To His Coy Mistress
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40 free To His Coy Mistress trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress' is one of the most quoted poems in English. In under fifty lines a suitor flatters, frightens and finally hurries a reluctant woman, and readers have argued ever since about whether he is in earnest or the poem is laughing at him. This quiz covers what students and readers are asked about most: the images in each of the three sections, the way the argument is built, the metre and rhyme, the poet's career in the turbulent seventeenth century, and the novels, films and television that have borrowed the poem's phrases. It suits anyone revising the poem for an English literature class or exam, teachers who want a quick check on a set text, and poetry readers who want to see how closely they have read it. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
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Q 01Which Latin phrase from an ode by Horace names the tradition 'To His Coy Mistress' belongs to?
Carpe diem
Carpe diem is more literally 'pluck the day', as one would a ripe fruit, though it is usually translated 'seize the day'.
Q 02What does nobody do in the fine and private grave, as 'To His Coy Mistress' drily notes?
Embrace
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.
Q 03Which creatures will try the lady's virginity in her tomb, according to 'To His Coy Mistress'?
Worms
Worms give the poem its most shocking image, a deliberately grotesque jolt meant to make the lady's long-kept honour look pointless.
Q 04Which winged vehicle of Time does the speaker of 'To His Coy Mistress' always hear hurrying near?
A chariot
A chariot marks the poem's turn: after twenty lines of leisurely fantasy, the mood switches from playful flattery to the fear of death.
Q 05Which poet did Andrew Marvell work beside as Latin secretary and later help to spare from execution?
John Milton
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.
Q 06Which British science fiction series took the episode title World Enough and Time from 'To His Coy Mistress'?
Doctor Who
Doctor Who used the phrase for the first half of a two-part story about a gigantic ship struggling to escape a black hole.
Q 07What was Mary Palmer's job for Andrew Marvell before she signed the preface to his poems as his supposed widow?
Housekeeper
Housekeeper Mary Palmer signed the preface as 'Mary Marvell', apparently posing as his wife to keep his small estate from his business partners' creditors.
Q 08Beside which distant river does the speaker of 'To His Coy Mistress' picture the lady gathering gems?
Ganges
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.
Q 09Which modernist poet's 1921 essay on Andrew Marvell revived the standing of 'To His Coy Mistress'?
T. S. Eliot
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.
Q 10Ten years before which biblical event would the speaker of 'To His Coy Mistress' begin to love?
The Flood
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.
Q 11Which precious stones would the lady of 'To His Coy Mistress' find beside her faraway river?
Rubies
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.
Q 12By which English river's tide would the speaker of 'To His Coy Mistress' sit and complain of his love?
Humber
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.
Q 13Which adjective describes the love that would grow vaster than empires in 'To His Coy Mistress'?
Vegetable
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.
Q 21What do the lovers' strength and sweetness combine to form near the end of 'To His Coy Mistress'?
A ball
A ball here is often read as a cannonball, a tight package of energy that the lovers fire through the barriers in their way.
Q 22Which biblical leader, who had the sun halted during a battle, is echoed as 'To His Coy Mistress' closes?
Joshua
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.
Q 23In 'To His Coy Mistress', what breathes out at every pore of the lady's skin as instant fires?
Her soul
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.
Q 14Which feature of the lady receives the first hundred years of praise in 'To His Coy Mistress'?
Her eyes
Her eyes come first in a timetable that swells absurdly from there, ending with tens of thousands of years for everything else.
Q 15Which part of the lady is saved for the last age of courtship in 'To His Coy Mistress'?
Her heart
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.
Q 16Which stone forms the lady's vault in 'To His Coy Mistress', where the speaker's song goes unheard?
Marble
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.
Q 17In 'To His Coy Mistress', the lady's honour turns to dust while the speaker's lust turns into what?
Ashes
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.
Q 18In modern texts of 'To His Coy Mistress', the lady's youthful hue sits on her skin like morning what?
Dew
Dew is an editor's fix: the first printing reads 'glew', which some scholars take as a dialect form of 'glow'.
Q 19To which hunters are the lovers compared as they devour their time in 'To His Coy Mistress'?
Birds of prey
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.
Q 20Which actor's doomed RAF pilot quotes 'To His Coy Mistress' in the film A Matter of Life and Death?
David Niven
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.
Q 24Until which far-off event may the lady of 'To His Coy Mistress' keep refusing?
The conversion of the Jews
The conversion of the Jews was popularly expected just before the Last Judgment, so she may say no until the very end of history.
Q 25Which metre, shorter than Shakespeare's pentameter, did Andrew Marvell use for 'To His Coy Mistress'?
Iambic tetrameter
Iambic tetrameter gives each line four beats, and the quick pace suits a speaker who keeps insisting that the clock is running.
Q 26Which rhyme scheme runs through all 46 lines of Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress'?
Rhyming couplets
Rhyming couplets usually close neatly on a full stop here, which gives the speaker's case its snappy, epigram-like confidence.
Q 27Which form of argument, first set out by Aristotle, do the three sections of 'To His Coy Mistress' imitate?
A syllogism
A syllogism runs premise, premise, conclusion, and the poem's 'if, but, therefore' copies it, though critics note the logic does not really hold.
Q 28Which figure of speech is the offer of thirty thousand years of praise in 'To His Coy Mistress'?
Hyperbole
Hyperbole, or deliberate overstatement, fills the first section, where the sums of years keep growing to mock the idea of a courtship without limits.
Q 29Which Dean of St Paul's is seen as founder of the metaphysical school of poets Andrew Marvell belongs to?
John Donne
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.
Q 30Which critic, in a life of Abraham Cowley, first called poets like Andrew Marvell 'metaphysical'?
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson did not mean it kindly: his verdict on these poets was unflattering, and their standing only recovered in the twentieth century.