1. Pastoral Poetry  “Pastoral” (from pastor, Latin for “shepherd”) refers to a literary work dealing with shepherds and rustic life.  Pastoral poetry is highly conventionalized; it presents an idealized rather than realistic view of rustic life.

2. Common Topics  Love and seduction  The value of poetry  Death and mourning  The corruption of the city or court vs the “purity” of idealized country life  Politics (shepherds critique society or easily identifiable political figures)  Eclogues (a dialogue between two shepherds)

3. Pastoral Elegy  Expresses the poet’s grief at the loss of a friend or important person  Praise for the dead shepherd  Effects of death upon nature  The poet’s acceptance of the inevitability of death and the hope for immortality

4. Famous Pastoral Poetry  Christopher Marlowe’s “A Passionate Shepherd to His Love”  Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”

5. The Passionate Shepherd to His Love  Carpe diem and immediate gratification of their sexual passions  Love in the countryside will be like a return to the Garden of Eden  There is a tradition that our problems are caused by having too many restrictions by society  If we get away from these rules, we can return to the pristine condition of happiness  If the nymph would go a maying with the shepherd, they would have the perfect life!

6.  In quatrains  Iambic tetrameter  The shepherd invites his love to experience the joys of nature  He hopes to return with the nymph to an Edenic life of free love in nature

7. The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd  Raleigh argues that because time flies, we should not seize the day  There could be consequences to their roll in the grass  Time does not stand still; winter inevitably follows spring; therefore,we cannot act on impulses until we have examined the consequences

8. The nymph reverses his images  Rocks grow cold  Fields yield to the harvest  The flocks re driven to fold in winter  Rivers rage  Birds complain  Free love is impossible  The seasons pass as does time  Nymphs grow old, and shepherds grow cold