User:FloatingLarGibbon/The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd

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The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd (1600), is a poem by Walter Raleigh that responds to and parodies the poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599), by Christopher Marlowe. The nymph's reply to the shepherd's invitation is a point-by-point rejection of the shepherd's courtship for a life of pastoral idyll.

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Stylistically, the poems by Marlowe and Raleigh are pastoral poetry written in six quatrains that employ a clerihew rhyme-scheme of AABB. They also both follow the unstressed and stressed pattern of iambic tetrameter with two rhyme couplets per stanza. Four iambs are contained in each line respectively. Raleigh uses multiple different figures of speech when writing his poem, including, but not limited to metaphor, and simile.

The poem was written in the first-person perspective of the nymph, as it is her reply. Historically, nymphs were used in Greek mythology to represent nature. This ties into the fact that the poem focusses on how temporary and changing nature is, inevitably forming her argument. She explains to the shepherd how everything ends, and nothing can last forever. The nymph explains in the first stanza how if the world was perfect and good things lasted forever, she would "live with thy and be thy love". But good things don't last forever, as the second stanza shows. This is shown well through the use of flowers. In the shepherd's poem, he uses flowers to represent youth, while the nymph turns it around to represent how everything dies.

Raleigh wrote the poem during the Elizabethan era between 1558 - 1603. The poem itself was not the only reply the "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love", as many other poets followed in Raleigh's footsteps. Some of the replies were hundreds of years later.

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