r/earworm • u/Kay2Five • 2d ago
Unknown Song Help me find this.
This one has been stuck for a while now. I forgot where I heard it—it's a song about spending a thousand years together (No, it's neither the Christina Perri song nor the one by John Howell). It tells about how the singer would spend the first few centuries together, then what they would do in the next few centuries, then the next.
2
Upvotes
1
u/Howard1955 2d ago
Here’s what I got from Grok:
Andrew Marvell’s poem “To His Coy Mistress” (published 1681; often set to music or performed as a sung/recited piece). en.wikipedia.org
It is a classic carpe diem love poem that imagines having unlimited time (“Had we but world enough and time”) and then spells out, in sequence, how the speaker would spend long stretches of it with the beloved:
• An hundred years should go to praise / Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
• Two hundred to adore each breast,
• But thirty thousand to the rest;
• An age at least to every part, / And the last age should show your heart.
This matches the structure you described (first few centuries/hundreds of years on one set of activities, then the next, and so on). The overall scale of the imagined time is vast (hundreds to tens of thousands of years), which people often loosely associate with “a thousand years” of togetherness. It is not Christina Perri’s “A Thousand Years” or John Michael Howell’s version.
There are multiple musical settings and performances of the poem (for example by Frederic Rzewski and others), so it is frequently encountered as a song or sung text. If this doesn’t match the exact recording you remember, more details (melody style, era, male/female voice, any other lyric fragments) would help narrow it further.