We are all the victims of time; we spend our lives striving to leave our legacy in order to beat the vicious clock that controls our spot on this Earth. What can be defined as a legacy? Values, wealth, a personal memory? Each legacy someone leaves can be powerful in its own way and each legacy is different. William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 exemplifies how you are able to immortalize someone through the legacy of art. Ironically “To the Virgins” by Robert Herrick and “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell both were written on the theme of Carpe Diem, about not fixating on the future but about “seizing the day”, yet evidently they have managed to leave a legacy as we still today discuss and analyze their works of art.

Shakespeare captured in Sonnet 18 how someone is able to leave a legacy through art. The sonnet compares a boy to a summer’s day and describes him as “more lovely and more temperate” meaning that the youth’s beauty is more perfect and gentle than the beauty and violent excesses of a summer day. The poem then shifts and speaks about how “summer’s lease hath all too short a date” and that just like how the summer months are always too short and come to an end, the lease that this boy has on life has abruptly come to an end all too quickly as well. The next few lines “sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, / and often in his gold complexion dimmed, / and every fair from fair sometime declines,” illustrates that even though the sun shines, it is usually dimed by the clouds and how with time all beautiful things eventually decline from perfection. The poem then takes its final shift where the ever-living poet in the next few lines, through his last verse, promises eternity. He writes that “thy eternal summer shall not fade, / nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,” referring that this boys beauty that which he so richly possess will not by lost. He says that death will not “brag thou wander’st in his shade”, implying that death normally boasts of his conquests over life but this time the boy will conquer death because with these “eternal lines” that Shakespeare has written, he will grow as time grows. Shakespeare closes the sonnet with these final two lines: “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” This closing statement explains Shakespeare’s hope that for as long as humans live and breathe and that there are seeing eyes on this Earth they will be able to read this poem and these verses will live on, celebrating and continually renewing this boys life. Shakespeare has unmistakably achieved his hope and dream of immortalizing his dearest friend he wrote about in Sonnet 18, but that is not the only person he immortalized. The sonnet is rather boastful as he expects that “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,” that people will be reading his poem, so truly he immortalized not only his friend but himself by creating a work of art that has continued to be read for hundreds of years.

The poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick displays a different perception on time. Herrick’s view was not about creating a legacy but rather about seizing the day. In the first stanza the idea of gathering rose buds “while ye may” underlines that you should go and enjoy your youth while you can because “old time is still a-flying”, meaning that time will continue to move and with every second, minute, day, you are getting older. In the third stanza Herrick says “that age is best, which is first / when youth and blood are warmer,” what he is describing is age that precedes the other years is always better. Being a child is better than a teenager, being a teenager is better than an adult and if you keep wasting away your years eventually there will not be any years left for you to waste. The last stanza clearly showcases Robert Herrick’s’ perception on time. He tells the virgins and the reader to “be not coy, but use your time” implying that we should utilize the time we are given wisely and appropriately. Herrick then writers “Having lost but once your prime”, he is portraying that your prime in life only comes once and once it is gone there is no looking back. Herrick ends the poem with “You may forever tarry”, warning you that you need to seize the day otherwise you will long for and regret the missed opportunities. Why should we wait for an opportunity that exists in the now? For time will always pass.

The poem “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell reveals his perception on time to be much like Robert Herrick, it is once again to do with seizing the day in which the speaker is trying to convince a mistress to love and enter into a sexual relationship with him. The first two lines of the poem “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime”, outline his main point that lovers do not have world enough or time enough to wait for sex, we need to live life now because time is precious and therefore the Lady’s coyness is in fact a crime. In line seven through twelve, the speaker argues that in an ideal world, his love for the mistress could not be weakened by time: “I would / Love you ten years before the Flood:” and that “My vegetable love should grow / Vaster than empires, and more slow.” The vegetable is a metaphor for his love and just like how with time a vegetable becomes nourished, so does his love. Yet just as how time also makes a vegetable go rotten, time will also take them from their love. In the second stanza, the speaker brings us back from this ideal world of his and states “But, at my back, I always hear / Time’s winged chariot hurrying near”, the speaker chooses a strong diction choice of “But” as a way to shift the poem back to actuality. He is warning the mistress and focusing her on the fact that in reality time is of the essence and “Time’s winged chariot” is who is driving their lives and with each day it is coming nearer. He then states that “Thy beauty shall no more be found; / Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound / My echoing song. The worms shall try / That long preserved virginity:” From these lines Marvell is frightening the mistress by saying that soon her beauty will be gone and she will be in your grave alone, only with the worms by her decaying body and her virginity that she never lost. She must make the decision to either experience sex for the first time or to never experience it because the Winged Chariot could arrive in 50 years or it could easily take her life today. Marvell continues with his more direct tone and language in the third and final stanza. He writes this act of submission to be very active: “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.” This act of rolling up into a ball and becoming one is Marvell’s actual description of sex. He claims to believe or is trying to make the mistress believe that sex is the way to another world and a way to break out of the prison of time. This act of submission would accomplish the speaker’s goal to connect in a sexual relationship with the mistress, as well as accomplishing an act, which in involved strength, sweetness, and strife, which are all things that would have taken a lifetime to experience. Andrew Marvell closes the poem with one final mark of persuasion: “Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run.” The significance of this line is for him to clarify to his mistress that time will not stop for them even though they are “in love”, so it is their choice to choose to live life passionately and without fear. The poem is a classic perception on time being about Carpe Diem and how we never know when our time will be over so we must experience all we can experience each and every day so instead of being controlled by time, we control our own time.

Although “Sonnet 18” is the only literary work out of the three, which includes “To the Virgins” and “To His Coy Mistress” that clearly states that the writer is trying to leave a legacy through art, the other two have unpredictably created an artistic legacy as well. Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell, who are the writers of “To the Virgins” and “To His Coy Mistress”, both spoke about “Carpe Diem” and focused on the theme of taking advantage of one’s youth and not concentrating on the future or trying to leave a legacy. William Shakespeare boasted about how his work will be read and recited, but Herrick and Marvell’s poems have become their legacy as we still are reading and writing about them today. The irony of this situation is that remarkably the factor that contradicts these two writers themes has become the fate of their work. In the words of William Shakespeare “So as long as men can breathe, and eyes can see”, each of these writers literary works will continue to be a legacy for hundreds of years to come.

“If you know when you have enough, you are wealthy,
If you carry your intentions to completion, you are resolute,
If you live a long and creative life, you will leave an eternal legacy.”
- Lao Tzu