The Passionate Shepherd to His Love (1599)

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     Come live with me and be my love,
     And we will all the pleasures prove
     That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
     Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

5     And we will sit upon the rocks,
     Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
     By shallow rivers to whose falls
     Melodious birds sing madrigals.

     And I will make thee beds of roses
10     And a thousand fragrant posies,
     A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
     Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

     A gown made of the finest wool
     Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
15     Fair lined slippers for the cold,
     With buckles of the purest gold;

     A belt of straw and ivy buds,
     With coral clasps and amber studs:
     And if these pleasures may thee move,
20     Come live with me, and be my love.

     The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
     For thy delight each May morning:
     If these delights thy mind may move,
     Then live with me and be my love.

Editor´s Comments

Christopher Marlowe's lyric, "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love," touches one of the deepest chords of poetry, because it's a song. All poems have some relation to music, if only in the sense that they depend on rhythm and patterns of sound. But many poems, like Marlowe's, were actually written to be sung -- a ballad like Sir Patrick Spens would be another example on this website. Marlowe's poem was written at a time when all the arts seemed to be fascinated by the idea of love-sick shepherds in idyllic country settings: composers were writing madrigals about the subject, and artists were imagining what it all looked like. Some examples of these other versions are linked to the text of the poem, and you can hear and see them for yourself.

Not that everyone agreed with the picture Marlowe gives us -- Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a famous response to the poem, as did John Donne, and even in the 20th century the poet William Carlos Williams was continuing the argument. He sided with Raleigh against Marlowe. Shakespeare has a character in The Merry Wives of Windsor sing a few lines of Marlowe's poem, and a 1996 film of Shakespeare's Richard III turns "The Passionate Shepherd" into a 1930s torch-song. Nowadays we talk about one group "covering" another group's song, and that certainly happened to "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." When it works, we don't exactly get a new song, but we don't just hear the old one either. Interpretation isn't just a word that applies to poetry: we also use it to talk about musical performances, and maybe there's a lesson there. How would you set Marlowe's poem to music?

Text History

"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" has drawn a large number of responses from other poets, beginning in Marlowe's own time. This response by Sir Walter Ralegh is one of the most famous, especially in the way that it plays with the conventions of the pastoral tradition:

         "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd"

          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.

Click here to see Marlowe's poem, and Sir Walter Ralegh's response, as they were copied together into an Elizabethan reader's commonplace book, or book of memorabilia.

Historical Considerations

Poems are mirrors that reflect the world in which they are written. More truthfully, the relation between poem and its historical context is more complicated- a surface that refracts, transforms, and reinvents its world. "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" is a poem in which a shepherd courts a maiden in a peaceful rural setting of flowers, lambs, singing birds, and singing people. Marlowe's bucolic picture in some ways connects to his less-than-pastoral life as a spy, a member of the Elizabethan regime's brutal and extensive new espionage network. Marlowe lived in a city where he was an energetic participant in the entrepreneurial early-modern market economy in which a man of humble birth could make a fortune, or lose one. For Marlowe, the professional theater was his entreprenurial opportunity, and he made his mark at a young age. His was also a violent time, and urban crime and disease in the Elizabethan era more than rivaled that in any modern American city. Consider why Marlowe, who would himself die of violence, might write a poem like "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." How would his audience, living in that violent and competitive new world, have read it?

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