Andrew Marvell

Table of contents

1 Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) 2 Sourced: 2.1 To His Coy Mistress 3 The Definition of Love

Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

English Poet

Sourced:

• Gather the flowers, but spare the buds.
  • The Picture of Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers

• She with her eyes my heart does bind,
  She with her voice might captivate my mind.
  • The Fair Singer

• How should I avoid to be her slave,
  Whose subtle art invisibly can wreath
  My fetters of the very air I breath?
  • The Fair Singer

• What wondrous life in this I lead!
  Ripe apples drop about my head;
  The luscious clusters of the vine
  Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
  The nectarine and curious peach
  Into my hands themselves do reach;
  Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
  Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass.
  • The Garden

• Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less
  Withdraws into its happiness;
  The mind, that ocean where each kind
  Does straight its own resemblance find;
  Yet it creates, transcending these,
  Far other worlds, and other seas;
  Annihilating all that's made
  To a green thought in a green shade.
  • The Garden

To His Coy Mistress

• 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.

• My vegetable love should grow
  Vaster than empires and more slow…

• An age at least to every part,
  And the last age should show your heart.

• But at my back I always hear
  Times winged 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 honor 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
  Thorough the iron gates of life:
  Thus, though we cannot make our sun
  Stand still, yet we will make him run.

The Definition of Love

• My love is of a birth as rare
  As 'tis for object strange and high;
  It was begotten by Despair
  Upon Impossibility.

• Love's whole world on us doth wheel.

• As lines, so loves oblique may well
  Themselves in every angle greet;
  But ours so truly parallel,
  Though infinite, can never meet.

• Therefore the love which us doth bind,
  But Fate so enviously debars,
  Is the conjunction of the mind,
  And opposition of the stars.