Like countless others I began the serious study of English literature by reading certain well-known poems closely, among them Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress.”  This seventeenth-century masterpiece had particular appeal for the neophyte exegete: it was about sex, though in a decorous and time-distanced way, and it belonged to a genre having a Latin name just right for casual dropping in the college dining-hall (“What did you do in English class today?”  “Oh, one or two carpe diem things”).  “To His Coy Mistress” was also easy to understand, in fact an argument set out in logical stages.  If we had world enough and time, then no need to rush into love . . . but we don’t, because Time’s winged chariot is moving right along . . . and therefore, lady, you and I had better seize the day (which is what carpe diem means) and get right to it.  

A perfectly clear poem, then—until lines 33 – 34:

Now therefore, while the youthful hew
Sits on thy skin like morning glew . . .

This is the reading of Marvell’s Miscellaneous Poems, published in 1681.  Editors almost always emend the couplet to

Now therefore, while the youthful hew
Sits on thy skin like morning dew . . .

Replacing “glew” with “dew” works well poetically.  What could be more evanescent than morning dew?  Like the youthful hue on the lady’s cheek, it is subject to Time’s inexorable power.  Dew, a becoming blush, love-making—all there to be enjoyed, but for such a short while . . .

“Glew” is however what the published text plainly says, and at least one editor of Marvell—Elizabeth Story Donno, in the Penguin Complete Poems—preserves the word, simultaneously re-arranging the lines in a way that has some support in manuscripts of the poem:

Now, therefore, while the youthful glue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew . . .

She thinks “glew” means “glue” in the modern sense.  Maybe, but to me the resulting image seems ludicrous, the lady’s skin adorned with the seventeenth-century equivalent of Elmer’s.  Luckily, other commentators have suggested alternative meanings for “glew.”  The word might be a variant form of “glow,” or even of “glee,” that is, happiness, merriment; the OED records the “glew” spelling for both words.  “Sits on thy skin like youthful glow,” “Sits on thy skin like youthful happiness”: both possible interpretations, I think.

For more than three hundred years scholars and ordinary readers have puzzled over the word “glew” in “To His Coy Mistress.”  Is this a waste of time, particularly in the case of a poem that is generally clear whatever “glew” means and that, moreover, is about the importance of not wasting time?  I’d argue the opposite, that the efforts we make to understand a work as finely wrought as Marvell’s are not finally wasteful, however long they take, however short our own lifetimes are.  To quote a Latin tag that (unlike carpe diem) seems to grow more and more meaningful as one ages, ars longa, vita brevis.