Douglas Murray, in his weekly poetry column at The Free Press, pays tribute to the most famous poem of Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress." (I was told long ago that his name is pronounced "marVELL," rhyming with "bell.")

I should say "deservedly famous." The poem is a standard anthology piece, and until yesterday I don't think I had read the whole thing since I was in college. But it occupies more space in my mind than that would suggest, partly because it occupies more space in literary culture. Eliot alluded to it in "The Waste Land":

But at my back from time to time I hear
The sound of horns and motors....

I can think of several other references, including a well-known poem by Archibald MacLeish, "You, Andrew Marvell."

And partly, in recent years, because I'm haunted by the couplet which Eliot is echoing:

But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near....

As a friend of mine who's around my age said not long ago "Time's wingèd chariot is idling in my driveway."

It seems to be a well-known fact of psychology if not of physics that the velocity of time's passage increases in inverse proportion to its remaining quantity. Almost as big a mystery is this question: Knowing that time is passing more swiftly, and that I don't have all that much of it left, why--why why why?--do I continue to waste as much of it as I do?