Guy Tiphane
Zoe Ullman
EN 214 (Lyric)
October 27, 2003
Following the Shepherd
Look for a good Valentine’s Day card idea or something to read at a wedding, and you are likely to find that Christopher Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love has the qualities you need for the occasion. “Exceedingly famous,” says Knoll in his biography of Marlowe, it “expresses our yearning for lost innocence” (Knoll, p. 15). It is interesting to note that Marlowe’s only short poem (he died before completing his other, longer poetic work Hero and Leander[1]) would be the object of parodies by his contemporaries Sir Edward Ralegh and John Donne, and then three centuries later by C. Day-Lewis. Four stanzas of the poem and one of Ralegh’s Reply were published in Shakespeare’s The Passionate Pilgrim (Shakespeare). More recently, many others have attempted to reuse the magical “Come, live with me and be my love” in their own poetry: search the Internet for the phrase and you will find a few poems reusing the theme in other contexts. This paper looks at the original and the three famous responses.
Different copies of the poem have been found, but not the definitive original from Marlowe. There are a few variations more easily identified in lines 3 and 4, and then in the possible insertion of an entire stanza before the last one. In Shakespeare’s abridged version, lines 3 and 4 read as follows:
That hills
and valleys, dales and fields,
And all the craggy mountains yields.
Instead of “That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, / Woods, or steepy mountain yields.” It is impossible to tell which set of lines was revised and by whom, but the Shakespeare version made the reading of the enumeration less precipitous, more musical. Other small variations in other stanzas have been noted among the transcriptions, as seen on The Perseus Digital Library (Perseus), and an entire new stanza appeared in an 1875 anthology (Palgrave). In this anthology, the following stanza was inserted before the last:
Thy silver dishes for thy meat
As precious as the gods do eat,
Shall on an ivory table be
Prepared each day for thee and me.
Needless to say, the stanza does not seem to belong to the poem: the “silver dishes” and the “ivory table” clash with the pastoral setting and the simplicity of the shepherd’s life. It is as if someone had wanted to read the poem in a wedding, but had needed to make it more real for a particular audience (someone who would have liked the sound of luxury). The oddity of the insertion highlights another line in the fourth stanza mentioning “buckles of the purest gold.” It is unlikely that a shepherd would be able to afford the gold, and all the previous lines mention material he would be able to access: wool, flowers, nature. Not as flagrant as the 19th century insertion, this exception may reveal the city origins of Marlowe or a touch of irony: even in a pastoral setting, gold ornaments are necessary to attract young women.
Sir Walter Ralegh’s The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd addresses some of the unrealistic features of Marlowe’s poem by ironically adopting the point of view of the woman in response to the shepherd’s promises. Structurally the same (iambic tetrameter), it mirrors the subject of each stanza from the Passionate Shepherd. Ralegh’s speaker looks at the reality of aging and of promises one cannot hold. Its language constantly brings the excitement of the shepherd’s promises down to nothing: “from field to fold,” “rocks grow cold,” “cares to come,” “Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten.” Once we see through the irony, the poem becomes one of aging and pessimism. This speaker wants to reign in the shepherd’s youth as if Ralegh had wanted to tell Marlowe that he is not going to be forever young and naive.
It is surprising to see the reference to Philomel in response to the
image of the melodious birds: it may be somewhat stronger, in response to an
allusion to rape. The tragic legend of
Philomela who was raped, then made dumb, and then made into a nightingale is a
very strong response to the shepherd’s sweet offers: is it that the speaker
knows them too well? In this respect,
Ralegh shows a good understanding of the woman’s perspective, the fear that men
may all be wolves in sheepskins.
The Passionate Shepherd and The Nymph’s Reply have been found together in a handwritten “commonplace book,” a kind of notebook kept by readers who would transcribe their favorites in it (Wraight), and the excerpts in Shakespeare’s own publication indicate that the two had probably been published in the same period. John Donne later published his own “Come live with me and be my love” poem under the title “The Baite.” The second line announces “some new pleasures” not only to emphasize that the poem is coming as a sequel to Marlowe’s, but also to show a different kind of text, using fish as a metaphor for sexual attraction and contact. In that respect, it makes the innocent promises of the shepherd become more sexual, as in Ralegh’s reply which alluded to rape. In Donne’s version, there are no allusions to any of the images used by Marlowe. Instead, the woman figure (the bait) attracts men (the fish) who are “Gladder to catch thee, than thou him” (perhaps an allusion to pregnancy or rape). It also compares this bait to others which would “Bewitch poor fishes’ wandering eyes,” and elevates it to a point where only “wiser far than I” fish won’t get caught. The Bait sets a very different tone to the courtship, no longer promising beautiful things and pastoral settings, but a rather direct man-to-woman attraction through the fish-to-bait metaphor. The “new pleasures” announced in line 2 have come true.
Three hundred years later, C. Day-Lewis reused the “Come live with me and be my love” theme more faithfully, but this time using the realities of daily life in 1935. It is alluding to the times of the Depression, when instead of a shepherd we would have a laborer searching for work. Day-Lewis replicated exactly the first and last two lines of Marlowe’s poem, but wrote a total of four stanzas in the same tetrameter. Day-Lewis’s reality being that of the worker, the cap of flowers becomes “a wreath of wrinkles” and a foot “shod with pain.” The lovely rocks / flocks become docks and frocks. The shallow rivers become “sour canals” and he only hopes to hear madrigals. To finish the speaker’s poor promises, the third stanza ends with:
But toil shall tire thy loveliness
After which he talks of hunger and death before repeating Marlowe’s last lines:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.
As with Ralegh’s reply, C. Day-Lewis’s version of the poem is another version of reality, this time the reality of poverty. The shepherd had access to lovely fields and fine wool, while this worker can only promise that his love will grow old and suffer. In a sense, it is what Ralegh’s nymph feared of the shepherd’s promises (minus the rape).
As with Shakespeare tragedies, Marlowe’s poem can be read in a modern
context. The text does not need to be
modified or modernized, even though modern shepherds are likely to be driving
pick-up trucks in
Works Cited
Day-Lewis, C., “Two Songs”
in The Complete Poems,
Donne, J., “The Baite” in Selected Poems,
Knoll, R.C., Christopher Marlowe,
Marlowe, C., “The
Passionate Shepherd to His Love” in
Palgrave, F. T., The
Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language,
The Perseus Digital
Library, “Christopher Marlowe, The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=1999.03.0017
.
Shakespeare, W., The Passionate Pilgrim, available online
at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/MobPass.html
,
webwedding.co.uk,
“Poems & Readings: The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” http://www.webwedding.co.uk/articles/ceremonies/vows/poemsreadings/passionateshepherd.htm
,
Wraight, A.D., Stern, V.
F., In Search of Christopher Marlowe,
[1] Shakespeare and Marlowe
competed for the favors of the Earl of Southampton. Upon Marlowe’s death, Shakespeare was free to
finish and present his Venus and Adonis
to