The themes in Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply" and how the poem is related to Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd"

Raleigh's
poem is one of numerous "answers" other writers gave to Marlowe's. It is both an
imitation--using the same stanzaic format, meter, and rhyme scheme as Marlowe's--and a kind ofas
well, though not in the sense of ridiculing it. It is literally an answer by the shepherdess to
the shepherd who is the speaker in Marlowe. If anything, Raleigh arrives at a much more serious
and complex exploration of the same themes expressed by Marlowe's "Passionate
Shepherd."

Marlowe gives us an idealizedsetting and theme. The shepherd
tells his love how wonderful life will be with him, beginning with what became one of the most
famous lines in the English language,

Come live with me
and be my love.....

then enumerating the things he will
give her and the advantages of living with him, and concluding with:

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing

For thy
delight each May morning,

If these delights thy mind may move,

Then live with me, and be my love.

Raleigh's
speaker, the shepherdess or "Nymph" replying, doesn't believe any of this. Her answer
basically confronts the shepherd with the reality that men lie, that youth does not last, and
that the world is marked by sorrow and decay:

Time drives
the flocks from field to fold,

When rivers rage, and rocks grow
cold,

And Philomel becometh dumb,

The rest complain of
cares to come.

She enumerates the things he has said
he'll give her, and debunks the value of them:

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.

But she concludes by saying that if all these
realities of life were not so, she would in fact change her mind and accept
his offer; she would decide,

To live with thee and be thy
love.

The two poems can be considered as expressing
idealism versus . Marlowe's shepherd is a smooth talker, not very deep, but as always Marlowe's
language is so beautiful that the reader is carried along by it. Raleigh's nymph is a sensible
realist, but more than this, there is a deep melancholy and resignation in her words, and she
expresses much more than a mere rejection of love. The basic theme of her reply is that of the
impermanence of life, and of beauty.