Time’s Winged Chariot

Andrew Marvell (1621 - 1678)

Poetry is a very beautiful expression of human emotions. If I left it at that, it would have been the understatement of the year! A couplet, unexpectedly wafted by a literary wind in the form of a quote in a quite unrelated book, might set in motion in you a train of thought, and at the same time savouring the metaphysical essence of it. It is the economy of words while expressing an idea that makes poetry an unassailable foe to prose. Likewise, I stumbled upon the lines

“But at my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot hurrying near”

as a quote in Arnold Toynbee’s ‘A Study of History’. There wasn’t any mention of the author – just the beguiling lines that invited the listener to immerse in a deep ocean of thinking at the philosophical inevitability of the subject alluded to, by the poet.

If the day was three decades prior to what it actually was, nothing would’ve happened. You would have no clue as to the poet who wrote these lines. May be learned scholars in English literature would have able to help, but most of them are out of reach of rustics like me even now. The lines would’ve forever haunted me with neither the beginning nor the end in sight. I would’ve been forever chained to the present as enunciated in those lines. But the year is 2015, the Internet has reached every corner of the country, and it was a matter of seconds to run a search in Google and coming up with 16,000 matching results! Not only the full poem, but a biography of the author is now available at your fingertips.

It was Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678) who wrote these lines in his poem, ‘To His Coy Mistress’ around 1650. Contrary to all expectations we might have formed based on the metaphysical quote, the poem is actually an amorous one in which the poet urges his mistress to shed her coyness and to respond favourably to his lustful advances because the time available to live is very short and he is already hearing the clatter of time’s winged chariot approaching from behind. What an irony! The thing you thought to be a diamond of philosophical speculation turned out on closer examination to be a piece of charcoal! The fact that both are of the same material need not detain us here. The poem is still noteworthy, with a few more aces down the poet’s sleeve, when he reminds us that “yonder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity”. It ends with this marvelous sextuplet,

“Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run”

English is hilarious if we detect the pun! Full text of the poem may be found here.