This voice speaks out uncommonly strong in the "Coy Mistress." The theme is one of the great traditional commonplaces of European literature. It is the theme of "O mistress mine," of "Gather ye rosebuds," of "Go, lovely rose"; it is in the savage austerity of Lucretius and the intense levity of Catullus. Where the wit of Marvell renews the theme is in the variety and order of the images. In the first of the three paragraphs Marvell plays with a fancy which begins by pleasing and leads to astonishment.
Had we but world enough and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime, . . . 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. . . .
We notice the high speed, the succession of concentrated images, each magnifying the original fancy. When this process has been carried to the end and summed up, the poem turns suddenly with that surprise which has been one of the most important means of poetic effect since Homer:--
But at my back I always hear Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near, And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity.
A whole civilization resides in these lines:--
Pallida Mors æqua pulsat pede pauperumb tabernas, Regumque turris. . . .
And not only Horace but Catullus himself:--
Nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux, Nox est perpetua una dormienda.
The verse of Marvell has not the grand reverberation of Catullus's Latin; but the image of Marvell is certainly more comprehensive and penetrates greater depths than Horace's.
A modern poet, had he reached the height, would very likely have closed on this moral reflection. But the three strophes of Marvell's poem have something like a syllogistic relation to each other. After a close approach to the mood of Donne,
then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity . . . The grave's a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace,
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.
It will hardly be denied that this poem contains wit; but it may not be evident that this wit forms the crescendo and diminuendo of a scale of great imaginative power. The wit is not only combined with, but fused into, the imagination. We can easily recognize a witty fancy in the successive images ("my _vegetable_ love," "till the conversion of the Jews"), but this fancy is not indulged, as it sometimes is by Cowley or Cleveland, for its own sake. It is structural decoration of a serious idea. In this it is superior to the fancy of "L'Allegro," "Il Penseroso," or the lighter and less successful poems of Keats. In fact, this alliance of levity and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified) is a characteristic of the sort of wit we are trying to identify. It is found in