Provide A Summarising Overview Of Christopher Marlowe S The Passionate Shepard To His Love And Compare
Submitted by ivoryheart on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM
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Provide A Summarising Overview Of Christopher Marlowe S The Passionate Shepard To His Love And Compare
The narrator of Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepard to His Love" is clearly enamored with his beloved, and sets the mood definitively in the first stanza with his impassioned plea to her to come away with him. He goes on to describe the life they would have together, setting an idyllic scene of a beautiful, natural backdrop and a simple life free from worry. He also makes her several promises of what he will do for her, detailing the beautiful clothing he will give her to wear. Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepard to His Love" is a typical example of a pastoral poem. A pastoral poem, according to M. H. Abrams, is "A deliberately conventional poem expressing an urban poet's nostalgic image of the peace and simplicity of the life of shepards in an idealized natural setting" (Abrams 202). Marlowe's poem fits perfectly into this genre, keeping with both the broad theme of peace and simplicity of life, as well as the conventional style of four line stanzas. These stanzas each contain a pair rhyming couplets, giving the poem a melodious, song-like quality and making it pleasant to read, reinforcing the idea of beauty and nature contained within it. The poem could also be classified as a lyric: Abram writes that "[A lyric is a] fairly short poem, consisting of the utterance by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind" (Abrams 146), which could describe how the narrator of the poem voices his desire for his beloved to share a simpler life with him. The tone of the poem is coaxing, as the narrator cajoles his love into doing what he wishes her to do. Marlowe's choice of diction is interesting in that it produces very effective imagery in his descriptions, as in the first stanza when he describes how their love will conquer all by portraying these obstacles as " valleys, groves hills and fields, / Woods, or steepy mountains " (line 3-4). The images of the lovely clothing he promises her reinforce the idea of how pure and beautiful his love is, as well as how idyllic...
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