Poet’s Corner: Raleigh’s Response to Marlowe

27 January 2026

(21 March 2014) Today we share one of the amusing responses to last week’s poem by Christopher Marlow, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” one by a contemporary of Marlow, Sir Walter Raleigh. Like Sidney, Raleigh was the ideal Renaissance man: soldier, courtier, philosopher, explorer, scientist, historian, and poet; he was a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, and helped Edmund Spenser to return to England from Ireland. He replied to Marlowe’s passionate shepherd with the following:

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 [the nightingale] becometh dumb;
The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do face, 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, they shoes, thy beds of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle [skirt], and thy posies
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten–
In folly ripe, in season rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
They 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 [ending], nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.

Raleigh’s ‘nymph’ sees straight through the phony shepherd’s appeals–she sees him as the shallow, posturing fake that he is, pointing right to the heart of the matter, that the shepherd sees only the surface, his desire is only ‘skin-deep’, and she will not be taken in by his posing. The poet here assumes what many believed: that remaining close to nature, as shepherds did, makes one wise, not easily taken in by appearance. Notice the echo of Marlowe’s lines at the end of the first, fourth, and fifth stanzas, the ‘nymph’ answering the shepherd’s question. Come back on Thursday for another edition of the Poet’s corner!