Andrew Marvell Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Andrew Marvell with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
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“But ours so truly parallel, Though infinite can never meet.”
Meaning & context
The speaker compares two perfectly aligned but separated lovers to parallel lines, making impossibility rather than lack of feeling the defining feature of the relationship.
Source details
“The Definition of Love,” posthumously published in Miscellaneous Poems (1681), represented by Representative Poetry Online. The mathematical image belongs to a metaphysical lyric in which Fate prevents the lovers’ union.
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“Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade.”
Meaning & context
Marvell imagines the contemplative mind withdrawing from ordinary objects and social striving into an intensely concentrated vision of green nature.
Source details
“The Garden,” posthumously published in Miscellaneous Poems (1681), represented through the public-domain Project Gutenberg text in The Quiet Life. The lines belong to a lyric meditation on solitude, mind, nature and Edenic imagery.
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“Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime.”
Meaning & context
Marvell’s speaker begins a carpe-diem argument by imagining unlimited time, using that impossible condition to prepare his later case for acting before mortality closes opportunity.
Source details
“To His Coy Mistress,” posthumously published in Miscellaneous Poems (1681), represented by Representative Poetry Online. The poem is a dramatic seduction argument by a speaker, not neutral advice about consent, relationships or urgency.