Time, Tide, and Tempestuous Flooding: Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’ in an Age of Storms

Abstract Why might Marvell complain ‘by the tide | Of Humber’ in ‘To his Coy Mistress’? This article reads these lines in light of little-known records of flood risk management, housed at East Riding of Yorkshire Archives, Beverley, to uncover a new approach to Marvell’s poem as shaped by the seventeenth-century ‘Age of Storms’. In winter 1646–1647, a series of storms left large swathes of land and multiple settlements east of Hull under water. The floodwaters remained on the ground long into 1647, leading to fines, recriminations, and arrests, as authorities sought to assign responsibility for the flooding. Floods in Marvell’s England were often read as cautionary tales and compared to the cataclysms of Noah’s flood and the coming Apocalypse. These similitudes between past, present, and future floods inform Marvell’s representations of flooding in ‘Upon Appleton House’ (1651) and ‘The Character of Holland’ (1653), and the article reads Marvell’s reference to ‘the flood’ in ‘To his Coy Mistress’ in a similar light, as referring simultaneously to the biblical deluge and the Humber floods of 1646–1647. The article therefore sheds new light on ‘To his Coy Mistress’, as a cultural product of a region that has long been at risk of flooding from North Sea storms.