Andrew Marvell: lover or predator?

Andrew Marvell is celebrated as one of the finest poets of the 17^th century. His verse is elegant, clever, and charged with that uniquely metaphysical blend of intellectual wit and sensual longing. His poem – ‘To His Coy Mistress’ – is one of the most famous in the English Language. Its phrases repeated so frequently they have become everyday figures of speech. Its words mined by other writers for novels, movies and plays. But the truth behind the poem leaves us asking whether this carpe diem entreaty is fuelled by passion or manipulation.

Andrew Marvell has seduced readers for almost 400 years. Regarded as one of the great metaphysical poets, there has always been an air of mystery about him.

What we do know is that he was undoubtedly clever. Born in 1621 to Reverend Andrew Marvell and his wife Anne, he grew up in Hull where he probably attended the grammar school until, at the age of 12, he left to study at Trinity College, Cambridge. He received his degree at the age of 18, but his father’s death in 1641 (he drowned in the Humber estuary) interrupted his studies and the next several years saw him travelling extensively in Europe.

Having completely missed the Civil War due to his travels, Marvell spent the next ten years working as a tutor. First for Mary Fairfax, the daughter of the renowned Parliamentarian general Thomas Fairfax; later for one of Oliver Cromwell’s wards.

It is during this time he is thought to have written one of the most seductive and coercive poems in the English canon – To His Coy Mistress.

Often presented by English teachers as a love poem, it is really nothing of the sort. The young woman to whom the poem is addressed has declined the attentions of Marvell – she does not want to sleep with him – and yet he persists. Combining urgency, wit, and the threat of mortality to persuade her that her desire to retain her viginity is a waste of time and youth, Marvell completely disregards the consequences for her if she gave in to his attentions. In the 17^th century, a girl’s chastity was bound to her marriageability, social and economic status. Pregnancy outside wedlock was not only ruinous – a seduced girl faced shame, exile, and often destitution – but potentially deadly at a time when maternal mortality was so high. For a man, the consequences were negligible. 

But still his words are so pretty, so lyrical, that even the reader is seduced.

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 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.
       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-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

We can admire the poem and feel the urgency as time races forward, acknowledging the passion and purpose, while mindful that the young woman had declined Marvell’s attempts at seduction. He bats away her arguments skillfully: her desire to remain chaste, he says, is irrational – her virtue is ridiculed not praised. Here there are more hints at selfishness and misogyny. 

His technique is disturbingly modern: “You’ll regret it if you don’t…” “We don’t have forever…” “Let’s not waste time…” It’s the poetic version of “you’re no fun.” 

As inappropriate as this is, what makes it worse is both the historical context and the identity of the “mistress” in question. 

Almost certainly she was none other than his pupil – Mary Fairfax – who was between 12 and 14 years old at the time.

Marvell, an adult man, was urging a teenager to give in to his lust before death made her viginity irrelevant. Not as part of a marriage proposal – he had no chance of that, not being of noble birth – but because of his desire for her. This has overtures of the incel – setting his aims far too high and then bemoaning his lack of luck.

The poem’s core argument – let us sport while we may – is not just manipulative but cruel. To him it’s a game; to her it has life-altering consequences. It’s the most caddish of behaviours, made worse by the power imbalance of teacher and pupil. His sense of entitlement again smells of incel behaviour. How dare she say no to him.

While masterfully crafted, the poem and Marvell himself deserve to be read and appraised honestly. He wasn’t just making an intellectual point about mortality, but was leveraging his craft to pressure a teenage girl against the social, legal, and ethical norms of his time. And he did so from a position of trust – as a tutor, mentor and adult. 

So where does that leave us? 

Can we still admire the poem’s craft while acknowledging its disturbing implications? Can we read Marvell without sanitising him or, worse, romanticising his manipulation? 

More importantly: should we? 

To make matters worse there is something disturbingly underhand about Marvell. He was undoubtedly private and secretive (Society is all but rude / To this delicious solitude) and quite possibly a sort of 17th century James Bond. Later rumours suggested he might have lost part of his manhood to venereal disease. He must have been fully aware that if his seductions were reciprocated he would lose his job. So he kept his poetry hidden.

Few even knew about it until his collected poems finally saw the light of day three years after his death at the age of 57. Even his death was not without controversy, accompanied by rumours that he had been poisoned by the Jesuits. Richard Morton, the eminant physician, noted angrily that an ounce of quinine could have saved him (as he died of vivax malaria).

But like many things in Marvell’s life, it was not meant to be.

As for Mary Fairfax, she was supposed to marry Philip Stanhope, 2nd Earl of Chesterfield, but instead went on to marry George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. It was not a happy marriage.

Andrew Marvell. The Complete Poems. (Everyman 1993.)

Nigel Smith. Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon. (Yale University Press 2010.)

AD Hope. His Coy Mistress to Mr. Marvell.

Annie Finch. Coy Mistress.