The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe

First published: 1599, in The Passionate Pilgrim

Type of poem: Lyric

The Poem

“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is a love poem that contains six quatrains of rhyming couplets in iambic tetrameter. In marked contrast to Christopher Marlowe’s plays about heroes and kings, this lyric poem purports to be the words of a shepherd speaking to his beloved. Its simple, musical language and fanciful imagery create an idyll of innocent love. The version of the poem that was printed in 1599 contained four stanzas attributed to William Shakespeare; the poem was printed again in 1600, in Englands Helicon, with only the six stanzas attributed to Marlowe.

In this poem, the shepherd persona speaks to his beloved, evoking “all the pleasures” of a peaceful springtime nature. He promises her the delights of nature and his courtly attention. The first quatrain is the invitation to “Come live with me and be my love.” Next, the speaker describes the pleasant natural setting in which he plans that they will live. Their life will be one of leisure; they will “sit upon the rocks,” watch the shepherds, and listen to the birds.

The shepherd does not refer to the cold winter, when herding sheep becomes difficult. He does not suggest that his work requires effort or that he may need to go off into the hills away from his beloved to herd his flock. Instead, he imagines their life together as a game enjoyed in an eternal spring. He promises to make clothes and furnishings for his beloved from nature’s abundant harvest: wool gowns from the sheep, beds and caps of flowers, dresses embroidered with leaves. Even the other shepherds seem to be there only to entertain the beloved, to “dance and sing/ for thy delight.” The poem ends by summing up the “delights” of the pastoral idyll and repeating the opening invitation.

Forms and Devices

Marlowe was a university-educated dramatist who might have rivaled William Shakespeare had he lived longer. His plays probed the tangled passions of heroism, ambition, and power. He led an active theatrical life and frequented taverns: Indeed, he met his death at the age of twenty-nine in a tavern brawl. Yet he chose to write this poem in a shepherd’s voice, using a pastoral convention that was frequently employed by Elizabethan poets. The pastoral tradition of courtly love poetry idealized the beloved and ennobled the lovers, using idyllic country settings and featuring shepherds as models of natural, unspoiled virtue.

The poem’s images are all drawn from the kind springtime nature of the pastoral tradition and from music. This imagery creates a gentle fantasy of eternal spring. The poem appeals to almost all the senses—sight, sound, smell, and touch—as the speaker tells his love that they will watch “shepherds feed their flocks” and listen to birds singing madrigals (polyphonic melodies). He promises to make beds of roses, and clothing of flowers and wool for his beloved. Images of “shallow rivers,” “melodious birds,” “roses,” “pretty lambs,” and “ivy buds” evoke a nature that is pure, simple, blooming, and kind to innocent creatures.

To complement the pastoral imagery, the poem blends alliteration, rhythm, rhyme, and other sound patterns to create a songlike lyric. The labial l sound is repeated in words such as “live,” “love,” “all,” “hills,” “shallow,” “flocks,” “falls,” and “myrtle.” The sibilant s recurs in “Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,” in “shallow rivers,” “roses,” “sing,” and “swains.” The m sound appears in “mountain,” “melodious,” “madrigals,” “myrtle,” “lambs,” and “amber.” This combination of sounds creates a soft, harmonious, gentle tone.

The poem is written in regular four-line stanzas with rhyming couplets. Most of the rhyming words are words of one syllable, and most of the lines are end-stopped, thus emphasizing the rhyming words and the rhythm of the poem. The rhymes include such appealing words as “love” (repeated three times), “roses,” “flocks,” “fields,” “sing,” and “morning.” There are frequent internal rhymes and partial rhymes in words such as lambs/amber, may/swains, seeing/feed, and finest/lined. The meter is iambic tetrameter with little variation. All these factors—short, regular lines, repeated simple rhymes, frequent internal rhymes and partial rhymes, and alliterative patterns—turn the poem into a song, with a melodious appeal that echoes the music of nature that it describes; the poem has been set to music by several different composers.