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The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd | Introduction

“The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” is Sir Walter Raleigh’s response to a poem written by Christopher Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” In the Marlowe poem, the shepherd proposes to his beloved by portraying their ideal future together: a life filled with earthly pleasures in a world of eternal spring. Raleigh’s reply, however, debunks the shepherd’s fanciful vision. While Marlowe’s speaker promises nature’s beauty and a litany of gifts, Raleigh’s nymph responds that such promises could only remain valid “if all the world and love were young.” Thus, she introduces the concepts of time and change. In her world, the seasons cause the shepherd’s “shallow rivers” to “rage,” rocks to “grow cold” and roses to “fade.” The shepherd’s gifts might be desirable, but they too are transient: they “soon break, soon wither” and are “soon forgotten.” In the end, the nymph acknowledges that she would accept the shepherd’s offer “could youth last” and “had joys no date.” Like the shepherd, she longs for such things to be true, but like Raleigh, she is a skeptic, retaining faith only in reason’s power to discount the “folly” of “fancy’s spring.”

The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd Summary

Lines 1–8
The nymph’s reply begins in the subjunctive— the grammatical mood used to convey hypothetical or contingent action. The subjunctive is commonly expressed with the “if . . . were” construction: “If I were king,” for example, or, in the first line of the poem, “If all the world and love were young.” This usage sets up the primary rhetorical structure of the entire poem: the speaker is going to contrast the shepherd’s vision, his hypothetical world, with the realities introduced by the word “but” in the second stanza. While the second part of the “if” statement— “And truth in every shepherd’s tongue”—may seem the more biting, the nature of the contrast exists in the first part. What renders the shepherd’s vision false, the nymph says, is time: the world and love do not remain young. Thus, while she finds lovely the shepherd’s evocation of spring, shallow rivers, flocks of sheep and rocks that exist merely so lovers can sit on them, in reality these ideal images are time-bound, subject to change and decay. Thus, “time drives flocks from field to fold,” “rivers rage” from rainy weather, “rocks grow cold” with winter, and even the nightingale—the timeless symbol of beauty unmentioned in the Marlowe poem—becomes “dumb” with the change in seasons. In contrast with the nightingale are “the rest”—those who do not become dumb but who instead “complain of cares to come.” By this, the nymph means human beings who, burdened with the consciousness of passing time, are subject to the anxiety of future misfortunes. In the shepherd’s... » Complete The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd Summary