To His Coy Mistress To His Coy Mistress "To His Coy Mistress" is a metaphysical poem written by the English author and politician Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) either during or just before the English Interregnum (1649–60). It was published posthumously in 1681. This poem is considered one of Marvell's finest and is possibly the best recognized carpe diem poem in English. Although the date of its composition is not known, it may have been written in the early 1650s. At that time, Marvell was serving as a tutor to the daughter of the retired commander of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax. The speaker
Metaphysical poets of the poem, Segel instances the English work of Henry King as well as Ernst Christoph Homburg's in German and Jan Andrzej Morsztyn’s in Polish. In addition, Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” is given as a famous example of the use of hyperbole common to many other Metaphysical poets and typical of the Baroque style too. The way George Herbert and other English poets “torture one poor word ten thousand ways”, in Dryden's phrase, finds its counterpart in a poem like “Constantijn Huygens’ "Sondagh" (Sunday) with its verbal variations on the word ‘sun’. Wordplay on this scale was not confined