Marrvel: 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.
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
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.

Where does the conceit lie?

Half-Ten Things to Remember When Venturing into the Lands of the Metaphysical Poets

1. Not a literary movement or school of poetry per se; more of a group of minds (Donne, Marrvel, Herbert, Vaughan) thinking alike - dolling out witty, inventive and stylistically clever verse.

2. Conceit - extended metaphor - fanatics. Just think of Donne's man and woman and their love being like the legs of a compass, or their marriage bed like the body of a flea.

3. Interested in the not-so-rational aspects of human life (for instance, the condition of the human soul), but applying a rational (more down to earth) perspective.

4. The once great Ben Jonhson called them a motley crew, their use of imagery: 'a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike'.

5. Were men out of tune with the pulse of their times - meaning stood against the commonality of the 16th century verse. It took more than two centuries for the recognition to come, from no other but T. S. Eliot himself, who wrote in his essay 'The Metaphysical Poets' that these men and their witty lyrics went where no one before them had gone before - into the land of passion and reason, the so-called 'the dissociation of sensibility'. Eliot saw in their verse his own poetic antecedent.