The Metaphysical and Cavalier Poets

Two influences stand out clear and distinct among all the forces that helped to shape
English poetry at the beginning of the 17th century: John Donne, the first of the
so-called ‘Metaphysical Poets’, and Ben Jonson, who was the model of a group of poets
who were classicists in literature and royalists in politics. They are generally remembered
as ‘the tribe of Ben’, to show their indebtedness to Jonson. At the time, distinctions were
not so clear-cut and the two influences often merged in single authors. Though it is
common to speak of a Metaphysical School of poetry in the first half of the 17th century,
such a school never really existed as a group of poets working together. It is true,
however, that many younger poets of the time looked to Donne as a master in the
tradition of wit. A love of wit and of ingenious metaphors was encouraged by the visual
tradition of emblems: pictures, or illustrations, which were accompanied by a caption
that not only explained their meaning but connected it with the subject of the picture,
often by means of a conceit, or elaborate comparison. Very popular were the Emblems
(1635) of Francis Quarles.

Among the most important Metaphysical Poets there is George Herbert (1593-1633), an
Anglican priest. His main collection of poetry, The Temple (1633), contains many poems
which puzzle the modern reader. Herbert’s faith is stirred by simple objects, like a
stained glass window, an altar, a church-floor. He sees the hand of God everywhere and
believes that the world is a great book written by God, full of symbols and patterns. He
wrote several ‘pattern poems’: poems that are shaped like objects, for example Easter
Wings .

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,

Though foolishly he lost the same,

Decaying more and more,

Till he became

Most poor:

With thee

O let me rise

As larks, harmoniously,

And sing this day thy victories:

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did begin:

And still with sicknesses and shame

Thou didst so punish sin,

That I became

Most thin.

With thee

Let me combine,
 And feel this day thy victory:

For, if I imp my wing on thine,

Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Easter Wings is a perfect example of ‘shaped verse’, representing its theme by its
typographical arrangement. A shaped poem ‘looks’ like its subject. Early editions print
Easter Wings with the lines running vertically, emphasising the shape of two angel’s
wings ready to fly, the subject of the poem. In this way the poem explores an image not
only verbally but also visually. The sense of deep dejection is emphasised by the shortest
lines, while the elevation of the spirit is suggested by the long ones. This corresponds to
a theological reality: the Christian sense of Easter can be understood as a descent of
God to earth to elevate man. Though sometimes condemned as ‘false wit’, shaped
poems have been written from ancient times to the present. A Hellenistic poem shaped
like Cupid’s wings might have suggested the form to Herbert.

Other significant Metaphysical poets are Richard Crashaw, Heny Vaughan and Thomas
Traherne. Richard Crashaw (1613-49), a Catholic who led a brief, hectic life, went to
Rome and died in Loreto (of poisoning, Protestant propaganda maintained). He is the
best English example of the baroque sensibility that was sweeping through Europe and
that is best represented in the figurative arts by Gianlorenzo Bernini’s works. Crashaw
was strongly influenced by Giambattista Marino and Donne, and European mystic poetry:
his rich sensuous exuberance is often exaggerated, but it is typical of a whole age of
European art and thought. Henry Vaughan (1621-95) wrote conventional and rather trite
metaphysical verse but also shows a purer inspiration when he writes about the lost
world of childhood. Thomas Traherne (1637-74) also believed in a divine condition
enjoyed by man in his infancy. In Traherne we find a vague anticipation of the Romantic
theory of the exalted state of the child as opposed to the decayed state of the adult.

To many poets of the first half of the 17th century, poetry meant not so much
metaphysical extravagance as classical elegance and clarity. They are usually referred to
as Cavalier Poets. They took the theme of passionate love, found at its best in Donne,
and gave it sober, refined expression in polished verse that owed much to Greek and
Latin poetry. Robert Herrick (1591-1674), was the poet of the period who most closely
followed in Ben Jonson’s footsteps. A great classicist, Herrick was a true pagan spirit,
though he took holy orders and lived in a priory in Devonshire. His classicism is evident
in his collection of short poems, Hesperides . As for Ovid, love is for Herrick an
irresistible force, and he follows Horace’s precept of carpe diem , with joy and no moral
questioning.

Other Cavalier Poets were Thomas Carew (1594-1640), Sir John Suckling (1609-42) and
Richard Lovelace (1618-56). The neo-classical vein is even stronger in Edmund Waller
(1606-87) and John Denham (1615-69), the author of Cooper’s Hill (1643), a poem on
the English countryside that reminds us of pre-Romantic descriptions of nature. The
inspiration is highly refined and anticipates the Restoration and the Augustan Age in
some of its characteristics: clear thoughts expressed in short sentences, nearly always in
heroic couplets showing balance, parallelism and antithesis.

John Donne (1572-1631)

Born in London into a Catholic family related, on his mother’s side, to Sir Thomas More,
at a time when anti-Catholic feeling in England was becoming increasingly strong,
Donne’s early life was inevitably difficult. The little money he had inherited from his
father did not allow him financial independence. He went to a Jesuit school and then
attended Oxford and Cambridge, as well as Lincoln’s Inn (one of the four London law
schools). He never took a degree, though, and never became a lawyer. He travelled
extensively on the Continent, took part in the expeditions against Cadiz and the Azores
led by Sir Walter Raleigh and the Earl of Essex, and attended courtly circles. Above all,
Donne made himself known for his poems and translations: love lyrics, satires, versions
of Ovid’s elegies. They all reflect the worldly, witty, cynical yet passionate side of
Donne’s inspiration and personality. They were published posthumously in 1633 as
Songs and Sonnets , but were widely circulated during the poet’s life: they contain
Donne’s most famous love poems and those written in the metaphysical style.

Despite his typically Elizabethan background, Donne shows an independent development

as a poet. He neither began with a sonnet collection, as was then common, nor with the
kind of short mythological poem made fashionable by Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and
Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis . Instead he wrote love elegies (some of which were
adapted from Ovid) and songs: none of the poems in this collection is in fact a sonnet –
the term was still used at the time to indicate a song. Donne’s first poems show us a
cynical young man who is a fortunate as well as a careless lover. Unlike the usual
Petrarchan lover, he is not a passive subject in the hands of his lady: he does not believe
that to suffer in silence is a lover’s greatest virtue, and he makes his love explicitly
physical. The world of Donne’s love poetry is made up of real objects, animals, and
people. It portrays a love experience which has been fully lived, enjoyed, suffered and
thought about.

The Sun Rising is one of Donne’s best known poems in this line. The poem starts
abruptly, typically for Donne. The sun, the object of reverence and admiration of so
much lyrical poetry (from Ovid to the medieval aubade , where the lover gently laments
the coming of the light), is here scolded for being a ‘busy old fool’. A few lines below it is
called ‘saucy pedantic wretch’. This is not only a break with tradition, but also a
breaking-away of the lover from the outside world: the poet can only think about his
woman, to the point of losing all sense of proportion, time and circumstance. He reduces
the world, the universe, to his own smaller world: the room, the bed where the two
lovers lie. In the lover’s comparison of all things and values to his own exalted state,
even the sun, which in the beginning was seen as an enemy and a disturber of the
lovers’ quiet, is in the end asked to participate in their new world. The individual thus
becomes the ruler of a universe that must obey him.

Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,

And thou shalt hear: All here in one bed lay.

She’s all states, and all princes I;

Nothing else is.

Princes do but play us; compar’d to this,

All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy 1 .

Thou, sun, art half as happy as we 1

In that the world’s contracted thus 2 ;

Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be

To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;

This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere 3 .

Donne’s poems also reflect a passionately tender attitude to love and women. Donne
believes that the union of two souls is stronger than that of the bodies. The poet and his
mistress live a kind of transcendental passion, a mystic or a religious experience, with
Love as a deity, or a priest, and the two lovers as its humble followers. They are
removed from the day-to-day reality of the world. In these poems, which describe a
superior kind of love, Donne does not deny or see as evil love’s physical quality; his
spiritual love is still very human. Man and woman are flesh and blood beings, but in a
higher reality. Both aspects, the physical and the spiritual, are always firmly controlled
by Donne’s analytical intellect, investigating love’s mystery with passionate zeal, as in A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning , a poem about the separation of two lovers. It was
probably written by Donne for his wife on the occasion of one of his trips to the
Continent. ‘Valediction’ means, from the Latin, ‘farewell’. So this is a farewell poem in
which the poet forbids his woman to mourn, that is to cry, for his absence. He refuses to
accept the idea of being separated from his beloved, by means of a logical argument. He
cannot deny that there will be a physical separation, but he believes that is a problem for
those who are only united by sensual love. The poet and his lady, instead, share a love
which is also non-physical, the union of two souls, which cannot be broken but is
expanded through space just as gold may be beaten very thin without breaking. The
simile would be quite ingenious as it is, but Donne, in true ‘metaphysical’ style,
introduces another, more complex, simile, surely his most famous. The two lovers are
compared to the connected legs of a compass: just as they can be pulled far apart but
never totally separated, so the two lovers may be physically far from each other, but
they will always be spiritually united. The compass legs, however far apart, will always
draw a circle, a symbol of perfect unity.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to aery thinness beat 4 .

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses 1 are two,

Thy soul the fixed foot, makes no show 2

To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the centre sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans, and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as that comes home 3 .

Such wilt thou be to me, who must

Like the other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

And makes me end, where I begun 4 .

As the poems in Songs and Sonnets testify, in his youth, Donne was a widely-read,
curious, restless man: the dashing ‘Jack Donne’, as he later defined his juvenile self
distinguishing it from the more sober ‘John Donne’ of his mature years. When in 1598
Donne became secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper, his fortunes seemed
to be improving: he even sat in Elizabeth’s last Parliament. A reversal of fortune came
suddenly in 1601, when Donne secretly married 17-year-old Anne More, Lady Egerton’s
niece, without permission from either her family or the queen, in whose service the girl
was. Donne was dismissed from his employment and imprisoned, and for several years
had to struggle with the financial necessities of a large growing family. At 35, he was no
longer the careless irreverent spirit he had been in the 1590s. His poetry also became
more serious. He thought deeply about the problems of life and death, human impulses
and sin, and the conflict between individual energy and the passing of time. His
disillusion is best seen in The Anniversaries , two long poems he wrote in 1611 and 1612
for the death of Elizabeth Drury, the daughter of Sir Robert Drury, one of his patrons. In
them we find the famous line ‘and new philosophy calls all in doubt’, often taken as
representative of Donne’s uncertain position between the old, fixed, unchangeable
medieval world, symbolised by the Ptolemaic universe, and the new Renaissance model
of the universe opened up by the revolutionary astronomical theories of Kepler,
Copernicus and Galileo, by the discovery of America, and by the new inductive method in
science advanced by Francis Bacon.

A more sombre vision of life, as well as an increasing concern for death and religion, are
at the core of Donne’s Holy Sonnets (1607-13). They were probably begun after the
death of Donne’s wife. Their attitude towards death is different from that of the early
poems, where it was explored in a series of elaborate conceits. Here Donne’s style is
more like the direct appeals to God of the Psalms: the poet is distressed at the thought
of his past errors and is frightened by the idea of repenting too late. Batter My Heart ,
sonnet XIV (14), one of Donne’s most famous holy sonnets, is striking because of the
vehemence with which the poet begs for God’s help, and which reminds the reader of
Donne’s similarly passionate love poetry. The poem contains many terms denoting
strength, decision and violence, in images regarding conquest by and surrender to God.
The central metaphor is that of war: just as Renaissance love lyrics often presented a
struggle between the lover and the lady, or Love and Reason, so here the fight is
between God and the Evil that is inside man. It is a war that can only be ended by God
crushing his enemy completely. It is worth noticing that, technically, these are Donne’s
only real sonnets.

Donne’s troubles came to an end in 1615, when he renounced the Catholic Church for
the Anglican. The change was not sudden. King James I had long been an admirer of
Donne’s wit and intellectual energy, and always thought he would make a great Anglican
preacher. Donne was worried about his conversion (especially the fear of seeming too
ambitious) but he finally decided. He then became one of London’s most successful men:
first Reader (that is teacher) in Divinity at Lincoln’s Inn, and later Dean of St Paul’s
Cathedral in 1621; for the rest of his life he was the king’s favourite preacher. Some 160
of his sermons survive, including the famous one on ‘for whom the bell tolls’, included in
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). They are strong, reasoned reflections on
death, sin and salvation, tinged with the baroque typical of the late English Renaissance.
For Donne and his contemporaries death was not something to be feared and ignored,
but rather a dramatic idea, almost loved for its unique levelling power and its
relationship with love and life.

John Donne had been haunted all his life by the thought of death. In his last years he
often meditated upon it, in both poetry and prose. This is clear in his preaching in St
Paul’s after an illness, in a thin white gown that made him look like his own ghost; or in
the portrait of himself, dressed in his shroud, that Donne arranged to be painted before
his death. His sermon For Whom the Bell Tolls , a phrase that Ernest Hemingway took
over as the title of one of his most famous novels (1940), was written during an illness
that brought Donne to the verge of death. While lying in bed in his house in London, he
heard bells tolling for someone who had passed away, and he asked himself who this
person might be. This occasioned his reflections over life and death, and the invisible but
unbreakable link that joins one man to another. As he so aptly put it:

Perchance he for whom this bell tolls 1 may be so ill as that he knows not it tolls for him;
and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about
me and see my state may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church
is catholic 2 , universal; so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she
baptizes a child, that action concerns me, for that child is thereby connected to that
Head which is my Head too, and engrafted into that body, whereof I am a member 3 .
And when she buries a man, that action concerns me. All mankind is of one author, and
is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but
translated into a better language, and every chapter must be so translated; God employs
several translators 1 ; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by
war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation; and his hand shall bind up
all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one
another. As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon calls not upon the preacher only,
but upon the congregation to come, so this bell calls us all; […]. No man is an island,
entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be
washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if
a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I
am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it
tolls for thee.

Donne’s sentences are often short; and one thought or image leads on to the next in a
logical chain; certain key words recur with the rhythmical regularity of a bell tolling for
every man. Language and syntax are both very clear, in order to convey the preacher’s
message: ‘No man is an island’, we all belong together since we all are part of one body.

Shortly before he died in 1631, pale and emaciated after a serious illness, he delivered a
memorable sermon on death to an enraptured audience in St Paul’s: Death’s Duel . Few
figures are more representative than Donne of the many sides of the English
Renaissance.

Donne’s Works

Songs and Sonnets , published in 1633 but widely circulated during the poet’s life: they
contain Donne’s most famous love poems and those written in the metaphysical style.

The Anniversaries (1611-1612), two long, very pessimistic poems on the decay and
disgregation of the world.

Holy Sonnets , written over a number of years, both before and after his conversion to
Anglicanism: they are all in the Petrarchan form.

Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), Donne’s book of private prayers and
devotions, written in 1623 on the occasion of a serious illness.

Death’s Duel (1631), the last and most magnificent of Donne’s 160 sermons, one of the
masterpieces of 17th -century baroque macabre inspiration.

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

Marvell was born in Winestead, Yorkshire, and led a quiet life, first at Cambridge, where
he graduated in 1638, and then from 1650 as tutor to the daughter of the Lord General
of the parliamentary (Puritan) forces, Sir Thomas Fairfax. His best poetry was published
after his death, in 1681, and it has steadily gained general appreciation. In Marvell we
find the presence of thought and feeling in inseparable unity; the coexistence of wit and
high rhetoric, of lightness and seriousness; the commitment to a political cause without
the loss of personal, serene expression. A Puritan, a friend and follower of Milton under
whose supervision he worked in the Latin Secretariate of the Commonwealth, Marvell
was able to reconcile his religious beliefs with a passion for life and a sensuality quite
unusual in the Puritan party.

This sensuality was manifested in various ways: in the contemplation of natural scenery,
for instance, as in Upon Appleton House , Lord Fairfax’s country house, one of his most
elaborate poems. A different, less controlled, more pagan sensuality emerges from To
His Coy Mistress , Marvell’s most famous poem. Here the old carpe diem motif is
developed with a wit that reminds us of Donne. The influence of Donne is visible in the
division of the poem into three stanzas. At the beginning the lover seems to concede
everything to his shy (‘coy’) beloved. If they had infinite time and space, then he could
love her at a distance; they would be in no hurry.

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, Lady, were no crime.

We would sit down and think which way

To walk and pass our long love’s day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side

Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the Flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the Conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires and more slow;

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast,

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, Lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But time does hurry them and death lies in wait. Here the lover tries to impress the
reluctant woman by threatening her with macabre visions of the decay of the body after
death, when it will be too late for love.

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near,

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found,

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long-preserved virginity;

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust:

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Marvell displays a baroque taste for this aspect of death (echoes of songs in vaulted
tombs, worms feeding on the remains of once beautiful women). Finally, the lover openly
asks the lady to enjoy the pleasures of love. Though the two lovers cannot conquer time,
they can at least make him go at their own pace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour

Than languish in his slow-chapt power.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Thorough the iron gates of life;

Thus though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

To His Coy Mistress is Marvell’s most famous poem and, in many respects, the one in
which the many elements of his poetic genius are seen at their best. Its style and
inspiration have close affinities with those of Donne, and it expresses the claims of
physical as opposed to Platonic love and of the present as opposed to eternity.

Marvell’s profound learning does not weigh down his best work, which is given lightness
and humour by his metaphysical style: The Definition of Love is a good instance of
Marvell’s highly analytical mind at work on a general subject that involves deep personal
feelings. Marvell also showed what a balanced mind could do in the field of political
poetry in his An Horatian Ode , where he celebrated Cromwell’s victorious return from
Ireland. The ode is Horatian in metre, clearness and vigour, and is highly original.
Despite his own Puritan ideals, which did not change even after the Restoration, Marvell
manages to keep his distance and shows commendable fairness in his treatment of King
Charles: the verses on the King’s execution and the admirable calm he showed in that
circumstance are rightly famous.

Another poem which shows Marvell’s wide range of interests is Bermudas (1653), about
a group of English Puritans who escape from religious persecution at home and after
crossing the Atlantic Ocean reach the Bermudas on a small boat. The poem was written
by Marvell when he was living at Eton, in the house of the Puritan divine John
Ox-enbridge, who had been twice to the Bermudas and probably gave the poet
first-hand accounts of the islands. The Bermudas were much in people’s minds at the
time as an exotic and a magic place. Originally called ‘the devil’s islands’ (because of the
many shipwrecks that took place there), they became known as the ‘Summer Islands’
after Sir George Somers’s shipwreck there in 1609: Somers and his men miraculously
escaped drowning and lived on the island for some time. This episode gave Shakespeare
inspiration for his play The Tempest (where the Bermudas are mentioned).

Marvell’s Works

Upon Appleton House , The Garden (c. 1650), poems in praise of gardens and country
life.

The Bermudas (c. 1650), a song of thanksgiving by a group of Puritan exiles on reaching
those islands.

An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland (1650) and Elegy upon the Death
of the Protector (c. 1659), instances of his political production.

Miscellaneous Poems (published in 1681), which slowly secured Marvell’s fame as a

witty, intellectual and brilliant poet.

The Carpe Diem Theme

One of the most relevant aspects of the classical revival that characterises the
Renaissance and the 17th century is the large use made by poets of the so-called carpe
diem theme. Carpe diem is a Latin expression that literally means ‘catch the day’; or, in
the usual English translation, ‘seize the day’. The phrase is used in the sense that one
should be ready to ‘catch’ the present moment and enjoy it, without worrying too much
about the future. The theme was especially dear to poets, who made it an invitation to
women not to refuse their lovers but to love and be happy while they were still young.
The carpe diem theme shows another side of love, as something to be sensually enjoyed
rather than idealized and transcended (as in the so-called Petrarchan tradition, best
exemplified by the sonnet sequences).

The theme of carpe diem was typical of classical literatures (Greek and Latin). The
originator of the expression was the Latin poet Horace (65-8 BC). In a famous ode,
Horace begs his girl not to try to guess the future: the future cannot be known and we
must take it as it comes. It is wiser to do so instead of thinking that life passes away
with each day; as Horace says, ‘while we talk, invidious Time has already flown away:
therefore seize the day (carpe diem ) and have as little faith as possible in tomorrow’.
Even more than an invitation to love freely, the ode is a profound reflection on the
passing of time and the instability of man’s life.
Horace’s theme became immensely popular with writers of all countries and ages. In the
hands of Renaissance poets, however, the theme lost some of its philosophical depth and
often became a joyous celebration of sensuous love among young people. In the Italian
Renaissance the most famous example of this is the Canzona di Bacco (1490), by
Lorenzo de’ Medici, also know as the Magnificent (1449-1492). The poem was composed
for the Carnival festivities and it was meant to be sung aloud by a train of masked
dancers. Its very famous beginning already contains the essence of the ‘seize the day’
theme: ‘Quant’è bella giovinezza, / che si fugge tuttavia! / Chi vuol esser lieto, sia: / di
doman non c’è certezza’. The last two lines are used as a refrain throughout the poem,
they are a continuous invitation to love today and not to think about tomorrow.

Another famous Italian version of the theme is the ballad Ben venga maggio , written by
Angelo Poliziano (1454-1494) for the May festivities (Calendimaggio ): ‘Ben venga
maggio / e ’l gonfalon selvaggio! / Ben venga primavera, / che vuol l’uom s’innamori’.
Poliziano’s ballad is a pagan exhortation to love now since human life doesn’t renew itself
like the grass at springtime: ‘Chi è giovane e bella / deh non sie punto acerba, / ché non
si rinnovella / l’età come fa l’erba; / nessuna stia superba / all’amadore il maggio’.

The vogue of the carpe diem theme was also great among English poets. Its two most
famous expressions are Robert Herrick’s To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time , and
Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress . Herrick’s song has in common with Lorenzo the
Magnificent’s Canzona di Bacco the insistence on youth and the idea that Time flies (in
the Italian, ‘giovinezza… si fugge tuttavia’; in the English, ‘time is still a-flying’, l. 2);
while it shares Poliziano’s references to spring and flowers.

Marvell’s song develops the same theme in another key. It is more complex, both in
language and thought: some of its images are unusual, like that of Time’s winged chariot
that approaches at great speed. Rather than making a carefree invitation to love, the
poem is bitterly ironic towards the woman who is shy (the ‘Coy Mistress’ of the title): if
she keeps refusing to love till she’s old and dies, her ‘long-preserved virginity’ will be
finally violated by worms in the tomb. In Marvell, the carpe diem theme is treated with
the wit typical of the Metaphysical school and has already lost some of its original pagan
sensuality.