“Carpe Diem” is Latin for “seize the day.” The idea is that you’re going to die eventually, so you should make sure to take advantage of the present. Today just an inspiring motto for your own life, in the Renaissance it was also often used as an argument to persuade women to return a man’s affections.
“Song: to Celia” is usually interpreted as an example of this genre. Although it’s not that explicit, as we discuss in this guide, death is implicitly present throughout the poem, from the speaker’s allusion to the “divine drink” of immortality, to the withering wreath he sends to Celia at the end of the poem. We can even read the end of the poem as a veiled threat: fail to return my affections, and you will wither like the wreath.
That interpretation is more convincing because there were so many poems written in the seventeenth century which made the same argument more explicitly. In the Summary and Analysis section, we quote Shakespeare’s Sonnet 10, which argues that the young man should marry and reproduce, because his children will let his self persist beyond his own death. In fact, the bulk of Shakespeare’s sonnets to the young man are variations on this theme.
However, Shakespeare was far from the only early modern poet to invoke death in love poetry. Perhaps the most famous example is Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress,” which begins, “Had we but world enough and time, / This coyness, lady, were no crime.” In other words, if we were immortal, it would be fine for you to delay. However, Marvell goes on,
at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
The morbid imagery is pretty shocking, and hardly romantic. At its heart, though, it’s making a simple argument: why delay, when soon you and I will both be rotting in the ground. In a world where language like this was an acceptable addition to love poetry, it’s much more convincing to see the “withered” wreath in “Song: to Celia” as having some similarly morbid connotations.
