"Come live with me and be my love." This is a famous line from Christopher Marlow's poem "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love". Marlow's poem is thought to be one of the greatest pastoral poems ever written, and has resulted in many responses. None of these responses is as famous as Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepard". The two poems concern a shepherd trying to woo his love to come live with him and experience the joys of pastoral living, and the other, a nymph- which is more realistic in her terms. The two speaker's attitudes on love are two radically different things.
The first poem is Marlow's "The Passionate Shepard to His Love". In this poem, the shepherd is clearly a romantic when is comes to love. The speaker talks only of the joys of pastoral life, but none of the hardships that are associated with shepherd's work. Throughout the poem, the Shepard is actually kind of shallow. In lines 3-5 he says "And we will all the pleasures prove/That valleys, groves, hills, and fields/woods or steepy mountain yields." He thinks that his love will be wooed only by the beautiful surrounding as beautiful gifts. The entire poem follows this pattern, speaking of "a thousand fragrant posies" to "coral clasps and amber studs".
The response poem is "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepard" by Sir Walter Raleigh. In this poem, the nymph pretty much shoots down all of the shepherds advances with reasoning and logic, but makes her own radical term at the end of the poem. The first stanza is a good example of here attitude toward the shepherds words. "If all the world and love were young,/And truth in every shepherd's tongue,/These pretty pleasures might me move,/to live with thee and be thy .
love." The nymph is saying that if all things were immortal (like flowers and jewelry), and the shepherd isn't lying, then, maybe she might live with him and be his love.
The two pastoral poems, when read together, from a more complete picture of love and what it really means.
