ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599), by Christopher Marlowe, is a pastoral poem from the English Renaissance (1485–1603).

Detailed explanation-2: -This poem is a celebration of love, innocence, youth, and poetry. Since the traditional image of shepherds is that they are innocent and accustomed to living in an idyllic setting, the purpose of such a pastoral poem is to idealize the harmony, peace, and simplicity of the shepherd’s life.

Detailed explanation-3: -With a classic rhyme scheme of aabb, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, ” is written in iambic tetrameter, which is four feet (tetra) of unstressed/stressed syllables (iambic), with seven stanzas each composed of two rhyming couplets.

Detailed explanation-4: -Marlowe’s clever use of poetic devices like internal rhyme, assonance, consonance, and alliteration, provides the music in the background by keeping the tone of the poem musical without reducing it to the sing-songy verse often associated with iambic tetrameter.

Detailed explanation-5: -Despite the brevity of his career, Marlowe made an indelible mark on English literature. He is considered by many to have established blank verse as the preferred meter of Elizabethan and Jacobean writing, and he was also a major influence on William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year.