19 pages • 38 minutes read
Christopher MarloweThe Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1599A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” by Sir Walter Raleigh (1660)
Sir Walter Raleigh’s playful reply to “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” also parodies Marlowe’s poem. In a line-for-line refutation of Marlow’s poem, the nymph rejects the shepherd’s affections and his courtship offer. As in Marlowe’s poem, Raleigh follows similar meter and rhyme, relying on six quatrains and using an AABB rhyme scheme, and it is also written in the pastoral style.
“Raleigh Was Right” by William Carlos Williams (1940)
Published in May 1940, William Carlos William composed “Raleigh Was Right” in response to the exchange that happens between “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” Williams’s poem does not utilize the six stanza, quatrain form. It utilizes repetition, assonance, and alliteration to create voice and tone. The poem also uses enjambment. Like the speaker in “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” the speaker in “Raleigh was Right” asserts that the idyllic reality the shepherd proposes is unattainable and not realistic.
“When You Are Old” by William Butler Yeats (1893)
Published in 1893 as part of Yeats’s collection The Rose, “When You Are Old” thematically resembles “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” In “When You Are Old,” the speaker displays unrequited love and encourages their beloved to remember the past and ponder what could have been had the beloved accepted the speaker’s affections. The poem is structurally similar to “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” It is composed of quatrains and relies on rhyme schemes and repetition to create the poem’s tone.
Further Literary Resources
“‘The Passionate Shepherd;’ And English Poetry” by R.S. Forsythe (2020)
In this article, scholar R.S. Forsythe examines the source of Marlowe’s poem. Forsythe then traces the poem’s direct influence through English literature. The article highlights how the poem has been frequently imitated and established the “‘initiation of love’” as a literary device in English literature. Forsythe dissects the syllabics of Marlowe’s writing, discussing the poem’s performance elements. Forsythe critiques how before Marlowe, “initiations of love” exist in English literature, but were not frequent and did not become prominently used until after the posthumous publication of Marlowe’s poem.
“Deification Through Love: Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’” by Louis H. Leiter (1966)
In this article, University of the Pacific in Stockton professor Dr. Louis H. Leiter explores the “manipulation of myth” in Marlowe’s well-known poem. Leiter argues that Marlowe understood that his readers would delight in discovering “mythological shards” in his work. Leiter asserts that “fragmented mythology” contributes to the poem’s density despite its seemingly simplistic subject matter and form. Leiter dissects the poem stanza by stanza and then analyzes the poem line by line. Leiter also highlights the significance of the shepherd’s reliance on the first-person (“I”) in the poem.
“‘Come Live With Me and Be My Love’” by Frederick W. Sternfeld and Mary Joiner Chan (1970)
In this co-authored article published in Comparative Literature, the authors explore the lyricism of Marlowe’s poem. The article strives to establish a musical setting for the poem, highlighting other contemporary references to the poem outside of music and in other pieces of literature. The authors focus on Donne’s “The Bait” as well as other poems written by Raleigh. The article asserts that both Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” were published as ballads. The authors provide an analysis of musical compositions of the poem.
Listen to Poem
English actor Sir Ian McKellen, renowned for his Shakespearean theater performances, as well as his role as Gandalf in the Lord or the Rings series, and Magneto in the X-Men film series, recites Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.”
Related Titles
By Christopher Marlowe
