Poetry
To His Coy Mistress
Andrew Marvell · 1681
Opening lines
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
Text quoted from rpo.library.utoronto.ca
Synopsis
A lover addresses a lady whose reserve he laments, in forty-six lines and three movements. First the concession: if we had world enough and time, your reserve would be no crime, and I could spend a hundred years praising your eyes, two hundred for each breast and thirty thousand for the rest. Then the objection: I hear at my back time's winged chariot, and before us lie deserts of eternity where the grave is a private place, but where no one, he believes, embraces. The conclusion remains, which he announces.
Context
The poem appeared in 1681, three years after its author's death, in a collection sent to press by his housekeeper under the name of his widow: she claimed to have it from the hand of her late husband, and the aim was probably to shield a small estate from the creditors of his associates. No autograph manuscript of his poems has survived, and this volume remains the basis of today's editions, although a shorter version of the poem has been found, thirty-six lines copied around 1672 by a colleague of the author in Parliament. In his lifetime he was known as a politician and satirist, and his lyric pieces scarcely circulated.
Who it is for
A poem of forty-six lines in three parts; everything depends on how the argument is articulated, which must be followed from beginning to end.
Prizes and reception
Admired in the nineteenth century, by Tennyson among others, it became in the twenties, after Eliot's essay of 1921, a reference text of the new English poetry.
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