What Is The Mood Of The Passionate Christopherd To His Love

Christopher Marlowe wrote a poem called “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” about his speaker, a shepherd, asking a woman to come live in nature with him and be his love. A few years later, Sir Walter Raleigh came out with a poem that was a response to Marlowe’s, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” that contradicted the original with it’s diction. Both poems touch upon the topics of love and nature but in entirely different ways. Marlowe’s poem is about the positivity nature can bring and about the possibility of being in love in nature. Raleigh’s is about nature and love both falling to the passage of time. The poems together give the reader a look into promises about love and what time can do to those promises. Marlowe wrote a pastoral

Marlowe chose the meter for his poem carefully, throughout it follows an iambic tetrameter which gives the poem a sing-song quality. This sing-song quality of the poem fits with the context of the words and topic. It’s about love, it’s supposed to be happy. But why would Raleigh, who wrote a poem about love being toppled by time, use the same meter? That’s Raleigh’s genius. There’s two reasons why his poem has the same meter. First is to mock Marlowe’s poem itself. Raleigh’s poem is in reply to Marlowe’s so it’s going to have a tone toward the original whether it’s agreeing or disagreeing. Raleigh’s reply is clearly disagreeing so the tone of his poem shows that through the use of the meter. The second reason is to mock the shepherd. The poem really is mocking the way shepherds try to entice women to be with them. Within the first stanza the nymph gives her view on shepherds, “If all the world and love were young,/ And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,” (Raleigh 1-2). This quote tells us that shepherds are liars and they won’t fulfill all the promises that they’ve given. Raleigh’s use of meter emphasizes that thought. It mocks the way the shepherd doles out his promises in that sing-song