The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

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The Passionate Shepherd to His Love is a poem written by the English poet Christopher Marlowe in the 1590s.

In addition to being one of the most well-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 six stanzas each composed of two rhyming couplets. It is often used for scholastic purposes because the poem is an good example of 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 extends into the the relationship that Marlowe had with Raleigh. Marlowe was young, his poetry romantic, rhythmic, and in the Passionate Shepherd he idealises 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 it is clear that he is rebuking Marlowe for being naive and juvenile in both his writing style and the Shepherd's thoughts about love.

Separate from the Marlowe/Raleigh debate is the issue of the Shepherd's Love's Identity. It is Raleigh, not Marlowe, who identified the Love as a Nymph, and in fact the poem says nothing about a Nymph. It has been suggested that "the Love" is a homo-erotic euphemism, since Marlowe was familiar with the wooing of young boys by older men from ancient Greek scripts. (Based both on analysis of his works and writing, and on widespread consensus in the comments and writings of his contemporaries, Marlowe himself is today considered to have been homosexual.)

The poem was used as the lyrics of 1930s-style swing melody in the 1995 movie Richard III based on the play of the same name by William Shakespeare, who was a contemporary of Marlowe.