There are numerous intriguing works of literature from the Renaissance period. Among these works are the pastoral poems “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” by Christopher Marlowe and “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” by Walter Raleigh. The two poems are telling the same story or talking about the same ideas from two different people’s perspectives. A shepherd is talking to his beloved in “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” and his lover responds to him in “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.” The two speakers have two drastically different outlooks and views of their lives. The speaker in “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” by Marlowe speaks from a more idyllic perspective while the speaker in “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” by Raleigh takes on a more realistic perspective, with both being influenced by the era and areas they live in. To begin, the speaker in “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is speaking from an idyllic perspective. The shepherd pronounces, “Come live with me, and be my love,/And we will all the pleasures prove/That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,/Woods, or steepy …show more content…
The nymph asserts, “But could youth last and love still breed,/Had joys no date, nor age no need,/Then these delights my mind might move/To live with thee and be thy love” (Raleigh 21-24). The nymph does not believe that she and the shepherd can have good lives together when living in the country for the rest of their lives. She thinks that if life was different, she would move to be with him, but life does not always go as one might expect it to. She believes that things will actually be different than how her lover thinks that they will be. She thinks that pastoral life could be nice for a little while but that it would eventually get tiring and boring. She takes a realistic perspective of pastoral life, seeing how it would be a hard and unhappy life to