The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Christopher Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love is, on the surface, a romantic poem told from the perspective of a shepherd calling out to a nymph who he hopes will be enticed to living with him. He sets forth an image of crystilline tranquilty, a paradise frozen in amber where the two will be happy for the rest of the foreseeable future.
The poem’s first lines read “Come live with me and be my love/ and we will all the pleasures prove” (Marlowe lines 1-2). Already there are promises being given to the as of yet unnamed love, only alluded to in the poem’s title. The speaker is already using a rather seductive tone to allure his love, and even though it is unclear as to what kind of life he may lead, he assuredly has much to promise and will bestow lavish gifts to his intended audience. It is then hinted, “That valleys, groves, hills and fields,/Woods or steepy mountain yields.” (Marlowe 3-4) that perhaps we are not involved with a speaker who resides in an urban setting or certainly not a scholar. There is slant rhyme capping the first two lines of this quatrain, an element and tool utilized much more frequently in poetry of the era than today. There is already an established tone of assurance and a gentle introduction on the behalf of Mr. Marlowe.
The second stanza is much more detailed in its intent. The second stanza, beginning with a couplet of “There we will sit upon the rocks,/And see the shepherds feed their flocks,/By shallow rivers to whose falls/Melodious birds sing madrigals” (Marlowe lines 5-8) provides both a lovely image of a couple watching and an understated explaination owing to why the speaker is involving nature...
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...Come live with me and be my love.” (Marlowe lines 19-20) It’s interesting to note how quickly Marlowe moves from jewelry and repeats his invitation with absolutely no promise of emotional connection or longevity.
The next stanza begins with another example of alliteration “The shepherds’ swains shall dance and sing/For thy delight each May morning:” (Marlowe lines 21-22). Almost as if a last effort to entice the nymph with the promise of lavish treatment and personal delight, the shepherd promises that not only his but all the shepherds’ assistants will personally sing to the nymph each morning, though perhaps this is only my interpretation after reading the response. The final couplet “If these delights thy mind may move,/Then live with me and be my love.” (Marlowe lines 23-24) repeats the opening couplet and solidifies the shepherd’s invitation.
Bryant explicitly shows the reader his love for nature through the poem. Lines 15-22 demonstrate this love: “The thick roof of green and stirring branches is alive and musical with birds, that sing and sport in
The Nymphs Reply to the Shepard is set out in six stanzas. each composed of four lines of similar length. This is a mimic of the layout used by Marlowe, here this gives prominence to the similarity. of the two poems,. Added to this both poems have a similar rhyme scheme.
The speaker has a depressed and refuted soul, which explains the tone of the sonnet and gives the overall mood of the passage. “This man 's art and that man’s scope” (Sonnet 29, line 6) which he enjoys “…contented least…” (Sonnet 29,line 7), however these thoughts he despises, because they appear to be out of his reach. The speaking is comparing himself to a bird singing at the gates of heaven escaping the dreadful earth in line eleven. However still presenting contrast with the ending couplet “For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings, that then I scorn to change my state with kings.” where the audience is introduced to what motivates the speaker to be positive. His sweet love as described is spoken highly of, while negating all of the unhappy ideas represented in the previous quatrains. Contrast is vivid through Sonnet 29, because of the last two couplets that concludes the author’s feelings and explains what encourages
The Shepherd in Marlowe's poem used disguised sexual images in hope that the Nymph would be attracted to him. The Shepherd first offered the Nymph "...valleys, groves, hills, and fields, / woods, or steepy mountain yields" ( ). He hopes that the Nymph would interpret the images as places he would like to take her, but in actuality the Shepherd was describing to the Nymph the various parts and curves of her body which he would like to explore. The Nymph replies to his offer by stating "The flowers do fade, and wanton fields, / to wayward winter reckoning yields " ( ). Which means that things change and though the Shepherd has a sexually unrestrained body, that through time he will become headstrong and unwilling to continue the sexual pleasures.
There is a lot of sensual imagery in this poem. Mainly we hear and see
The image developed in the first stanza is especially striking, with its suggestion of once tame and friendly animals who have reverted to wildness and will no longer risk the seemingly innocent taking of bread from the speaker's hand. This stanza establishes at once the theme of change, a change from a special, privileged condition to one of apparent mistrust or fear, and the sense of strangeness (no explanation is given for the change) that will continue to trouble the speaker in the third stanza. Strangeness is inherent in the image itself -- "with naked foot stalking in my chamber" - -- and the stanza is filled with pairs of words that reinforce the idea of contrast: "flee"/"seek," "tame"/"wild," "sometime"/"now," "take break"/"range." Most interestingly, we are never told who "they" are.
Like one’s childhood, the poem begins with pure joy. Shakespeare begins the poem with “Full many a glorious morning have I seen / Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye.”(1-2) On a surface reading, the poet is saying how wonderful the day is. This can be extended to a early life, too. When a child is young, he holds everything in awe. Every sight is a first, from a cooing mother to a glorious mountain. In most cases, nothing spoils the pure bliss of the awareness.
The Passionate Shepherd to his Love and The Nymphs Reply to the Shepherd are both four line stanzas. They are both pastorals as well which means that the are replies to each other. The Nymph is replying to the Shepherd saying that he really doesn’t love her saying his love is fake.
At the start, the first stanza of the poem is full of flattery. This is the appeal to pathos. The speaker is using the mistress's emotions and vanity to gain her attention. By complimenting her on her beauty and the kind of love she deserves, he's getting her attention. In this first stanza, the speaker claims to agree with the mistress - he says he knows waiting for love provides the best relationships. It feels quasi-Rogerian, as the man is giving credit to the woman's claim, he's trying to see her point of view, he's seemingly compliant. He appears to know what she wants and how she should be loved. This is the appeal to ethos. The speaker seems to understand how relationships work, how much time they can take, and the effort that should be put forth. The woman, if only reading stanza one, would think her and the speaker are in total agreement.
Although Raleigh’s title does not describe the nymph, her reply is an exercise in freedom to think for herself and express her own values. Marlowe 's poem offers no evidence that his “love” is a nymph; however, Raleigh makes the speaker a nymph who playfully mocks the shepherd’s request. Raleigh clarifies this intention by using six stanzas of four lines and the same iambic tetrameter used by Marlowe. The nymph 's choice to mirror the shepherd 's structure indicates that her “reply” is a systematic deconstruction of his argument. Mockingly, she concedes, “if all the world and love were young and truth in every shepherd’s tongue,” then she would “live with thee and be thy love”; in other words, the nymph playfully suggests that these propositions are not true. By using the same rhythm and turning the shepherd 's requests back upon themselves, the nymph echoes the shepherd 's
In relation to structure and style, the poem contains six stanzas of varying lengths. The first, second, and fourth stanzas
In the second stanza, we are presented with golden wedding bells. This stanza has a total of twenty-one lines. These two things together seem to symbolize that the golden period in ones life happens in their twenties. The third line in this stanza, " What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!" tells of a marriage between two people. The new couple will be joined together in harmony, creating a world of happiness. Reference to a turtle-dove in this stanza symbolizes peace in this period of life. Compared to the first stanza, which used words such as "twinkle" and "tinkle", the second stanza gives off a more mature feel with words like "rapture" and "impel." The third stanza also refers to the future, as people at this age start thinking seriously about their future. In the first two stanzas, the bells are of desired metals, and the reader interprets them as positive sounds
The first thing that strikes me about this poem is the structure. The poem is very ordered written with 4 lines a stanza and a total of 6 stanza’s. This looks like a professional poem created by an adult, showing experience right away. The syllables are normally 7 per line but there are exceptions to this rule as all of stanza 5 has 8 syllables a line. The first stanza and the last stanza are nearly the same apart from the last line of each differing by a word. This poem uses many poetic devices well to create a vivid picture in the readers mind. There are rhyming couplets, alliteration, repetition, rhetorical questions as well as many biblical and egotistical references to the artist and poet himself. Now we will look at the poems meanings.
Stanza three explains what life was like at the farm he lived on, as the previous stanzas have. Line twenty describes the landscape and how beautiful it is. It describes it as Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air,” (20). Lines twenty one through twenty three use more imagery to describe the landscape. They use words such as “lovely and watery” (21) to show how pleasant it was to gaze upon the land. The word “And” is also repeated in the beginning of each of these lines which creates suspense. They also show repetition by repeating words such as “green” and it brings up the starry night again. Line twenty four talks about owls and how they are starting to come out. The day is starting to end and there is still beauty in everything. Now night has begun and all the things that made the day happy and carefree are starting to disappear. Lines twenty five through twenty seven use imagery to show that the moon is appearing and the horses and everything else is disappearing into the night. This begins to show that the youth the speaker is experiencing is starting to
In the first stanza, the poet seems to be offering a conventional romanticized view of Nature: