The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
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In English literature, "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" (1600), by Walter Raleigh, is a poem that responds to and parodies the poem "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" (1599), by Christopher Marlowe. In reply to the shepherd's courtship, the nymph presents a point-by-point rejection of his offer of a transitory life of passion and pastoral idyll.[1]
Stylistically, the poems by Marlowe and Raleigh are pastoral poetry written in six quatrains that employ a rhyme scheme of AABB CCDD EEFF GGHH IIBB JJBB.[2] Compositionally, each poem follows the unstressed and stressed pattern of iambic tetrameter, using two couplets per stanza, with each line containing four iambs.[3] The poem contains a number of rhetorical devices such as metaphors and alliterations.[4]
Historically, in the composition of English poetry, the nymph is a character from Greek mythology who represents Nature and the finite spans of life, youth, and love, which the nymph explains to the shepherd. As a reply poem, "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" is written as a first-person narrative;[3] in the first stanza, the nymph tells the shepherd that if the world were perfect, she would live with him and be his love, but in the second stanza she reminds him that the good things in life, such as a bouquet of flowers, are impermanent.[4] In Marlowe's poem, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love", the flowers proffered by the shepherd represent youth, however, they also connote death, as the nymph notes in Raleigh's poem.[3]
Moreover, as a poem from the Elizabethan era (1558–1603) of the 16th century, "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" was not the only poetical reply to the poem by Kit Marlowe;[3] in the 20th century, the poem Raleigh was Right (1940), by William Carlos Williams, sided with Walter Raleigh against Christopher Marlowe.
The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd (1600)
by Walter Raleigh (1552–1618)
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.
Time drives the flocks from field to fold
When Rivers rage and Rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.
Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten:
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.
Thy belt of straw and Ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.
But could youth last and love still breed,
Had joys no date nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.
Authorship
The poem's attribution to Raleigh rests on two seventeenth-century manuscripts, whereas earlier copies are unattributed. Izaak Walton's inclusion of the poem in his The Compleat Angler (1653) is the earliest dateable reference to it being Raleigh's. With no other author identified in alternative manuscript copies, Victorian academic John Hannah concluded that "I should be sorry to believe that Walton was mistaken".[5]
