Welcome back, friends and neighbors, to show that gives rhyme its reason: the Classic English Literature Podcast. My name is MG McDonough, the Old Man of the Clubhouse, and I’m marvellously happy you’ve stopped by.
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I live in Vermont – spent most of my life here, though I’m originally from Rhode Island. That’s why my voice is like this. You’d expect, wouldn’t you, that a podcast about English literature would be hosted by someone with a voice like Stephen Fry, Charles Dance, or Benedict Cumberbatch. Someone with a rich, mellifluous tone, mildly non-rhotic, with just a touch of gravity. Instead, you get a swamp yankee with an accent like a bookie’s runner on Atwells Avenue.
Anyway, I live in Vermont, and I bring this up not just to be friendly but because it is germane to today’s texts. When people who don’t live in Vermont think about Vermont (usually after asking where it is), a quite specific image comes to mind. Most will think about skiing – those pine quilted mountains of pristine powder. Hot cocoa round a stone fireplace in a log cabin. Maple syrup and sharp cheddar. Rolling pastures, red dairy barns, herds of Holsteins coming in for milking. A place stuck in time, in some indefinable antique era – maybe the 1890s, maybe the 1940s. Hard to tell.
Look, we trade on that image – tourism is a major section of our economy – I think some $3 billion annually. Chambers of commerce and boards of tourism encourage this bucolic nostalgia. Look at our cans of maple syrup next time you’re in the grocery. Bet you anything they depict a late winter scene: fella in a red flannel shirt and a Stormy Cromer hat. Horse pulling a sled with a big galvanized tub on it – they’re pulling up to the sugar house, ready to boil sap. Ah, the simple life!
Back in the late 80s, after finishing high school, I worked for a mail-order catalog company that sold old-fashioned knick-knacks, clothing, antiquey reproductions. When someone placed a telephone order and asked about a product, we were forbidden to say, “Let me look it up on the computer.” Heaven forfend! No! We had to say, “Let me go check on the shelf” or “Let me ask Harriet.” We had to promote the image that the customer from San Diego was talking to a store clerk in a 1934 Vermont general store, where two old farmers played checkers by the woodstove and Harriet kept track of the stock room while her rhubarb pies cooled on the window sill.
Why? Because in an urbanized, technologized, and atomized society, where much feels artificial and superficial, people yearn for what they believe is simple and authentic. They want to know that there is a place where the pace is slower, relationships are deeper, life is more in tune with nature. The irony is, of course, that such nostalgia is as much a synthesized product in a capitalist market as the latest techno-gadget. But it's a product Vermont sells, and sells well. The reality of life in Vermont is does indeed involve much that the fantasy promotes, but that stone fireplace requires firewood, and it is hard graft indeed felling, skidding, bucking, splitting, and stacking 8 cords of fuel to ward off winters so cold they’ll freeze your wrists off. “Real” country people love the land that sustains them, but they are not romantic about it. Romance is for city folk.
And that’s where this ramble finally meets with today’s poems. The Tudor century is one of rapid and chaotic cultural change. The development of printing and the effects of the English reformation threw old certainties about knowledge, nature, and God in the air. Improved navigational techniques and cartography, like the Mercator projection, aided exploration and exploitation, which redrew the mental maps of English folk. In the countryside, enclosure movements consolidated small, open fields into larger, privately-owned enclosed fields as landowners sought to increase agricultural efficiency and profitability. This resulted in the displacement of small-scale farmers and the conversion of communal land into private property, which had significant social and economic consequences. In addition, new agricultural techniques such as crop rotation, the use of manure as fertilizer, and the selective livestock breeding led to increased productivity, which meant greater food production and population growth. The increasing and displaced rural population fled to cities, which hustled to accommodate the rural migrants. The organization of urban spaces changed as streets were widened, bridges and canals constructed, and public buildings raised. Of course, we have the concomitant issues of poor sanitation, poverty, and crime intensifying.
All this choppy-changey turmoil certainly would make one yearn for the good ol’ days, the days of yore, when all was simple. Through a big thick layer of succession anxiety – the fact that Queen Elizabeth, surprised by time, has not clarified her heir to the throne, and you have the undeniable longing for the untainted sylvan life. Pastoral poetry expressed this yearning amongst the highly born, who no doubt resented the hurly-burly of the great unwashed.
A particular kind of pastoral lyric began to emerge late in Good Queen Bess’s reign called the eclogue, sometimes called bucolics. It’s a classical form, based on the work of the Roman Virgil, that presents the idealized rural life in the form of a dialogue. Often, these are poems of seduction, in which a shepherd, sometimes called a swain, attempts to convince a shepherdess, sometimes called a nymph, to do the thing that most young men attempt to convince most young women to do. Among the most famous is one composed by Christopher Marlowe (who will feature prominently in upcoming episodes) called “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” It’s fairly brief, so I will give it to you in its entirety.
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the Rocks,
Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow Rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing Madrigals.
And I will make thee beds of Roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of Myrtle;
A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty Lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;
A belt of straw and Ivy buds,
With Coral clasps and Amber studs:
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.
The Shepherds’ 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.
Marlowe creates a first-person speaker who issues his pick-up line in a very simple, plain style. Note that the meter is iambic tetrameter – a four beat line, which feels very familiar and perhaps homespun. We are quite used to the four beat line – much of the poetry experienced by modern audiences comes in the form of pop music lyrics, and the musical time signature is 4/4 – four beats per measure, so Marlowe takes his verse out of the courtly, or “literary” realm, and makes it quite folksy. Note also the simple rhyme pattern – elementary couplets – and the entire absence of classical or Biblical allusion. In a decorous way, Marlowe imagines a poem fitted to the great unwashed – I suppose he figures it's the way an unlettered herdsman would compose, quite unlike the complex metrical style of, say, Spenser in the Shepherd’s Calendar. There’s something of a feigned oral culture quality here.
We also get a pretty clear picture of the shepherd’s outlook on things. His argument to the nymph rests upon her wanting pretty things – caps, kirtles, gowns, slippers, and gold buckles. One could argue that there is something of a market logic here – the seduction is transactional. Of course, the Shepherd also emphasizes the austere purity of natural, country life: beautiful valleys, groves, hills, fields, mountains, and rivers with pretty lambs, singing birds (and singing shepherds). He paints a very vernal image of life in nature: commodious, warm, lush, and gentle.
Makes one wonder how we’re supposed to understand the shepherd’s personality, or at least his intentions. I think it both ungenerous and unsophisticated to imagine the shepherd as some wolf on the pull, some f-boy looking for a bit of sexual distraction to pass life’s long day. I think he really loves her – or really thinks he loves her, at any rate. See, that’s the thing. I believe this request is heartfelt, it’s beautiful. But it’s naive – and I do think naive more than deceptive. The boy is passionate – the poem isn’t called the Practical Shepherd to his love. He’s clearly young, callow, seems overwhelmed by his emotions and willing to offer this girl everything he can manage. And even if we think his offer of pretty clothes and accessories a bit condescending, I think he’s just too immature to notice it. He just thinks that’s what girls like! And, really, they’re all going to be made by his own hands – his own work. These are bespoke items, handcrafted, locally-sourced, free-range, organic, sustainable. Aren’t homemade gifts the most personal?
On the other hand, though, I wonder if Marlowe is having us on a bit here. Does the shepherd seem just a bit too over the top? Is the passion and the pastoral turned up to 11? I suppose it could be satirical, a little self-aware fun-poking, mocking the nostalgic pretensions of urbane courtiers. Maybe we’re supposed to laugh at the passionate shepherd. I don’t, though. I would think it cruel.
In 1600, a year after Marlowe’s poem, swashbuckling hero Sir Walter Ralegh wrote a response called “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” and he certainly read Marlowe straight. It seems almost like a Tudor diss track: Ralegh, writing in the voice of the propositioned shepherdess, replies in a near line by line rebuttal of the shepherd’s plea. Here it is:
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move,
To live with thee, and be thy love.
Time drives the flocks from field to fold,
When Rivers rage and Rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb,
The rest complains of cares to come.
The flowers do fade, and wanton fields,
To wayward winter reckoning yields,
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.
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.
Thy belt of straw and Ivy buds,
The Coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.
But could youth last, and love still breed,
Had joys no date, nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee, and be thy love.
Ralegh preserves Marlowe’s prosody, but the nymph comes across as far wiser, more mature, than the passionate shepherd. She accepts the terms of his argument, but begins her refusal in the conditional: IF all that you said was true, I MIGHT think about it. But she knows that all he said is not true. She notes the mutability of the world, the ephemerality of the shepherd’s gifts, indeed of his passion itself. “Time,” she says, “drives the flocks from field to fold.” Flowers fade, she notes, spring is a fantasy for with autumn comes sorrow. The dresses and slippers and jewelry “soon break, soon wither,” she says, “are soon forgotten.”
The nymph is certainly more hard-nosed, more realistic. She quite reminds me of the beloved woman in Spenser’s Amoretti 75, who chides her lover for trying to immortalize her by writing her name in the beach sand. She, like the nymph, points to inexorable mutability: “For I myself shall like to this decay.” And Ralegh subtly underscores her greater intellectual reach, her more mature wisdom. In Marlowe’s poem, the shepherd uses virtually no figurative language, no allusions, and few classical rhetorical devices; I suppose “madrigals” is technically a metaphor for birdsong and the “yielding” of stanza 1 could be personification – if you squint. Ralegh’s nymph, however, displays a more sophisticated grasp of language. Firstly, of course, she wonderfully parodies the scansion. She alludes to Philomel, of whom we’ve spoken in other episodes, the Greek woman who, after being raped by her brother-in-law, is turned into a nightingale, whose song is often noted for its beauty and its sorrow. So the nymph is layering here, a bit of self-projection. We have alliteration and assonance offering sonic support to the nymph’s quite effective use of parallelism – for instance: “A honey tongue, a heart of gall, / Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall” and “In folly ripe, in reason rotten.”
She’s just a brighter person than the shepherd. She knows what he doesn’t – that his proposal is just a romantic version of a Vermont tourist brochure, a pretty picture on a maple syrup bottle. It’s not really real.
But what really makes Ralegh’s poem a better one, I think (and I know such judgments are controversially subjective), is not just its more elevated use of language. What makes this poem great is the last quatrain, in which the devastatingly pragmatic nymph gives us a sense of “if only” – as if she’d really like to believe that this eternal bucolic paradise could exist:
But could youth last, and love still breed,
Had joys no date, nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee, and be thy love.
I think she likes him, but he’s just not, well, man enough. Not macho, but mature. She wishes, I think, that she could be wrong. Remember when we talked about the Wife of Bath’s Tale back in episode 12? Married 5 times since the age of 12, severely beaten by her last husband, yet out on the trail looking for number 6? She tells the story of a rapist knight and how he lives happily ever after with a beautiful and loyal wife. I think I said something about how the story shows us the profound depth and roundness of her character – a woman who knows the hardness of a patriarchal world, yet somewhere inside, still longs for the fairy tale, the heroic knight-lover. I think the nymph, whose life seems less marked by trauma, is of a similar psychological bent nonetheless. Spring’s fancy is a delightful dream.
The nymph articulates that very medieval and early modern notion of Fortune’s Wheel. Human life, human history, is ever in flux, ever turning from joy to sorrow and back again. The philosopher Boethius, from the sixth-century, gives us the most notable and quotable version of this idea in his The Consolation of Philosophy. For a bit of context, Boethius was a highly placed Roman official who eventually was imprisoned and executed on false charges of treason. He writes the Consolation while awaiting execution – it is an imagined conversation between himself and Dame Philosophy. He asks how his fortune could have changed so disastrously. She chides him thus:
Thou deemest Fortune to have changed towards thee; thou mistakest. Such ever were her ways, ever such her nature. Rather in her very mutability hath she preserved towards thee her true constancy. Such was she when she loaded thee with caresses, when she deluded thee with the allurements of a false happiness. Thou hast found out how changeful is the face of the blind goddess. She who still veils herself from others hath fully discovered to thee her whole character.
Boethius, like the Anglo-Saxon Seafarer from way back in episode 4, discovers that happiness can only be realized in the unchanging and eternal, the immutable. For them, this is Heaven with God, who alone is immutable. For the classical age, some version of Solon’s or Ovid’s dictum: “count no man happy until he is dead.” For Buddhism and Hinduism, it is the path to nirvana, the release from the cycle of life and death called samsara. For the nymph, well . . . I don’t know that the nymph sees the possibility of immutability as anything but a fantasy. There is a sadness in her, I think, because she has nothing she feels able to rely on, to build on. I don’t know. I haven’t sorted all this out because I’m just thinking about it now.The passionate shepherd must be disappointed by her reply, but I don’t get the sense that he would be devastated. He’ll ride the wheel, I imagine. Fall in love again. His is not a tragedy. We may admire the nymph more – I certainly do – for her common sense and judgment. But she really seems to think Fortune’s wheel is more of a slide.
Some of you may have been scratching a bit of an itch throughout this episode: “I thought he said a pastoral eclogue was a dialogue between two shepherds.” I did, but perhaps I played fast and loose. Each poem we read today creates a fictive situation in which the speaker addresses a present implied listener. Now, I know you’re saying, “Well, can’t we assume that somebody is always speaking to someone?” Yes, I take your point. What I mean is that in the dramatic situation of the poem, we are to assume another person’s presence. The shepherd is speaking to an implied nymph. It’s different than, say, Elizabeth I’s “On Monsieur's Departure” or Wyatt’s “They Flee from Me.” In those poems, there is no implied listener, no third party. It’s like they are speaking to us. But in today’s poems, we’re overhearing a conversation between two people, but only one is speaking. And, of course, these poems, taken together, do render the dialogue complete. It’s not too much to say, I don’t think, that the poems only become great when taken together. They become a “real” eclogue only in conjunction and the complexities inherent in each individual poem only become immanent when read side by side.
The theme of “carpe diem,” or seize the day, will become an important one in the next century, especially among a group we sometimes call the Cavalier Poets, and we will certainly spend some time on it. Today, though, we can see a glimpse of proto-carpe diem in Marlowe and Ralegh. The passionate shepherd certainly argues the YOLO case – you only live once, come live with me now while there’s time! The nymph too knows you only live once, and is therefore more prudent, more cautious. But maybe less happy.
But Ralegh’s poem establishes a tradition of parodies, replies, and responses to Marlowe’s lyric, from John Donne and Robert Herrick in the 17th century to Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, and C. Day Lewis in the 20th and even today into the 21st. I’ll put a link in the show notes to a page where you can find all of them. https://comelivewithmeballad.com/replies-parodies/
Thanks for listening everybody. Be sure to subscribe and tell all your friends if you enjoyed the show. See you soon!