To His Coy Mistress: Motifs

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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Water

Water appears in various forms throughout the poem, always in symbolic reference to life. In the opening lines, when the speaker invites the fantasy of having the whole world at their disposal, he mentions two rivers on opposite sides of the earth: the Ganges in India, and the Humber in England. Despite being separated by so much space, the speaker implies that the lovers would remain connected by the vitality of these flowing bodies of water. Immediately after mentioning the two rivers, the speaker tells his mistress, “I would / Love you ten years before the Flood” (lines 7–8). Here the speaker references the Biblical Flood that drowned every creature in the world except for those saved on Noah’s Ark. Although the Flood is most obviously linked to death, the speaker’s emphasis remains on survival. His point is that, if he had an eternity to court his mistress, he would have started way back in Old Testament times, and his love would have endured even the great Flood. Finally, late in the poem the speaker likens the mistress’s glowing skin to “morning dew” (line 34), drawing attention to her youthful beauty and vigor.

Genitalia

Although the speaker references several body parts throughout the poem, his most significant references are to genitalia. The speaker uses these references to establish a tension between vitality and decay, sex and death. In the poem’s first stanza, the speaker imagines spending a significant amount of time praising each part of his mistress’s body. In listing these parts, he imagines his own arousal growing to massive proportions. As he puts it: “My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow” (lines 11–12). In one sense, he means that his appreciation for his mistress would grow. In another sense, however, he is cheekily referencing the size of his erect penis. By contrast, when the speaker’s thoughts turn to death in the second stanza, he describes what will happen to his mistress’s corpse in the grave: “then worms shall try / That long-preserved virginity, / And your quaint honor turn to dust” (lines 27–29). The word “quaint” is a double entendre that means both “out of date” and “vagina.” Essentially, the speaker is trying to say that if his mistress refuses to have sex with him now, the worms will take her virginity when she dies.

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