To His Coy Mistress

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1681

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Birds

Marvell uses bird symbolism and similes when suggesting the act of sex. This creates an image of sex that is natural and normal. His comparison of the lovers to birds is a playful, but also deadly, one: “let us sport while we may, / [...] like amorous birds of prey” (Lines 37-38). These birds are not the peaceful species usually associated with love—doves—but rather birds of prey. Marvell emphasizes the speed of predatory birds. They “devour” time “at once” (Line 39), or attack their prey in a flash or an instant. Marvell’s use of predatory birds draws upon other literary love chases that involve ornithological and natural euphemisms for sex, like Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis.

Furthermore, the preeminent example of a bird of prey is the eagle. The eagle, according to A Dictionary of Literary Symbols, is “associated with the sun” (66), connecting the predatory birds to another natural and celestial symbol in “To His Coy Mistress.”

The Sun

Marvell’s poem interlinks the sun and time. Not only does time have a “winged chariot” (Line 22), which evokes the Greek sun-god Helios, but the “sun” (Line 45) running after the lovers is the final image of the poem. Christianity operates with a solar calendar, and the hours of individual days were marked by sundials long before the invention of modern clocks. Clocks, however, became popular a few hundred years before Marvell wrote “To His Coy Mistress.” These gear-operated objects “run” (Line 46), in an anthropomorphic way, like Marvell’s sun. The image of making the sun--and time--run after the lovers elevates the act of physical intimacy: By refusing to wait, they have power over time. In other words, they set their own pace, or their own clock. This has a biological implication as well: Conception is often symbolically associated with the sun and a new life proliferates the beauty of the parents, extending the time before that beauty must die.

Rivers & Rubies

The location of the two rivers in Marvell’s dream-world--one in the west and one in the east--speaks to real-world colonialism and the attitudes it engendered. When there is “world enough, and time” (Line 1) for the mistress to be coy, she wanders by the “Indian Ganges’ side” (Line 5) finding “rubies” (Line 6) on its riverbanks. Meanwhile, the spurned Marvell walks beside the river Humber near his British hometown. Easily obtaining wealth in India and marking it as a place a woman would dally is an example of orientalism. Orientalism, a term coined by Edward Said, describes how colonial nations like England view the countries they colonize: The native people are both exotic and exploitable.

The image of the ruby speaks to Marvell’s opinions about India, specifically, and the east, generally. The ruby was a common symbol in eastern poetry, as in “The Sunrise Ruby” and other poems by Rumi. While Marvell invokes the sun in “To His Coy Mistress,” his ruby is divorced from the connotations of Rumi’s sunrise. The ruby, instead, represents the unusual, or exotic, as well as easy money. The East India Company was on the rise in England during the time Marvell wrote poetry and worked as a politician; this colonial power robbed India of its symbolic rubies--as well as its literal exports--and created a power imbalance between the two nations that continues to impact international relations.