The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd

In English literature, The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd (1600), by Walter Raleigh, is a poem that responds to and parodies the poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599), by Christopher Marlowe. In her reply to the shepherd’s courtship, the nymph presents a point-by-point rejection of his offer of a transitory life of passion and pastoral idyll.

Stylistically, the poems by Marlowe and Raleigh are pastoral poetry written in six quatrains that employ a clerihew rhyme-scheme of AABB. Compositionally, each poem follows the unstressed and stressed pattern of iambic tetrameter, using two couplets per stanza, with each line containing four iambs, to realise the metaphors and similes.

Historically, in the composition of English poetry, the nymph is a character from Greek mythology who represents Nature and the finite spans of life, youth, and love, which the nymph explains to the shepherd. As a reply poem, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” is written as a first-person narrative; in the first stanza, the nymph tells the shepherd that if the world were perfect, she would live with him and be his love, but in the second stanza she reminds him that the good things in life, such as a bouquet of flowers, are impermanent. In Marlowe’s poem, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”, the flowers proffered by the shepherd represent youth, which the nymph notes also connote death.

Moreover, as a poem from the Elizabethan era (1558–1603) of the 16th century, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” was not the only poetical reply to the poem by Kit Marlowe; in the 20th century, the poem Raleigh was Right (1940), by William Carlos Williams, sided with Walter Raleigh against Christopher Marlowe.