에 즐겨요.
그리고 이제, 먹이에 굶주린 새처럼,
*시간의 천천히 씹어 대는 힘에 시들기보다는
차라리 당장 우리의 시간을 삼켜 버려요.
우리의 모든 힘과 모든 아름다움을 굴려 하나의 공을 만들고,
인생의 철문을 지나 거친 분투로 우리의 쾌락을 떼어 내요.
그러면, 우리가 우리의 태양을 멈춰 있게 할 수는 없지만,
달리게 할 수는 있을 거요.