He finally compares the relationship to a raging storm. Here he uses nature imagery. Once the storm is over there is peace and tranquility this suggests even after all their quarrels there can be reconciliation ‘the storm is frightening, but it will son be gone’ everything passes, memories fade ‘the breech in us can be mended’.
She echoes his use of nature imagery but feels that the relationship is permanently damaged she has a heart ‘that can never be repaired’ their love is dead.
The poem almost sounds like an argument or a debate of different points of views. Caesura and parenthesis is used to show the thought process. He is trying to convince her, but she is not swayed. The poem appeals to our senses. Effective imagery is used to communicate the hurt, pain and suffering felt in the relationship.
How shall we begin to parse the extravagant rhetoric in the first verse paragraph? Exotic location: "Indian Ganges." Hyperbolic expanses of time: "an hundred years," "two hundred," "thirty thousand." Elevated language: rhymed couplets, stately tetrameter, refined grammatical mood (dominated by the future subjunctive). The poem is addressed to the speaker's "mistress," that is, a lady to whom courtesy and courtly convention and erotic longing attribute a superordinate status, a power to command. She is said to be "coy," that is, strategically withholding. She is thus imagined as capable of calculation and of extracting erotic compliment at a high "rate." The poet professes to be more than willing to provide what she would have, but surely it is less than complimentary to charge the lady with calculation. "Coyness" in Marvell's era might be used to connote mere reticence, but the less neutral connotation was already coming into ascendancy; it would take a very innocent lady indeed to gaze into the mirror of Marvell's poem and see herself figured as unaffectedly "shy." We may note, while we're at it, the conspicuous third-person possessive in the title of the poem: to his, not my, coy mistress. The body of the poem is written in the first and second person; the loved addresses his lady directly. And yet in the title of the poem, he coolly acknowledges another audience. For whose amusement is this lady being wooed?
And then there is the extended subjunctive: hypothesis contrary to fact. Had we world enough and time... but we do not. Taking everything back before it is given, the poet inventories the lavish forms of courtship he "would," but will not, be happy to perform. The inventory itself, if truth be told, is rather perfunctory: ten years, a hundred, etc.; your eyes, your forehead, etc. "Vegetable love" is wonderful—though what exactly does it mean? (Scholarly annotation about the ancient division of souls—vegetative, sensitive, and rational—falls flat somehow.) "Till the conversion of the Jews" (i.e. till the eve of Apocalypse) is better yet. It is perhaps too good. The apocalyptic vista rhymes so neatly with the lady's scruple ("Jews," "refuse") that the poem's wide disproportions are made to seem preposterous. It is not chiefly lack of time and "world" that prevent the suitor from suing in the heightened manner dictated by poetic convention; it is aesthetic disdain. The suitor is burlesquing the very expansiveness with which he is expected to sue. Expected by whom? By the lady, or so her lover unchivalrously implies. It is as though a woman of our own day were charged with basing her fantasy life upon the romances of the daytime soaps. Marvell's coy mistress finds herself accused not only of manipulative affectation but also of frank bad taste. What kind of woman would be wooed like this?
The tone of insult deepens in the second section of the poem:
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 honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Following the slightly acerbic stipulation with which he concluded the first section of his wooing speech (I think too highly of your deserts and of myself to love "at lower rate"), the lover puts forth his official explanation for refusing to woo by the book. And as if to show what he could do if he would, he "explains" in a flight of eloquence. Far from affording us dignified or delectable leisure, he says, time is a "wingèd chariot" hastening toward our end. The only vastness at our disposal is the vastness of the afterlife. The afterlife affords no vistas of erotic or moral "desert," but merely the emptiness of a desert. The logic of the lover's argument is the logic of carpe diem: "seize (or savor) the day." It was a well-worn logic in the Renaissance, as it had been since the time of Horace. "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may," wrote Marvell's contemporary Robert Herrick, "Old time is still a-flying;/ And this same flower that smiles today,/ Tomorrow will be dying." Counseling a maiden to seize the day was also a well-worn stratagem of seducers, as the conclusion of Herrick's poem makes clear:
Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For, having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.
(This poem is brazenly addressed "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.")
Like Herrick, Marvell is quite explicit about the unlovely threat his hurry-up implies. In neither poet do we find the faithful suitor's profession, "To me you shall always be lovely." Nor even, "I shall love you forever despite the ravages of age." Not at all. Explicated for the benefit of virgins in general, or a coy mistress in particular, desire is found to be quite as ruthless as time. Desire has a short half-life; ladies must get while the getting is good. Lest the lewdness of the insult be lost on the lady, Marvell introduces a pair of genital insinuations. You scruple to preserve your bodily intactness? the lover taunts. You haven't a prayer; it's either me or the worms. Nor is "quaint" honor half so fastidious as it at first appears to be: Chaucer used "queynte"—and Renaissance authors used it too—to denote the female pudendum.
Now that both mistress and lovemaking have been quite stripped of their pretensions, now that the lady knows just where she stands, both in the general marketplace and in her lover's particular regard, the lover unleashes his most fevered proposition:
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.
Note the driven enjambments: "all / Our sweetness," "sun / Stand still." This is forward motion with a vengeance. Not turtle doves, but "birds of prey." Not gilded portals, but "iron gates." The lover proposes a world in which the alternatives are not so much "eat or be eaten," but "eat and be eaten" or "be eaten alone." Not one creature is not caught in the mortal machinery; only with violence can the day (and the initiative) be seized.
he poet's bravado is undeniably exhilarating, and yet we may return to the question that Dryden implicitly asked of Donne: Can this poem really be after what it purports to be after? Can it, as a seduction poem, by even the wildest stretch of imagination be designed to work? What kind of woman would be successfully persuade like this? Either, I would respectfully suggest, she must be a very stupid one, one so dull to insult and so eager to be swept off her feet that she succumbs to her fate obliviously, or she must be a very clever one indeed, one willing to join the lover in his high-spirited contempt for convention, one capable of discerning the compliment behind the ostensible slur. This lady—the second one—would be a woman to whom the poet might signal above the head, as it were, of the foolish figure he playfully pretends to take her for. It is this second lady in whom I prefer to believe, and whom I believe the Marvellian poem proposes: a worthy and active partner in intellect, in appetite, in irreverent conversation, and in bed.
