Do Some Words In The Nymph's Reply To The Shepherd Changed The Poem

Verse form past Walter Raleigh

"The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" (1600), past Walter Raleigh, is a poem that responds to and parodies the poem "The Passionate Shepherd to His Dearest" (1599) by Christopher Marlowe. In her reply to the shepherd's invitation, the nymph presents her rejection of the shepherd's courtship for a life of pastoral idyll.

Both poems are written in the fashion of traditional pastoral poetry and follow the structure of six four-line stanzas employing a rhyme scheme of AABB, with Raleigh'south an well-nigh line-for-line refutation of Marlowe's sentiments.^[1]

In the 1939 film, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, both poems are sung as a duet by Mistress Margaret Radcliffe (Nanette Fabray), singing Marlowe'south original words, and Lady Penelope Grey (Olivia de Havilland) taking Raleigh's rebuttal. The functioning infuriates Queen Elizabeth (Bette Davis) whose doomed love for Robert Devereaux, 2d Earl of Essex (Errol Flynn), 32 years her inferior, is the subject of the story.

The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd [edit]

If all the earth and honey were immature,
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 abound cold,
And Philomel becometh impaired;
The residual complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A love tongue, a middle of gall,
Is fancy'south leap, only sorrow's autumn.

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 beloved still breed,
Had joys no date nor historic period no need,
And so these delights my mind might move
To alive with thee and be thy love.