Tone of "To His Coy Mistress"

The tone of “To His Coy Mistress” goes through transitions throughout the poem. It begins seemingly romantic, speaking of how his love for his mistress could endure vast expanses of time, "My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires, and more slow". The reader would expect this to be a love poem of a man proclaiming his undying loyalty to a woman. From there the speaker expresses urgency, with morbid descriptions of inevitable death, contradicting the previous statement of time being irrelevant, "Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song; then worms shall try". This transformation leads to suspicion of the speaker's true desires regarding his lover and confusion as to the nature of the poem. It then turns passionate, but absent is the romantic tone the writer began with, "And now, like amorous birds of prey, Rather at once our time devour". "To His Coy Mistress" begins with a tone of romance and tranquility but concludes with almost violent lust.