The speaker of “To His Coy Mistress” is an anonymous male lover who desires to have sex with his mistress. It is clear from his sustained attempt to seduce this anonymous woman that the speaker is motivated primarily by sexual arousal. For example, though he speaks generally of his love for his mistress, he also makes fairly explicit reference to his erect genitalia when he tells her, “My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires” (lines 11–12). The speaker then spends the next six lines looking over his mistress’s body, naming the various parts of her that he would like to “praise.” Finally, as the poem nears its conclusion, the speaker fantasizes about the strenuous physicality of lovemaking. He tells his mistress, “Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball, / And tear our pleasures with rough strife” (lines 41–43). The lengths this speaker goes to convince his reluctant mistress to have sex with him make it clear just how excited he is.

And yet, despite his evident arousal, the desire for sex may not be the speaker’s only motivation. Instead, his insistence on the need to seize the moment may well reflect an existential crisis related to his own mortality. In the poem’s second stanza, the speaker moves away from his fantasy of infinite time and space and turns to images of aging and death. He invites his mistress to imagine the fading of her own beauty, then he conjures a vision of worms eating her corpse. On the one hand, the speaker is using these images to shock his mistress, believing that her own fear of decline will convince her to make love. On the other hand, there is also the hint of something more personal in the way the speaker introduces the subjects of aging and death. He says: “But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near” (lines 21–22). Instead of making a more general claim about the passage of time, the speaker specifically refers to his own experience here, suggesting that he may have a personal preoccupation with his own eventual death. In this case, his motivation may stem as much from a desire for sex as from a fear of his own mortality.

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