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The tone of “To His Coy Mistress” is at once humorous and existential. For one thing, the reader can detect a humorous tone in Marvell’s use of meter. Instead of the more noble sound of so-called “English heroic verse,” he used a shorter line that, to his contemporaries at least, would have sounded comically stunted. There is also evident humor in the extremes to which Marvell has his speaker go to seduce his mistress. Consider the shift in register from the first stanza’s idealized vision of eternity to the second stanza’s graphic depiction of aging and death. The suddenness of this shift, matched with its extreme nature, underscores the humorous absurdity of the speaker’s logic. That said, one could also argue that the very suddenness of his shift from the ideal of love to the horror of death points to a more central occupation with his own inevitable demise. If this is true, then the speaker’s sustained, even strenuous attempt to seduce his mistress might be motivated by his own fear of death. Understood in this way, the poem has a complex tone that uses humor to conceal a very serious concern about mortality.

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