Building Background

Christopher Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh led busy, ambitious lives in the bustle of Queen Elizabeth I’s London. Nonetheless, both men were influenced by the pastoral tradition, which idealized the simple lives of shepherds in a rural setting.

Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love is considered one of the greatest pastoral poems ever written. It was so popular in its day that Shakespeare had a character in his play The Merry Wives of Windsor sing a few lines from it. The poem has also inspired many responses from other poets, from Marlowe’s time to the 20^th century. These include John Donne’s The Bait, Robert Herrick’s To Phyllis, to Love and Live with Him, and Cecil Day-Lewis’s Song. The most famous response to the poem, however, is Sir Walter Raleigh’s The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd, written in 1600.

Pastoral poems are not meant to be realistic. They exaggerate rural pleasures and the innocence of country people living in harmony with nature. Implied in this celebration of “the natural life” is a criticism of the worldly pursuit of fame and fortune to which most aristocratic readers and writers of the time were devoted. By promoting an ideal of humble contentment in nature, pastoral poems reveal the dissatisfaction of urban people who yearn for the lost innocence of a simpler time or place. Contrast the idealization of simplicity in The Passionate Shepherd to His Love with the courtly, civilized world reflected in the poetry you have read earlier in this theme.

Poetic form: pastoral

A pastoralis a poem that presents shepherds in idealized rural settings. Renaissance poets like Marlowe and Raleigh used the pastoral form to express their feelings and thoughts about love and other subjects. Shepherds in pastorals tend to use courtly speech. The poems usually have metrical patterns and rhyme schemes that help give them a musical or songlike quality.

The imagery derives from commonplace country settings, as the following lines suggest:

And we will sit upon the rocks,

Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks.

As you read these poems, look for details of pastoral life and for the use of nature imagery to convey emotions and ideas.

Reading skill: compare speakers

The speakerin a poem is the voice that addresses the reader, much like the narrator in a work of fiction. Poets use the speakers they create to express ideas or tell a story from a specific point of view. The speaker and the poet are not necessarily identical, even when the words I and me are used.

The speakers in the following poems—the shepherd and the nymph—express very different attitudes about the topic of love. To identify the differences, consider

• whom the speaker is addressing

• the speaker’s choice of words

• evidence of the speaker’s attitude toward the poem’s subject

As you read both poems, use a chart like the one shown to make notes on the speakers’ differing attitudes toward love. Look for specific words and phrases that indicate their feelings.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 834