A Comparison Between Marlowe, Donne, Raleigh

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorHigh School, 12th grade August 2001

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Christopher Mallowe's poem, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,"� presents an overly optimistic view of love. He personifies the Shepherd's love to both beauty and bounty. Sir Walter Relegh's poem, "The Nymph's Reply,"� presents an overly pessimistic view of love. The nymph describes the Shepherd's love as unstable and changing just as nature is; she believes that they both conclude in death and decay. John Donne's poem, "The Baite,"� presents an overly optimistic view of love. The lover in the poem is desperately falling in love with a woman, whom he describe is the bait that attracts him. These three poems use nature to express their different view of love.

The shepherd view love as happy, and cheerful; no hardships or unpleasantness are in his proposal. The shepherd offers his lover all the precious and beautiful things that nature holds. "Come live with me and be thy love"¦That hills and valleys, dales and fields, or woods or steepy mountain yields"� (ln1, 3-4).

The shepherd offers things that cannot be realistically obtain. "And I will make thee beds of roses...fragrant posies"¦a cap of flowers, and a kirtle."� He is living an enchanted life, and he believes that things in nature will satisfy the woman forever. To the shepherd's view, nature's bounty symbolizes great wealth of love he has for her. He has painted a wonderful fairy tale life in order to win his lover to be his wife. On the other hand, the lover in, "The Baite"� is proposing to his lover to live with him in the "golden sands, and christall brookes"� (ln 3). He to same as the shepherd is living a life that is fill with unrealistic and dreamy things.

In "The Nymph's Reply,"� the nymph describes the shepherd's love or promise to her is...