<P> Also in the field of science fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a Hugo - nominated short story whose title, "Vaster than Empires and More Slow", is taken from the poem . Ian Watson notes the debt of this story to Marvell, "whose complex and allusive poems are of a later form of pastoral to that which I shall refer, and, like Marvell, Le Guin's nature references are, as I want to argue, "pastoral" in a much more fundamental and interesting way than this simplistic use of the term ." There are other allusions to the poem in the field of Fantasy and Science Fiction: the first book of James Kahn's "New World Series" is titled "World Enough, and Time"; the third book of Joe Haldeman's "Worlds" trilogy is titled "Worlds Enough and Time"; and Peter S. Beagle's novel A Fine and Private Place about a love affair between two ghosts in a graveyard . The latter phrase has been widely used as a euphemism for the grave, and has formed the title of several mystery novels . </P> <P> Brian Aldiss's novel Hothouse, set in a distant future in which the earth is dominated by plant life, opens with "My vegetable love should grow / vaster than empires, and more slow ." </P> <P> The phrase "there will be time" occurs repeatedly in a section of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), and is often said to be an allusion to Marvell's poem . Prufrock says that there will be time "for the yellow smoke that slides along the street", time "to murder and create", and time "for a hundred indecisions...Before the taking of a toast and tea". As Eliot's hero is, in fact, putting off romance and consummation, he is (falsely) answering Marvell's speaker . Eliot also alludes to the lines near the end of Marvell's poem, "Let us roll all our strength and all / Our sweetness up into one ball", with his lines, "To have squeezed the universe into a ball / To roll it toward some overwhelming question," as Prufrock questions whether or not such an act of daring would have been worth it . Eliot returns to Marvell in The Waste Land with the lines "But at my back in a cold blast I hear / The rattle of the bones" (Part III, line 185) and "But at my back from time to time I hear / The sound of horns and motors" (Part III, line 196). </P> <P> The line "deserts of vast eternity" is used in the novel Orlando: A Biography, by Virginia Woolf, which was published in 1928 . </P>

Meaning of the title to his coy mistress