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    The Passionate Shepherd To His Love

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    Kristell C. Lagarde
    The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe invites his beloved nymph to live with him and experience the pleasures of nature, promising beds of roses and fine clothing. The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Raleigh argues that the shepherd's promises are fleeting. She notes that flowers fade with the seasons and that time continues its march, making the shepherd's offers empty. While the shepherd envisions an Edenic life of free love, the nymph understands they live in a fallen world where pleasure is transient and consequences must be considered.

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    The Passionate Shepherd To His Love

    Uploaded by

    Kristell C. Lagarde
    408 views3 pages
    The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe invites his beloved nymph to live with him and experience the pleasures of nature, promising beds of roses and fine clothing. The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Raleigh argues that the shepherd's promises are fleeting. She notes that flowers fade with the seasons and that time continues its march, making the shepherd's offers empty. While the shepherd envisions an Edenic life of free love, the nymph understands they live in a fallen world where pleasure is transient and consequences must be considered.

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    The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

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    The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe invites his beloved nymph to live with him and experience the pleasures of nature, promising beds of roses and fine clothing. The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Raleigh argues that the shepherd's promises are fleeting. She notes that flowers fade with the seasons and that time continues its march, making the shepherd's offers empty. While the shepherd envisions an Edenic life of free love, the nymph understands they live in a fallen world where pleasure is transient and consequences must be considered.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    408 views3 pages

    The Passionate Shepherd To His Love

    Uploaded by

    Kristell C. Lagarde
    The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe invites his beloved nymph to live with him and experience the pleasures of nature, promising beds of roses and fine clothing. The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd by Sir Walter Raleigh argues that the shepherd's promises are fleeting. She notes that flowers fade with the seasons and that time continues its march, making the shepherd's offers empty. While the shepherd envisions an Edenic life of free love, the nymph understands they live in a fallen world where pleasure is transient and consequences must be considered.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
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    The Passionate Shepherd to His Love The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd

    by Christopher Marlowe by Sir Walter Raleigh


    1599 1600

    Come live with me and be my love, If all the world and love were young,
    And we will all the pleasures prove And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
    That valleys, groves, hills, and fields These pretty pleasures might me move
    Woods or steepy mountain yields To live with thee and be thy love.

    And we will sit upon the rocks, Time drives the flocks from field to fold,
    Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks When rivers rage and rocks grow cold;
    By shallow rivers to whose falls And Philomel becometh dumb;
    Melodious birds sing madrigals. The rest complain of cares to come.

    And I will make thee beds of roses The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
    And a thousand fragrant posies, To wayward winter reckoning yields;
    A cap of flower, and a kirtle A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
    Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle; Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.

    A gown made of the finest wool Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy bed of roses,
    Which from our pretty lambs we pull; Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies,
    Fair lined slippers for the cold Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten,
    With buckles of the purest gold; In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

    A belt of straw and ivy buds, Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
    With coral clasps and amber studs; Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
    And if these pleasures may thee move, All these in me no means can move
    Come live with me and be my love. To come to thee and be thy love.

    The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing But could youth last and love still breed,
    For thy delight each May morning: Had joys no date nor age no need,
    If these delights thy mind may move, Then these delights my mind might move
    Then live with me and be my love. To live with thee and be thy love.

    Notes for "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love."


    Pastoral lyric: Poetry that expresses emotions in an idyllic setting. It is related to the
    term "pasture," and is associated with shepherds writing music to their flocks. The
    tradition goes back to David in the Bible and Hesiod the Greek poet.

    The themes of the poem - carpe diem and the immediate gratification of their
    sexual passions.
    Love in the May countryside will be like a return to the Garden of Eden. There
    is a tradition that our problems are caused by having too many restrictions, by
    society. If we could get away from these rules, we could return to a prisitine
    condition of happiness. The "free love" movement of the 1960's was a recent
    manifestation of this utopian belief. If the nymph would go a-maying with the
    shepherd, they would have a perfect life.

    In quatrains (4 line stanzas) of iambic tetrameter (8 syllables per line, 4


    measures per line with 2 syllables in each measure), the shepherd invites his
    beloved to experience the joys of nature.

    He hopes to return with the nymph to a Edenic life of free love in nature.

    Notes for "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd."


    Raleigh argues that it is not society that taints sexual love. We are already
    tainted before we enter society. Releigh combines carpe diem with tempus
    fugit in an unusual way. Normally we should sieze the day because time
    flies. Raleigh argues that because time flies, we should NOT sieze the
    day. There will be consequences to their roll in the grass. Time does not
    stand still; winter inevitably follows the spring; therefore, we cannot act on
    impulses until we have examined the consequences.

    The world is NOT young--we are not in Eden, but in this old fallen world - a
    world in which shepherds have actually been known to lie to their nymphs.

    This poem by Sir Walter Raleigh uses the same meter and references to
    present "mirror images" of Marlowe's poem. The feminine persona (the
    nymph) of the poem sets up a hypothetical set of questions that undermine
    the intelligence of the man's offer because all that he offers is transitory. She
    reverses his images into negative ones:

     rocks grow cold


     fields yield to the harvest
     the flocks are driven to fold in winter
     rivers rage
     birds complain of winter (a reference to the story of Philomela who was
    raped and turned into a nightingale).

    We live in a fallen world. Free love in the grass in impossible now because
    the world is not in some eternal spring. The seasons pass, as does
    time. Nymphs grow old, and shepherds grow cold.

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