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How to Seduce a Lady in Three Easy Steps
Andrew Marvel’s To His Coy Mistress has always been on my list of the ten best poems in the English language. Though written using the high poetic language of the 17th century, the structure of Coy Mistress rests on a decidedly non-poetic and practical argument, almost a syllogism, in which the man tries to talk his lady into bed. Its bare bones looks like this:
- If we had time, I would spend it on a lengthy and elaborate courtship.
- But we don’t have time because life is short (he hears Time’s winged chariot at his back) and death brings an end to everything.
- So let’s take our pleasures now while we’re still young and full of passion.
For all you young men out there in the throes of love or lust, here then is how they won fair lady’s heart (and body) back in the 17th century. You might want to take notes. (For the sake of inclusiveness, you young women can juggle the words a bit and it will work for you too.)
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, [would be] no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day. . . .
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow. . . .
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,
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.
Marvell’s poem contains some of the most memorable lines in British literature: “But at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,/And yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity.” And of course, “The grave’s a fine and private place,/But none, I think, do there embrace.”
The poem also contains probably the most macabre and disturbing image in all of English literature when the poet shows his lady the dreadful consequences of persisting in refusing his advances: She will grow old, the poet says, and in death her virginity will be explored by worms: In the tomb, then, “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.”
When I chose this poem to discuss on Ricochet, I was surprised to find that in the thirty years of teaching Coy Mistress, I had unconsciously memorized almost the entire poem. So I’ve walked around with the words and images of Marvel’s poem for the past fifty years.
In fact, one of the nice things about being a reader of high literature is that your mind is filled with the best ideas and images that writers have come up with through the centuries. I cannot drive past a dark woods without those trees evoking the words of Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. The words are not always inspirational. When I think on my own mortality, for instance, I’m reminded of Macbeth’s despair, “[Life] is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” A few years back, I was near Walden Pond, so I drove over and stood on the shore, thinking of Thoreau’s thoughts on man and nature. When I was a runner, the words of Isaiah used to come to my mind: “But those who hope in the Lord will. . . Soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary; they will walk and not grow faint.” And who can forget Dylan Thomas’s cry to his dying father, “Do not go gentle into that good night”?
That sort of thing will not help you win any STEM awards, and you’re not likely to advance the material life of mankind, but it’s not a bad way of going through life on a personal level.
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Trink, I’m going to have to think about this for a bit. I’ll get back to you.
She, Roberts comes from the days when clever and intelligent lyrics were as important, if not more, as the music. In Roberts’ case, the lyrics are almost everything. I think your mother had good taste.
I’m jelly. You never said that about me.
She: “I’m jelly”! So you can make a Britishism by taking the “ous” out of a word and replacing it with a “y”? Did you know that’s called “Anglocreep.” Even the term “ginger,” once a strictly British term for people like us, is now commonly used in the U.S. Anglocreep!
You would have made a lively professor, She. Your students would have loved the remnants of your British accent. You still have remnants, don’t you?
Those remnants, if you have any, raises your apparent I.Q. about 10 points, especially in the eyes of those in the chattering class.
Someone should write a poem about Andrew Marvell.
I’m going with, ‘his mom did his editing’.