It was Valentines Day yesterday, and I made it. But I thought about love, and I thought about a misdirected e-mail I got last month, one of the vagaries of the double-click age. Actually I thought about it because I had to spend the better part of this snowy day rebuilding my operating system because something awful got into it and it killed my Internet browser and my e-mail access and changed the whole character of an afternoon. I have an option on this particular awful version of MicroSoft’s scourge of mankind operating system to pick another date on which to recreate my system, before the current problem began. So, strangely, I found myself reading e-mail from the middle of last month. The first I read was not intended for me, ended with a veiled analogy that while the chaos of life can be painful at times, it is still preferable to the quiet alternative. I pondered that for awhile, and pondered the nature of cyberspace where all this crap of mine lives.

Then I found myself thinking of the lines from a Restoration poem that provided the title and theme to a wonderful Peter Beagle novel a few years ago. “A Fine and Private Place.”  It was a wonderful story about a cemetery, a couple ghosts, a wise-guy Raven, and some Living that were so far gone they could see the Dead. I couldn’t quite remember the quote, the meter and the lines, but part of it kept running through my mind all day.  I thought they went something like this:

“The grave’s a fine and private place,

but none, do there, I think, embrace.”

It wasn’t quite right. It tortured me until I was at the keyboard again, system restored and all right with the world. Whatever was coming in the next month was unknown. I wish I could do that myself, and I may wish it a lot more someday soon. I’m sure the whole notion of being at the keyboard will seem antique someday. This will all be part of the cyberwind that swirls around us, buried in a chip somewhere, but for today, in this year, I hit the Google site to look up the reference. I thought I would try to find out who wrote it, since that was gone with the wind. So much for my school of Literature, Science and the Arts education. But I found it that afternoon in one query and two double-clicks. Here it is, in full, by Andrew Marvel, who is trying to get his girlfriend to lighten up a little. He did this in 1681. I was pleased to learn that one of my other favorite quotes is here as well, “Had we but World enough, and Time,” and I think I like that context, too, with war bearing down on us and the threat of all manner of awful things abroad in the land. Lighten up, everybody, and listen to the words of a young man now in his grave four hundred years:

To His Coy Mistress

Had we but World enough, and Time,

This coyness, Lady, were no crime.

We would sit down, and think which way

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges side

Should’st rubies find: I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the Flood:

And you should if you please refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires, and more slow.

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze.

Two hundred to adore each breast:

But thirty thousand to the rest.

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart.

For, Lady, you deserve this state;

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear

Time’s wing�d chariot drawing 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.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin by morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may;

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour,

Than languish in his slow-chapt power.

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.

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Now that Dude could write. And that Dude, and his mistress live still, though their dust blows with the exhaust of buses that pass by the quiet churchyard where they lie.

Copyright 1681 Andrew Marvel and 2003 Vic Socotra