The great playwright Christopher Marlowe also wrote one of the most famous lyrical poems in British literature, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." In this pastoral portrait, Marlowe reveals the shepherd's desire for a certain young lady to be his love. In "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd," Sir Walter Raleigh voices the young lady's answer to this invitation. The two poems share the identical structures of rhyme scheme and meter. Also, the speakers share a similar desire for youthful love. However, these similarities are overshadowed by the differences in the author's backgrounds which, in turn, influence the starkly different characteristics of the speakers of the poems--their view of reality and their motive for love.

One obvious similarity in the two poems is their structure. "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" mimics Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" exactly. Both poems consist of four-line stanzas, or quatrains...