The poet says that her beauty is transient. The ‘marble vault’ is a mausoleum, a metaphor for her death. It is also a metaphor for her body, which will no longer respond to his ‘echoing’ song, that is his praise and love for her. Note the sibilant ’s’s and consonant rhyme in ‘sound’ and ‘song’. The semi-colon creates a caesura, one assumes to give the lady time to think about the grim prospects, before proceeding with an even nastier idea, that of worms eating her.

It is a rather brutal way of referring to the fact that she can die soon, and will have lost her chance to enjoy his love.

After the exaggerated praise of the first stanza, the poet moves on in the second to discuss reality; time and impending death are imperatives that urge him to seek immediate physical satisfaction.

Even though his lady deserves so much more, Marvell claims that there isn’t time to delay. The reference to ‘Time’s winged chariot’ is a familiar one.

T.S. Eliot alludes to this line in The Waste Land:

But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear."

A rather macabre, modern adaptation, Eliot in the same poem later repeats the phrase as,

But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring
Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring."

Mrs. Porter, is a brothel owner, Sweeney too is conscious of time’s imperative and so visits her in the ‘spring’ (the latter a metaphor for the awakening of sexual desire).

Marvell refers to time and its winged chariot as part of his persuasive tactic.

This is reminiscent of the style of Medieval Romance, in which poems of courtly love were dedicated to a distant, idealised and unobtainable lady. The knight would perform near impossible tasks to prove his love. The genre emphasised chastity and exaggerated respect, though there was often a strong, unspoken sexual undertone. The genre was parodied by Cervantes in the Don Quixote stories.

However, the elaborate, hyperbolic praise by the gallant knight of every aspect of his lady — hair, eyes, chaste beauty etc — isn’t quite followed here, in that Marvell is frank about his ‘adoration’ of her breasts.

The poetic tradition of a man cataloging a woman’s attractiveness is know as a blazon.

This is another bizarre and inventive comparison, juxtaposing his ‘vegetable love’ with vast ‘empires’. This suggests natural growth and increase in feelings and desire. It suggests a gradual and organic development, but powerful and enduring.

It is also reminiscent of his poem The Garden where the poet makes a similar comparison.

However, given that the poem has a satirical edge, it’s difficult to ignore the fact that the imagery of the growing “vegetable love” is also sexual. One interpretation is that the vegetable is a metaphor for a woman’s sexual organs; vagina and ovaries. Another is that it is phallic reference to the poet’s tumescence, i.e. erection.

The reference to empires reflects the opening up of the New World. Exploration was increasing and European countries starting their embryonic colonies which were to grow into empires. The metaphysical poets wove into their poetry the sense of the vastness of the new continents.

The Church used the technique of encouraging young men to control their sexual urges by thinking about the object of their affections as a corpse eaten by worms.

It can be read as a veiled threat. In short, “Either you lose your virginity to me now, or you’ll lose it to maggots in the grave!” There is a clear phallic joke here. He is in effect asking, ‘Which would you prefer, my human, living worm, or the worms of corruption in the grave?’

More charitably, he’s following his previous line of thought. It’s wasteful for her to continue to refuse his advances. Time passes too quickly and death is ever-present. Therefore she should not preserve her virginity for the worms when he would happily take it now. He wants her to live in the moment. An example of ‘carpe diem’ — seize the day.