To His Coy Mistress: Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Worms

The speaker mentions worms in the poem’s second stanza, and the reference has both literal and symbolic meaning. When his mistress eventually dies and her body has been conferred to a grave, in lines 27–29 the speaker says:

then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honor turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.

On the literal level, the speaker refers to worms as decomposers of physical matter. It is a common trope in poetry to describe corpses as food for worms. Here, the speaker draws on this trope to emphasize his mistress’s mortality. She, too, will die, and worms will turn her body back into soil. On a more figurative level, however, the worm symbolizes male genitalia. What’s odd, though, is that the worm, as a penis, is detached from all sexual desire. The speaker’s point in these lines is that, if his mistress refuses to have sex with him when she’s alive, then the worms will take her “long-preserved virginity.” But since she will be dead, she won’t be able to enjoy the sexual act. The speaker won’t be able to enjoy it either, since the worm will have beaten him to the punch, thereby “[turning] into ashes all my lust.”

Amorous Birds of Prey

In the poem’s final stanza, the speaker calls on his mistress to join him and, “like amorous birds of prey, / Rather at once our time devour / Than languish in his slow-chapped power” (lines 38–40). On the surface, these lines show the speaker pressing on with his seduction, but his use of the simile “like amorous birds of prey” conceals a deeper, symbolic meaning. In the seventeenth century, alchemy was still an influential field of study. Alchemical treatises of the day, such as Mylius’s Philosophia reformata (1622), showcased various visual “emblems,” which encoded symbolic meaning. One prominent emblem in Mylius’s treatise is that of amorous birds of prey. The emblem depicts two birds of prey devouring each other as they copulate, and it symbolizes the sexual union between a man and a woman. Both parties involved in the sexual act are said to feed on each other’s flesh and blood in order to produce offspring. In the context of alchemy, the amorous birds of prey represent the alchemical marriage of male and female. In the context of the poem, the birds of prey communicate the speaker’s desire for vigorous sexual union with his mistress.