To His Coy Mistress

“To His Coy Mistress” is a carpe diem poem. According to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, it is “the best known example in English” (209) of a carpe diem poem used to persuade a lover. Carpe diem is Latin for "seize the day" and originates in Horace’s Odes. Other poems that use this form advocate for a variety of hedonistic activities (e.g. eat, drink, and be merry). Marvell emulates other carpe diem poets in his themes of fleeting time and the inevitable approach of death.

In each line, Marvell uses iambic tetrameter: eight syllables, or four feet. A metric foot combines an unstressed syllable with a stressed syllable. Many people argue that iambic meters are the closest to common speech because of the alternating stresses, and they produce a song-like cadence. Tetrameter is second only to pentameter (five feet in ten syllables) in its popularity in English poetry. Tetrameter lines take up less than half a standard page, giving printers of Marvell’s poem a large amount of white space with which to horizontally play.

Marvell does not follow any formal guidelines for the number of lines or indented breaks in this poem. The number of tetrameter lines, 46, makes “To His Coy Mistress” longer than a standard modern book page, but the poem would probably fit on a 17th century folio page (or a modern broadsheet, letter, or legal-sized page), which has more vertical space.