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Marvell uses rhyming couplets throughout “To His Coy Mistress,” which means the rhyme scheme is AA BB CC and so on. Marvell maintains this rhyme scheme throughout the entire poem, with no deviations. Modern readers may question the rhymes of several couplets, such as “lie” and “eternity.” To our ears, these words do not rhyme, but to seventeenth-century English ears, they did. For the most part, Marvell uses ordinary words to make his rhymes. Two exceptions might be “would” and “Flood,” and “refuse and Jews.” But otherwise, most of the rhymes in the poem fall on perfectly commonplace English words like “way” and “day,” or “all and ball.” Marvell’s use of ordinary language reflects a common practice among the so-called metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. Though their poetry was characterized by very sophisticated use of elaborate conceits, they often broke with poetic convention by mixing ordinary speech into their philosophical speculations. Marvell’s use of ordinary rhyming words in this poem is remarkable for the fact that the rhymes, though perfectly regular, don’t draw undue attention to themselves. They therefore allow the reader to concentrate on logic of the speaker’s argument.

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