Marlowe Vs. Raleigh

“The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”

Although everyone has a slightly different outlook when it comes to love, Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh have done a great job portraying the two extremes in their poems “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” and “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”.

Christopher Marlowe was a sixteenth century British poet and playwright. Many attribute his passionate and impulsive style of writing to his experiences with espionage while working for Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council. It is even believed that his death, by stabbing, in 1593 was a political assassination. Marlowe lived at the same time as Shakespeare, and some believe that Marlowe wrote many of the plays that were later attributed to Shakespeare (Henry L.Carrigan Jr. 2)

In his poem, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” Marlowe exhibits his impulsiveness and his passion. According to Algernon Charles Swinburne, the “Passionate Shepherd” is “unrivalled in its way- a way of pure fancy and radiant melody without break or lapse.” (Algernon Charles Swinburne 96) Each line in the poem describes a vibrant and beautiful life that the shepherd p

Carrigan Jr., Henry L. “Christopher Marlowe”. Library Journal, Volume 127, issue 9.

Marlowe, Christopher. “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” Making Literature Matter. Bedford/St. Martins: Boston, New York; 2000.

Marlowe and Raleigh’s works come together to show us how impractical, and perhaps too skeptical we can be about life. The shepherd represents the passions and dreams we have inside ourselves. His actions are what sometimes we wish we had the guts to do, to stick ourselves right out there and risk it all on what we believe we want, and hope to achieve. The Nymph represents our common sense, and our need to have a method to the madness. She is not willing to risk her entire life on something that has no substance.

In answer to Marlowe’s poem, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”, in which the shepherd’s true love explains her denial of his offer. Raleigh decided to take on a completely different view of love. The poem is a pessimistic one, written in the supposed honest outlook that Raleigh had in all parts of his life.

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