Love and Time in "To His Coy Mistress"

Andrew Marvells’ poem To His Coy Mistress centers around the relationship between love and time. Although some might say that love is eternal, Marvell argues his belief that there is only so much time to experience love in a lifetime and that love may only exist to a person's time of death. There is no known fact stating that love continues on to another realm. Ostensibly, Marvell structures his poem on the ideas of living in the moment for love and not wasting any time. “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime.” The narrator is trying to let his "coy" mistress know that they do not have all the time in the world and that their time together is limited. Love is too special and time is too precious. The narrator essentially tells his mistress that it is a "crime" to waste time by taking their relationship slowly because they are wasting time that they could be together. The speaker continues by stating how time never stops and always catches up to moments in the present: "But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near." This quote illustrates the speaker's urgency to experience love with his mistress before it is too late. Regardless of how much he is in love with his mistress, the end of time always haunts the speaker and continuously gets closer and closer. Marvell ends the poem with the speaker telling his mistress that they are going to make the most of the time that they have together: "Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still yet we will make him run." The speaker asserts that he and the mistress should seize the moment and never let any moment that they could spend together pass them by. They are going to make the most of the time that they have together and are going to spend that time being in love. Marvell demonstrates that the concepts of love and time are related through the relationship between the speaker of the poem and his mistress in To His Coy Mistress.