The Passionate Shepherd To His Love Analysis

Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh were two poets of the sixteenth century who wrote a pair of poems, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” These pieces are a criticism of the time’s pastoral and romantic view of love and nature. For example, Marlowe’s poem is sincere in how the speaker talks of his love for the nymph. It romanticizes rural life and the carefree young love the shepherd offers the nymph. Alternatively, Raleigh’s poem is a satire of Marlowe’s. He takes the sincere words of the shepherd and shapes them into a rebuttal from the nymph. The nymph speaks of how the shepherd’s promises cannot be kept and how his view of love is not realistic. The shepherd and nymph’s differing views on nature and time are linked through their views on love. Raleigh’s poem is a satire of the romanticized view of nature and love through the pastoral genre.
The theme of time links the two other themes, love and nature, together. Time is a repeated contrasting subject between the shepherd and the nymph. While the shepherd is innocent and young, …show more content…
He has the nymph twist the shepherd’s words to show that love is a fragile thing. It can easily be twisted and changed by time, just like the seasons. The differing views of each poem are linked through time, which also links the themes of love and nature. These themes were highly idealized and romanticized in Marlowe and Raleigh’s time. The pastoral genre idealized nature and the idea of the simple and plain life. “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” both take this genre and completely satirize it through mirroring and logical reasoning. The themes of love and time found in Marlowe’s poem are rebuked by Raleigh’s nymph through her experience and her