To His Coy Mistress is a witty metaphysical poem written by the British author and statesman Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) either during or just before the Interregnum.

Marvell probably wrote the poem prior to serving in Oliver Cromwell's government as a minister. The poem was not published in his lifetime.[citation needed]

The speaker of the poem addresses a woman who has been slow to respond to his sexual advances. In the first stanza he describes how he would love her if they had an unlimited amount of time. He could spend centuries admiring each part of her body and her refusal to comply would not faze him. In the second stanza, he remembers how short human life is. Once it is over, the opportunity to enjoy each other is gone because no one embraces in the grave. In the last stanza, the speaker urges the woman to comply, arguing that in loving each other with fervor they will make the most of the short time they have to live.

The poem is written in iambic tetrameter and rhymes in couplets. The first stanza ("Had we...") is ten couplets long, the second ("But...") six, and the third ("Now therefore...") seven.

Many authors have borrowed the phrase "World enough and time" from the poem's opening line to use in their book titles. The most famous is Robert Penn Warren's 1950 novel World Enough and Time: A Romantic Novel, about murder in early-1800s Kentucky. With variations, it has also been used for books on the philosophy of physics (World Enough and Space-Time: Absolute versus Relational Theories of Space and Time), geopolitics (World Enough and Time: Successful Strategies for Resource Management), a science-fiction collection (Worlds Enough & Time: Five Tales of Speculative Fiction - Dan Simmons), and, of course, a biography (World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell).

Also in the field of science fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a Hugo-nominated short story whose title, "Vaster than Empires and More Slow", is a borrowing. Ian Watson notes the debt of the latter story to Marvell, "whose complex and allusive poems are of a later form of pastoral to that which I shall refer, and, like Marvell, Le Guin's nature references are, as I want to argue, "pastoral" in a much more fundamental and interesting way than this simplistic use of the term.".

The phrase "there will be time" occurs repeatedly in a section of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), and is often said to be an allusion to Marvell's poem.[citation needed] Prufrock says that there will be time "for the yellow smoke that slides along the street", time "to murder and create", and time "for a hundred indecisions ... Before the taking of a toast and tea". As Eliot's hero is, in fact, putting off romance and consummation, he is (falsely) answering Marvell's speaker. Eliot also alludes to the lines near the end of Marvell's poem, "Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball," with his lines, "To have squeezed the universe into a ball / To roll it toward some overwhelming question," as Prufrock questions whether or not such an act of daring would have been worth it. Eliot returns to Marvell in The Waste Land with the line "But at my back from time to time I hear / The sound of horns and motors" (Part III, line 196).

In the movie 25th Hour, the last verse of the poem is recited in an English class. Andrew Marvell's poetry plays a significant role in the film The Serpent's Kiss, and Thea/Anne recites part of this poem, which is taken as a spell by another character.

Most recently, Audrey Niffenegger's fiction novel The Time Traveler's Wife borrows heavily from Andrew Marvell's poem. The novel focuses on the main character Henry DeTamble, a reluctant time-traveler who proclaims his love for his wife Clare Abshire through the use of the phrase, "World enough and time".

Archibald MacLeish's poem "You, Andrew Marvell", alludes to the passage of time and to the growth and decline of empires. In his poem, the speaker, lying on the ground at sunset, feels "the rising of the night". He visualizes sunset, moving from east to west geographically, overtaking the great civilizations of the past, and feels "how swift how secretly/The shadow of the night comes on."