The Passionate Shepherd To His Love

Roy Chan SID: 94105908 October 22, 2007
The Shepherd Cries For True Love

Are the heart and the mind contradictory from a desire and an illusion? In the poem, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, Christopher Marlowe, a highly acclaimed English poet, evokes the natural world of a shepherds life whose temptation is to fall in love with an object known as the Nymph. The poem, which is composed in iambic tetrameter form, is interesting in that the poet never mentions to the reader whether there are any clear history between the two; whether there are any evidence that the shepherd wanted to be in love with the Nymph; nor whether there are any declaration made of him offering up marriage or love to the Nymph in the near future. This is interesting because Marlowe does indicate to the reader that the shepherd wanted the Nymph to come and seek a love relationship with him; however, the poet never exclaims to the audience whether the womans reply is ever heard, thus making the Nymph presence unknown to the reader at times. Marlowe poem is thought-provoking because it reminded me of a 19th century French writer, politician, and diplomat Francois-Auguste-Rene de Chateaubriand when he once states, As long as the heart preserves desire, the mind preserves illusion. Chateaubriand, who is the founder of romanticism in French literature, implies that our mind would continue to have a false impression in life as long as the heart maintains desire. The shepherd, whose intention is to fall in love with a Greek mythology, has a strong desire to not fall out from his love toward the Nymph because of how his mind preserves illusion. The shepherd never wanted to fall out to the other side of love; so he therefore continues to interact with the Nymph in hopes that she would recognize that his heart and mind toward her is unconditional, and that his desire and illusion with the Nymph would one day intercede together in the near future. Marlowe hence composed
Roy Chan SID: 94105908 October 22, 2007 the poem utilizing a four feet of unstressed and stressed syllables to vividly describe the desire and the illusion in The Passionate Shepherd to His Love to represent a contrast between the heart and the mind, ultimately suggesting that the heart and the mind is correlated to the shepherds failure and intention to interact with the love object known as the Nymph So the question arises: how do the literary form and the content of the poem relate to the shepherds failure and intention to interact with the Nymph? The poem, which is written during the Elizabethan era, uses a pastoral content to explicate the lifestyle of a shepherd who worked very hard in the countryside with other farm workers. An example of a pastoral content is in line 5 when the poet writes And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing shepherds feed their flocks; By shallow rivers to whose falls, Melodious birds sing madrigals. Like this, writing in a pastoral tradition generally meant that the tone of the poem is characterized by the state of comfort and of romantic love as if the shepherd believes that everything would work out very well between him and his love. An example of how the shepherd is very certain that he would fall in love with the Nymph is in line 13 when the narrator writes A gown made of the finest wool, Which from our pretty lambs we pull. Another is in line 19 when the poet writes And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me and be my love. Both of these illustrate how the shepherds life is filled with great awe and that the shepherd is confident that he would one day fall in love with the Nymph. Most pastoral poems during the third century depict the ideal of sexuality and eroticism - that they convey images of humans desire and temptation to fall in love with an object. Hence, the shepherd and the Nymph probably had a desire and an illusion to fall in love with one other, ultimately suggesting that those
Roy Chan SID: 94105908 October 22, 2007 two attributes represent the contrast between the heart and the mind intentions to fall into love together. Aside from the pastoral content, the iambic tetrameter help makes the structure of the poem to contain rhyme schemes throughout the poem. A rhyme scheme can be described as the pattern in which the rhymed line-endings are arranged in a poem or stanza (Baldick, 219). An example of a rhyme scheme is on line 21, when the poet writes The shepherd swains shall dance and sing, For thy delight each May morning. In the sentence, we could see that the rhymed line-endings of sing and morning rhymes together. Other sentence like in line 1 is when the ending had love and prove, and fields and yields. This pattern can be seen throughout the poem as all the stanza consisted of various patterns in rhyme scheme. It is this type of form and content that helps the reader understand more about the theme between the shepherd and the Nymph. One can say that the theme in the poem could be described as taking life as a leisure and relaxation. An example is in line 5 when Marlowe writes And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks. This sentence can be seen as us having unlimited freedom with nature in order for the poet to convey the images of the shepherds desire and illusion to have freewill with the Nymph. Despite the rhyme scheme and pastoral content, the iambic tetrameter used throughout the poem makes the description of love between the shepherd and the Nymph become more relevant to the heart and the mind. The utilization of the rhyme scheme and the pastoral form makes the poem to be interesting in that it does not use the form of enigmatic but rather something to be more obvious and apparent to the reader. Marlowes poem reminds me of French writer Franois de La Rochefoucauld when he believes that
Roy Chan SID: 94105908 October 22, 2007 the actions of men and women are motivated solely by their own advantage and self interest. He believes that Self-love is love of oneself and of all things in terms of oneself; it makes worshippers of themselves and would make them tyrants over others if fortune gave them the means (Rochefoucauld, 43). In other words, he believes that to love one self is the beginning of a lifelong romance. Though the poet never proclaims that the Nymph loved the shepherd, the shepherd probably knew that having a love relationship with the Nymph could be a start of a lifelong romance. His love is viewed similar to Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza when he states that Love is nothing else but pleasure accompanied by the idea of an external cause (Morgan, 23). Needless to say, this quote reflects that love is just accompanied by the idea of an external cause, and that love between the shepherd and the Nymph is nothing more but a desire and an illusion in order to represent the contrast between the heart and the mind, ultimately suggesting that the heart and the mind is correlated to the shepherd failures to interact with his love object, the Nymph.
Roy Chan SID: 94105908 October 22, 2007 Reference Baldick, Chris. The Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ferguson, Margaret. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Morgan, Michael. The Essential Spinoza: Ethics And Related Writings. New York: Hackett Publishing Company, 2006. Rochefoucauld, Franois. Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims. New York: Dodo Press, 2007.

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Roy Chan SID: 94105908 October 22, 2007

The Shepherd Cries For True Love

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