Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.

Lines 1–2 open the poem, and they help establish the nature of the anonymous speaker’s relationship to his unnamed mistress. The speaker’s first words clearly imply a belief that his mistress’s coyness stems from a desire to take things slow. His words have a comedic effect for two main reasons. For one thing, the speaker’s elegant syntax suggests a level of care and patience that is amusingly at odds with the immediacy of his own sexual desire. For another thing, we readers have nothing to go on but the speaker’s words. Whereas he believes that his mistress just wants to take things slow, it is entirely possible that her coyness has another source. She could be in love with someone else. Or perhaps the speaker suffers from a horrible insecurity. We readers cannot know, but this possibility creates an additional layer of irony in the poem.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.

Lines 21–24 open the poem’s second stanza, and they mark a shift in the speaker’s argument. Whereas the first stanza was filled with idealized imagery and conjured the lushness of river landscapes (symbolic of the vitality of life), here the speaker turns to the barren imagery of vast, empty deserts (symbolic of the immensity of death). Perhaps most important, however, is the speaker’s invocation of urgency. In contrast to the first stanza’s vision of eternity, the speaker describes his sense of how swiftly time passes. The swift passage of time may contribute to the speaker’s anxiety about his own eventual death. In the lines that follow, the speaker will invoke this anxiety in a way intended to scare his mistress into having sex with him.

The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Lines 31–32 conclude the poem’s second stanza with a humorous example of understatement. Whereas the second stanza opens with a suggestion of existential crisis, it ends with a joke about how the grave is not a great place for having sex. The humorous tone of these lines helps the speaker transition away from the graphic depiction of rotting corpses and back to his main goal. And that goal is not to emotionally disturb his mistress, but to entice her to make love.

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.

With these lines (lines 37–40), which occur in the third stanza, the speaker finally articulates what it is he wants from his mistress. Although his desire for sex has been implicit from the beginning, he has spent the bulk of the poem talking, first, about romance, and second, about death. Only here does he explicitly tell his mistress that they should “sport us while we may“—that is, make love while they still can. The repeated use of the word “now” in the first two lines underscores the speaker’s sense of urgency. Likewise, the reference to “amorous birds of prey” implies the ferocity of the speaker’s desire: he wishes to devour time, rather than let time’s “slow-chapped power” devour him.

Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Lines 45–46 are the speaker’s final words, and as has happened throughout the poem, they conjure imagery that holds in tension the opposing notions of eternity and the quick passage of time. Here, the tension revolves around the reference to the sun. The speaker acknowledges that he and his mistress cannot make the sun stop moving, and hence they cannot stop time or avoid death. However, through vigorous lovemaking, they can use their time in the best way possible. By filling their time to the utmost capacity, they could force the sun to “run.” That is, instead of having to live their lives according to the sun’s rhythms, they could force the sun, the source of all life, to keep up with them.

Take a Study Break