The Passionate Shepherd to His Love / Christopher Marlowe

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"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" is a poem written by the English poet Christopher Marlowe and published in 1599 (six years after the poet's death). In addition to being one of the most well-known love poems in the English language, it is considered one of the earliest examples of the pastoral style of British poetry in the late Renaissance period. It is composed in iambic tetrameter (four feet of unstressed/stressed syllables), with seven (sometimes six, depending on the version) stanzas each composed of two rhyming couplets. It is often used for scholastic purposes because the poem is a good example of regular meter and rhythm.

The poem
Come live with me and be my Love, And we will all the pleasures prove That hills and valleys, dale and field, And all the craggy mountains yield. There will we sit upon the rocks         5 And see the shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. There will I make thee beds of roses And a thousand fragrant posies,        10 A cap of flowers, and a kirtle Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle. A gown made of the finest wool Which from our pretty lambs we pull, Fair linÃ¨d slippers for the cold,         15 With buckles of the purest gold. A belt of straw and ivy buds With coral clasps and amber studs: And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me and be my Love. 20 Thy silver dishes for thy meat As precious as the gods do eat, Shall on an ivory table be Prepared each day for thee and me. The shepherd swains shall dance and sing         25 For thy delight each May-morning: If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me and be my Love. – Christopher Marlowe
 * The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

History
The poem was the subject of a well-known "reply" by Sir Walter Raleigh, called The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd. The interplay between the two poems extends into the relationship that Marlowe had with Raleigh. Marlowe was young, his poetry romantic, rhythmic, and in the Passionate Shepherd he idealises the love object (the Nymph). Raleigh was an old courtier, and an accomplished poet himself. His attitude is more jaded, and in writing the Nymph's reply it is clear that he is rebuking Marlowe for being naive and juvenile in both his writing style and the Shepherd's thoughts about love. Subsequent responses to Marlowe have come from John Donne, C. Day Lewis, William Carlos Williams, Ogden Nash, W. D. Snodgrass, Douglas Crase and Greg Delanty, and Robert Herrick.

Marlowe's poem was adapted for the lyrics of the 1930s-style swing song performed by Stacey Kent at the celebratory ball in the 1995 film of William Shakespeare's Richard III. It was also the third of the Liebeslieder Polkas for Mixed Chorus and Piano Five Hands, written by P.D.Q. Bach (released in 1980) and performed by the Swarthmore College Chorus.