Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"

Had we but world enough and time,
우리가 충분한 시간을 가지고 있다면
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
내 연인이여, 아무 문제 없겠죠.
We would sit down, and think which way
우리가 앉아서 어느 길을 걸을까 생각하며
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
당신은 갠지스 강에서
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
루비를 찾고 나는 험버에
Of Humber would complain. I would
묶여서 불평할게요. 저는
Love you ten years before the flood,
노아의 홍수(세상의 시작) 10년 전부터 사랑했고,
And you should, if you please, refuse
당신은 계속 거부할 수 있어요
Till the conversion of the Jews.
유대인이 개종할 때까지.
My vegetable love should grow
나의 식물같은 사랑은 자랄 거에요
Vaster than empires and more slow;
제국보다 더 크고 느리게
An hundred years should go to praise
100년동안 당신을 칭송하는데 쓸 거에요
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
당신의 눈을, 그리고 당신의 이마를 보는데
Two hundred to adore each breast,
200년은 각각 당신의 가슴을 흠모하는데,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
3000년은 나머지 부분을,
An age at least to every part,
모든 부분을 사모하는데 한 시대가 걸릴거고
And the last age should show your heart.
마지막 시대에는 당신의 마음을 보여주겠죠
For, lady, you deserve this state,
당신은 이런 사랑을 받을 가치가 있기 떄문에
Nor would I love at lower rate.
이보다 못한 상태로 당신을 사랑하지 않겠어요

But at my back I always hear
       하지만 내 뒤에서 저는 항상 들어요

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
시간의 마차가 황급히 나를 향해 다가오는 소리를
And yonder all before us lie
그리고 우리 앞에 거대한
Deserts of vast eternity.
영혼의 사막이 놓여 있어요
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
그대의 아름다움은 더이상 찾을 수 없고
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
그대의 대리석 무덤 속에서는 들리지 않을 거에요
My echoing song; then worms shall try
나의 메아리 치는 소리를. 그러면 벌레들은 맛볼거에요
That long-preserved virginity,
당신이 오랫동안 지켜왔던 처녀성을
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
그리고 당신의 오래된 구식의 영예는 먼지로 변할거고
And into ashes all my lust;
네 욕망도 재로 변할거에요
The grave’s a fine and private place,
무덤이 아주 고요하고 사적인 공간이지만
But none, I think, do there embrace.
그래도 내 생각에 거기서 아무도 포옹하지 않을 거예요

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
       그러니까 지금, 그대의 젊은 피부 색깔이

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
아침 이슬이 그대 살결에 머무는 동안에
And while thy willing soul transpires
그리고 그대의 하고싶어하는 영혼이
At every pore with instant fires,
온 몸의 구멍에서 숨을 쉬는 동안에
Now let us sport us while we may,
이제 우리가 할 수 있을떄 놀아봐요
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
먹이감을 노리는 육욕적인 새처럼
Rather at once our time devour
차라리 우리가 이 시간을 삼켜요
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
천천히 씹어먹는 시간의 힘에 시들기 보다는
Let us roll all our strength and all
온 힘을 다해 굴려서
Our sweetness up into one ball,
우리의 상냥함을 하나의 공으로 만들고,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
격렬한 충동으로 우리의 기쁨을 찢어요
Through the iron gates of life:
생의 첫 문을 타파해서
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
그러니, 우리가 해를
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
멈추게는 못 해도, 달리게 할 수는 있어요.

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. Death cannot be delayed or defeated; the only response to death is to enjoy as much pleasure as possible before it comes. 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. Stanza 2 diverges from the beautiful dream of stanza 1, reflecting instead on the pressing, inescapable threat of death. 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.

• 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.

Heart

• The speaker spends much of stanza 1 imagining that he will spend eternity slowly, luxuriously describing and praising each part of his mistress’s body. His focus is on physical features and beauty: her forehead, eyes, and breasts. In line 18, however, the speaker turns to the mistress’s “heart.” One hopes this is not literal: that he does not plan to cut into her chest and describe the organ itself. Rather, the heart functions symbolically here, representing the mistress’s innermost character. The mistress can delay revealing her true self until the very end of time. Though the speaker continues to love her, passionately, she does not have to reciprocate until she’s good and ready. It also suggests something about what’s at stake for the speaker: he wants to have his mistress’s heart, hinting at a genuine romantic love rather than simple lust. This is a rather chaste desire: the rest of the poem is much more explicit. The speaker withholds the full force of his desire here, restraining his more sexual ambitions until much later.

Deserts of Vast Eternity

• In line 24, the speaker compares death to “deserts of vast eternity.” The deserts are not literal spaces. Instead, they represent time itself, symbolically. In using this symbol, the speaker draws on a key tradition in western thought. Deserts are important spaces in western religion and art. In Christianity, for example, the desert is often a space of trial and tribulation. The speaker, however, rejects this tradition: instead of being a space of religious meaning, it is a blank and empty space, devoid of pleasure, devoid of content. It does not contain either the punishment or the paradise that Christians expect after death. It belongs to a surprisingly secular worldview: one in which death is an absolute end with nothing beyond it. This view of the world suits the speaker, since he wants to convince his mistress to have sex with him immediately, without saving her honor for the afterlife. The desert symbolizes the speaker’s nihilistic, even atheistic beliefs about the afterlife, and it also marks the extent to which he has turned his back on the traditional images of Christianity.

Dust and Ashes

• At the end of stanza 2, the speaker notes that his mistress’s virginity (and the honor it represents) will “turn to dust.” Dust is an important symbol of death and decay in the history of western thought: for example, casting Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, God announces to them, “For dust thou art and to dust thou shall return.” To be mortal is to be made of dust. Life itself is only a temporary escape from being dust. The speaker extends and even subverts this traditional symbol. In his account, it is not the mistress’s body but her honor which is dust. Honor is an abstract concept, a social convention. But the speaker’s use of the symbol suggests that it does have material value. Honor is just as fragile as the body. Like the body, it will be devoured by death. There is no sense in trying to preserve it, since it will turn to nothing as soon as death comes.

• It is traditional to invoke ashes when discussing lust: lust is like a fire, and like a fire it burns out. However, Marvell is content to employ the symbol of ashes in a relatively traditional way, in contrast to his subversive discussion of dust in the previous line.

Personification(시간에 대한 의인화)

• The speaker uses personification to describe time as though it has the human qualities of power, agency, and intelligence. In line 40 the speaker describes time as having “slow-chapped power”—suggesting that it has the capacity to break things apart. Similarly, in line 22, time is described as having a “wingèd chariot.” In the poem, time as an inexorable force owns things, moves around, drives horses.

• The speaker also describes time as a character, with intelligence and power. In this sense, the poem comes to seem like a drama, a fight between two kinds of intelligence, human and non-human. In this battle, the speaker seems almost ready to concede defeat: as a character, time seems in this poem omnipotent, incapable of being defeated. One might read this as part of the speaker’s strategy: he wants to seduce his mistress by showing her she has no better option. But the personification also makes its power seem overwhelming, so much so that one might imagine the speaker is making his case so strongly that the mistress’s reaction might be one of panic and existential dread.

Vocabulary

Coyness describes a series of contradictory behaviors. Someone who’s being coy is simultaneously flirtatious and withholding, expressing interest but refusing to act on it.

The Ganges is a river that flows along the border between the countries of India and Bangladesh.

The Humber: is a river and tidal estuary in East Yorkshire, a region in northeastern England.

The Flood is the starting point of human history: in Genesis 6:9-17, God erases everything that happened before it and allows humanity to restart by by unleashing a devastating flood.

The conversion of the Jews to Christianity marks its endpoint. The Jews will convert to Christianity immediately before the End of Days, the Second Coming of Christ.

Vegetable: The speaker uses the word as an adjective. He describes his love as slow-moving and slow-growing, patient and restrained.

Time’s wingèd chariot: In poetry and art from the Renaissance, time is often represented with wings. It also often has a chariot. However, Marvell seems to be the first poet or artist to join the two images.

Quaint: old-fashioned or out of date

Transpire: as used here is related to the word “respire.” Like “respire,” it describes something like breathing.

slow-chapped: slowly break down anything

Strife: contention and opposition, as in a fight between people who disagree with each other.

Form

• “To His Coy Mistress” is a poem in rhyming iambic tetrameter couplets.

• Notice that the speaker’s thought begins at the start of line 1 and ends at the end of line 2. A new thought begins at the start of line 3.

• Occasionally, the speaker will extend his thought beyond the boundaries of the couplet—while maintaining the couplet as the basic structure of his ideas. This happens in lines 41-44, which make one complete thought, broken up into two parts.

• The speaker breaks this pattern occasionally in the poem, sometimes in moments when he loses his composure, or when he wants to emphasize a point. One can find a case of the latter in line 37: “Now let us sport us while we may.” The line is conceptually discrete from the lines around it. Since it is the poem’s main point, the speaker isolates it exactly so that it stands out.

• The poem’s overall argument is organized into three sections, each of which gets its own stanza. In the first stanza, the speaker proposes a hypothetical: “What if…” In the second stanza, he demonstrates why the hypothetical is impossible: “But…” In the final stanza, he demonstrates the consequences of his demonstration: “Therefore…” The poem thus reads like a three-part sentence: “If…but…therefore.” This structure contributes to the feeling that the poem is trying to persuade; it takes the form of a logical argument and functions like a syllogism.

Meter

• “To His Coy Mistress” is in iambic tetrameter throughout. The poem’s meter is relatively smooth. Indeed, long passages of the poem are perfectly metrically regular, as in the poem’s first four lines:

  Had we | but world | enough | and time,
  This coy- | ness, lad-| y, were | no crime.
  We would | sit down, | and think | which way
  To walk, | and pass | our long | love’s day.

• Arguably, there is a more significant and pervasive metrical variation at work in the whole poem. “To His Coy Mistress” is consistently one foot short of being proper heroic couplets: its tetrameter lines are eight syllables long, where a Renaissance reader—well-versed in heroic couplets—would expect ten. The poem consistently feels like it’s falling short, failing to achieve the placid, dignified smoothness a reader expects in heroic couplets. But it’s also an advantage: what the poem loses in dignity and seriousness it makes up for in lightness and playfulness.

Rhyme Scheme

• “To His Coy Mistress” is organized into rhyming couplets. Each couplet has its own rhyme; after Marvell completes one rhyme, he moves on to the next. One can see this pattern in the first 10 lines of the poem, which are rhymed aabbccddee. The couplets are designed to feel separate—and not just in terms of their rhyme. Many of the couplets in the first ten lines are conceptually distinct from each other. For example, the first two lines of the poem are a complete sentence, a complete thought:

  Had we but world enough and time,

  This coyness, lady, were no crime.

• Notice that the speaker’s thought begins at the start of the first line and ends at the end of the second line. In the third and fourth lines, he embarks on a new thought. The unit of rhyme thus serves to divide the poem both formally and conceptually.

• The poem also contains a number of rhymes that look like slant or half rhymes: for example, “try” and “virginity” in lines 27-28. However, English pronunciation has shifted since Marvell’s time. Though they may sound off to contemporary readers, for Marvell these were strong, full rhymes.

Literary Context

• Andrew Marvell belonged to a literary group known as the “metaphysical poets.” Metaphysical poetry developed in the 1590s and early 1600s, and its most prominent early practitioners included poets like John Donne. Metaphysical poetry is marked by its philosophical intensity: it often takes up big topics and tries to think through them in poetry. But, it is also marked by its playfulness and its willingness to use irony, everyday language, and elaborate, strange metaphors and similes. Marvell belongs to the second generation of metaphysical poets, alongside poets like Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughn; Donne himself had been dead for more than twenty years by the time Marvell wrote “To His Coy Mistress.” The poem thus reflects the influence of the metaphysical poets, while also drawing on other poetic traditions. For example, in the first stanza, the speaker imagines spending more than thirty thousand years praising each part of his mistress’s body. This is a rhetorical tactic similar to a blazon, a literary technique drawn from the tradition of Petrarchan love sonnets in Italian, French, and English. “To His Coy Mistress” thus draws on a variety of poetic sources, cobbling together several different traditions of love poetry.

Historical Context

• “To His Coy Mistress” was likely written in the 1650s, during a period of significant political turmoil in English society. In the 1640s, the nation had endured a bloody civil war. The civil war was provoked by religious and political tensions, especially between radical Protestants and more conservative Anglicans. But it quickly became a broader conflict over the nature of government itself, with Royalists—who supported the monarchy and the Anglican Church—pitted against Parliamentarians—who supported a democratic form of government and a Puritan church. The civil war culminated with the execution for treason of the King, Charles I, in 1649. Oliver Cromwell, a Parliamentarian, assumed control of the government for most of the 1650s—a period called the “Interregnum.” Marvell himself was an active participant in these events. He served as Latin Secretary, alongside the poet John Milton—an important role in Cromwell’s national government. He joined Parliament in 1659, representing Kingston-Upon-Hull.

• After the restoration of the monarchy in the 1660s, Marvell managed to escape punishment for his participation in the revolutionary government, and he worked to prevent the new king, Charles II, from executing John Milton. Important as this political turmoil is to Marvell’s life—and his writing—it is notably absent from “To His Coy Mistress.” In the poem, Marvell’s speaker seems to have withdrawn from all such political complications; he experiences love apart from the politics of the world in which he lives.