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About The Passionate Shepherd to His Love and Her Reply (Unabridged)

"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love", known for its first line, "Come live with me and be my love," is a poem written by the English poet Christopher Marlowe and published in 1599 (six years after the poet's death). In addition to being one of the best-known love poems in the English language, it is considered one of the earliest examples of the pastoral style of British poetry in the late Renaissance period. It is composed in iambic tetrameter (four feet of unstressed/stressed syllables), with seven (sometimes six, depending on the version) stanzas each composed of two rhyming couplets. It is often used for scholastic purposes for its regular meter and rhythm. The poem was the subject of a well-known "reply" by Walter Raleigh, called "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd". The interplay between the two poems reflects the relationship that Marlowe had with Raleigh. Marlowe was young, his poetry romantic and rhythmic, and in the Passionate Shepherd he idealizes the love object (the Nymph). Raleigh was an old courtier and an accomplished poet himself. His attitude is more jaded, and, in writing "The Nymph's Reply", he rebukes Marlowe for being naive and juvenile in both his writing style and the Shepherd's thoughts about love.