40 Fun Facts About To His Coy Mistress

Which Latin phrase from an ode by Horace names the tradition 'To His Coy Mistress' belongs to?

Carpe diem is more literally 'pluck the day', as one would a ripe fruit, though it is usually translated 'seize the day'.

What does nobody do in the fine and private grave, as 'To His Coy Mistress' drily notes?

Embrace is the punchline of the poem's driest joke, an understatement that closes the gloomy middle section just before the speaker turns to urging action.

Which creatures will try the lady's virginity in her tomb, according to 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Worms give the poem its most shocking image, a deliberately grotesque jolt meant to make the lady's long-kept honour look pointless.

Which winged vehicle of Time does the speaker of 'To His Coy Mistress' always hear hurrying near?

A chariot marks the poem's turn: after twenty lines of leisurely fantasy, the mood switches from playful flattery to the fear of death.

Which poet did Andrew Marvell work beside as Latin secretary and later help to spare from execution?

John Milton faced punishment for his anti-monarchy writings when the king returned, and Marvell, by then an MP, helped persuade the court to spare him.

Which British science fiction series took the episode title World Enough and Time from 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Doctor Who used the phrase for the first half of a two-part story about a gigantic ship struggling to escape a black hole.

What was Mary Palmer's job for Andrew Marvell before she signed the preface to his poems as his supposed widow?

Housekeeper Mary Palmer signed the preface as 'Mary Marvell', apparently posing as his wife to keep his small estate from his business partners' creditors.

Beside which distant river does the speaker of 'To His Coy Mistress' picture the lady gathering gems?

Ganges is the river of the lady's daydream, half a world from the muddy English estuary where the speaker says he would sit and complain.

Which modernist poet's 1921 essay on Andrew Marvell revived the standing of 'To His Coy Mistress'?

T. S. Eliot argued that earlier critics had missed the wit under the poem's playfulness, and his essay set off the modern reappraisal of Marvell.

Ten years before which biblical event would the speaker of 'To His Coy Mistress' begin to love?

The Flood puts the start of his courtship near the dawn of biblical history, a mock-solemn boast about how slowly he would love with unlimited years.

Which precious stones would the lady of 'To His Coy Mistress' find beside her faraway river?

Rubies hand the lady the exotic East while the speaker keeps a dull tidal river at home, a joke about how far apart endless leisure would let them drift.

By which English river's tide would the speaker of 'To His Coy Mistress' sit and complain of his love?

Humber is the estuary beside which Marvell grew up, so the speaker stays in the poet's own backyard while the lady roams the East.

Which adjective describes the love that would grow vaster than empires in 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Vegetable love grows without thought or hurry, like a plant, which is the joke: given forever, his passion would spread as slowly as a forest.

Which feature of the lady receives the first hundred years of praise in 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Her eyes come first in a timetable that swells absurdly from there, ending with tens of thousands of years for everything else.

Which part of the lady is saved for the last age of courtship in 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Her heart is kept for the finale because, after a tour of what he can see, the speaker ends on the unseen place where body and feeling meet.

Which stone forms the lady's vault in 'To His Coy Mistress', where the speaker's song goes unheard?

Marble belongs to the stock images of death the speaker piles up in the middle section, alongside dust and the grave, before a far nastier image follows.

In 'To His Coy Mistress', the lady's honour turns to dust while the speaker's lust turns into what?

Ashes completes an echo of the funeral phrase about dust, so the speaker admits that death will cancel his desire just as surely as her virtue.

In modern texts of 'To His Coy Mistress', the lady's youthful hue sits on her skin like morning what?

Dew is an editor's fix: the first printing reads 'glew', which some scholars take as a dialect form of 'glow'.

To which hunters are the lovers compared as they devour their time in 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Birds of prey are a startling choice for a love poem: the couple are to eat time greedily rather than be slowly chewed up by it.

Which actor's doomed RAF pilot quotes 'To His Coy Mistress' in the film A Matter of Life and Death?

David Niven speaks the lines over the radio from a burning bomber in the film's opening minutes, expecting to die because his parachute is destroyed.

What do the lovers' strength and sweetness combine to form near the end of 'To His Coy Mistress'?

A ball here is often read as a cannonball, a tight package of energy that the lovers fire through the barriers in their way.

Which biblical leader, who had the sun halted during a battle, is echoed as 'To His Coy Mistress' closes?

Joshua needed extra daylight to finish off the Amorite kings; the lovers admit they cannot stop the sun, so they vow to make it race instead.

In 'To His Coy Mistress', what breathes out at every pore of the lady's skin as instant fires?

Her soul is called willing, which is the speaker's sly move: in the final section he stops arguing and simply assumes she wants what he wants.

Until which far-off event may the lady of 'To His Coy Mistress' keep refusing?

The conversion of the Jews was popularly expected just before the Last Judgment, so she may say no until the very end of history.

Which metre, shorter than Shakespeare's pentameter, did Andrew Marvell use for 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Iambic tetrameter gives each line four beats, and the quick pace suits a speaker who keeps insisting that the clock is running.

Which rhyme scheme runs through all 46 lines of Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Rhyming couplets usually close neatly on a full stop here, which gives the speaker's case its snappy, epigram-like confidence.

Which form of argument, first set out by Aristotle, do the three sections of 'To His Coy Mistress' imitate?

A syllogism runs premise, premise, conclusion, and the poem's 'if, but, therefore' copies it, though critics note the logic does not really hold.

Which figure of speech is the offer of thirty thousand years of praise in 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Hyperbole, or deliberate overstatement, fills the first section, where the sums of years keep growing to mock the idea of a courtship without limits.

Which Dean of St Paul's is seen as founder of the metaphysical school of poets Andrew Marvell belongs to?

John Donne set the pattern for the group: poems staged as heated arguments with a lover, a friend or God, spiced with witty and shocking comparisons.

Which critic, in a life of Abraham Cowley, first called poets like Andrew Marvell 'metaphysical'?

Samuel Johnson did not mean it kindly: his verdict on these poets was unflattering, and their standing only recovered in the twentieth century.

The catalogue of the lady's features in 'To His Coy Mistress' mocks love sonnets in which Italian's style?

Petrarch inspired generations of sonnets that listed a distant beauty's charms in stock comparisons, and Marvell's inflated timetable sends the habit up.

Which Yorkshire town did Andrew Marvell, poet of 'To His Coy Mistress', serve as MP for about twenty years?

Hull paid him a daily wage while Parliament sat, and he sent its mayor and corporation regular letters reporting on the business of the Commons.

At which university did Andrew Marvell enter Trinity College as a boy of twelve or thirteen?

Cambridge saw his first verses into print, in Latin and Greek, while he was still a student, and a portrait of him hangs in his old college.

Which king's beheading began the kingless years in which Andrew Marvell probably wrote 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Charles I went to the scaffold in January 1649, and the poem is often dated to the early 1650s, when Marvell was working as a tutor in Yorkshire.

Whose return from Ireland did Andrew Marvell mark with a famous ode around the time of 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Oliver Cromwell is praised in the ode, yet the poem also responds with sadness to the execution of the king he had helped bring down.

Which retired general's daughter was Andrew Marvell tutoring when he probably wrote 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Thomas Fairfax had given up command of Parliament's army and withdrawn to his Yorkshire estate, Nun Appleton, which Marvell also celebrated in verse.

Which collection, issued three years after Andrew Marvell died, first printed 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Miscellaneous Poems gathered lyrics that had stayed in manuscript during his life, when his very public career made publishing them unwise.

Which science fiction author took the story title Vaster than Empires and More Slow from 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Ursula K. Le Guin used the line for a Hugo-nominated tale of explorers on a forest planet whose plant life turns out to share one consciousness.

Which novelist's World Enough and Time, about a murder in old Kentucky, borrows from 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Robert Penn Warren subtitled it 'A Romantic Novel', and the same phrase later became the title of a biography of Marvell himself.

Which fantasy author named the ghost love story A Fine and Private Place after a line in 'To His Coy Mistress'?

Peter S. Beagle set it in a cemetery where a homeless man has lived unnoticed for nearly two decades, fed on sandwiches stolen by a raven.