Essay Comparing The Passionate Shepherd And The Nymph's Reply

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Comparing & Contrasting “The Passionate Shepherd” and “The Nymph’s Reply”

The two poems, “The Passionate Shepherd” and “The Nymph’s reply”, are alike, and different in their own way. Both of these poems use a unique style of writing by having six stanzas with four lines each. Although each poem throws in different types of viewpoints regarding love, nature and time, the passionate shepherd is writing too what he thinks is the love of his life while the nymph is replying to the shepherd trying to tell him his love is not love, it is just lust. The Shepherd is writing to the nymph trying to tell her he loves her by saying “Come live with me, and be my love.” This line is repeated multiple times throughout the poem. The shepherd believes that love is a great feeling, but what he doesn’t know is that his love is just lust. In this poem, the Shepherd is very optimistic about love. On the other side of things, the Nymph’s reply to the …show more content…

She believes everything dies eventually and emotions change. She hints at this throughout her whole entire reply. While the Shepherd tends to believe that time seems to stand still, the Shepherd thinks everything lasts forever. The Nymph’s viewpoint on time is much different and more realistic than the Shepherd. The Nymph says if time and seasons change, then the seasons change and not everything the Shepherd said will be true. When they change, the objects that the Shepherd brought about will no longer have any meaning to the Nymph. All in all “The Shepherd” and “The Nymph” have very different viewpoints on many things such as love, materialistic items, time, and even nature. The Shepherd and The Nymph don’t have many similarities, they are quite different. If I had to compare the two only using one word for each, I would say the Shepherd is optimistic, while the Nymph is pessimistic. The Shepherd and the Nymph both have different viewpoints on love, materialistic items, nature, and