Part one of term paper
The consensus was that the poem's speaker is attempting to persuade "His Coy Mistress" to have sex with him. The speaker seems frustrated, impatient, and to feel a sense of urgency in pursuing this goal. Some students argued that the speaker's words are mostly empty rhetoric--that he doesn't necessarily believe in the truth of what he is sa ...

Part two of term paper
... more graphic and less genteel as the poem progresses, as he appears to become increasingly desperate. The references to spirituality in the first section seem to disappear in the second section's focus on lust (the loss of it in death) and the third section's focus on intercourse. The third section does contain the "philosophical" proposal that, as lovers, the couple will turn the tables on time, but it's not clear if this idea is, again, empty rhetoric. A variation on this interpretation is t ...