The Passionate Shepherd to His Love by Christopher Marlowe - Research Paper Example

Cover Letter February 25, I prepared two works to explore a critical question on Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” The poem uses the voice of a shepherd expressing an innocent and pure kind of love. Marlowe used six quatrains that have rhyming couplets to achieve a wistful tone in his work that belongs to the lyrical live genre. I created a short story that explored the answer to the critical question, as well as an essay explaining the choices I made. The short story is about Carlito, a shepherd who is fond of daydreaming. He has a good heart, but he is unfortunate because he lacks love from his family and the girl of his dreams, Isabela. The story is a parody of the poem because it rejects the idealism found in the identity of the shepherd and the romanticism of love and innocence. The essay explains that the story reveals the reality of poverty and frustrations that are realistic to a shepherd’s life. It uses the pensive tone of the poem to argue that daydreams are beautiful forms of escape from one’s terrible life. The story and essay believe that Marlowe wants readers to think about their lives and the reality of love and innocence. Innocence is imagined, as well as love, for unless it is returned, love can be bitter and angry. The shepherd of Marlowe is in a daydream, suspended in his thoughts of what life and love should be, and not what they actually are. The Imaginings of the Passionate Shepherd to His Love Carlito arrived at his home after a whole day of pasture. His clothes were bloody and muddy. His face looked ten years older than his seventeen years of age. His body thin, but firm with muscles from years of hard work since childhood. It was a bad day, like most his dark dull days were. Two of his lambs got caught in a bush at a steep hill. He cursed them again and again, while thorns bit his hands and arms. The fields were dry, so he and his troops, as he would like to see himself a gallant captain of his army, went farther into the woods. He lost one lamb again, and he never saw it once more. After crying for his lost lamb, weeping for the beating his father would once more lay on him, Carlito remembered sitting on the rocks, imagining Isabela. She is Don Juan’s youngest daughter, the most beautiful of them all, fifteen years old, striking in her light blonde hair and blue eyes. He imagined the two of them, telling each other words of love, as they look at their shepherds feed their fat and bountiful flocks. They would listen to the rivers and falls singing to them odes of love. He was her king, and she, his queen. The world revolves around them, serving their needs and wants. Whack! A large callous hand hit the back of his head. His father, Luis, came. He must have counted the sheep and found one missing. His father’s voice boomed like thunder: “You idiot! How many lambs do you have to lose to make us all go hungry!” I could not say anything. I looked down and mumbled a pitifully weak, “Sorry father.” Luis took his son, much smaller than he was, and shook him by the shoulders. “And what have you been doing? Imagining again like the dolt that you are! A lamb has bigger brains than you! I caught you many times, sitting on the rocks, daydreaming like an ass! I’d lash you until you barely breathed right now if only I was not so tired from Don Juan’s farm! What a dunce! A dunce for an eldest son!” Luis walked away, took a cup and threw it into the wall, as if he wanted to throw his eldest son instead. “You know what you have to do.” Carlito took the roughest beans from a sack and laid them on the ground. He kneeled on it and a bed of coarseness violently assaulted his knees. “This time, you lay on it, face forward, naked!” His father was creative in his punishments, putting twists on them every now and then. A while ago, Carlito slept on a bed of posies. Now, he suffered on a bed of sharp green beads. His two brothers would arrive soon. Instead of asking their father to forgive him, they would join in mocking him. Only a year apart from one another, they treated him lower than the ugliest lamb in their watch. They did not see him as the eldest, only the lamest. To cope with his pain and humiliation, Carlito went to another bed, a bed of roses with Isabela. He was making her a cap of flowers, and put beautiful fresh myrtle into it too. She loved it. She kissed him slowly. He kissed her back passionately and held her tightly. She smelled like honey against the flowers of love he made for her. They kissed on the bed of roses, never minding anyone around them. Not even the two malicious shepherds, Antonio and Lucas, Carlito’s brothers. Antonio and Lucas were laughing when they came. Antonio won a large bet, and he gave some of his winnings to his father, who was “so proud of him, a real winner in life.” Antonio was much taller and heavier built than Carlito. Lucas got a basket of fruits from Mrs. Arianna, an old lady who adored him because of his good looks. Indeed, Lucas looked like a million bucks with his aristocratic nose, almond brown eyes, and fair skin. He rarely took care of the herd. Oftentimes, he served Mrs. Arianna, the old lady, reading to her and sharing stories. Lukas was the only one who knew how to read and write among them all, and he was quite intelligent. Antonio and Lucas were the demons of Carlito’s life. They taunted him. Antonio sneered and said: “Why am I not surprised? A loser for an eldest, ugh, what a curse!” Lucas added to the insults: “To think he was mother’s favorite once. I guess idiots get some love, best love, from their mothers.” Carlito shut his ears in his mind. His mother loved him the most because he was the most respectful and hardworking. She died a year ago from an unknown and untreated illness. He remembered making her a belt of straw and ivy-buds for her birthday. She loved the ivy. He also made a coral bracelet. Carlito would give these things to Isabela too, if only he did not know she would mock her. His brothers said more bad words. Carlito went away, went back to Isabela. He was proposing to her, asking her to marry him, to live with him. He promised her a good and happy life. With beautiful almond-eyed shepherds dancing and singing for them, serving them a feast day after day. He promised her everlasting happiness on the rocks, the grass- their heaven on their little piece of earth: “Come live with me and be my Love. Come live with me and be my Love.” He was waiting, waiting for her to give her sweet yes. Unwilling to wait, perhaps afraid of rejection even in his own dreams, he kissed her passionately. When he woke up, it was dawn, time to work again. He cooked food for his family and left earlier than usual. Carlito went nearer town with his flock. He knew Isabela passed by from school on that road. She did. She walked with a few friends. Some soldiers were a bit far from her, guarding her like they would a king. Isabela and her friends were laughing. Carlito had a cap of flowers, ivies and roses and myrtle. He approached her, bearing his humble gift of love, when a soldier grabbed him, took the cap and stomped on it. Isabela and his friends watched as the soldiers beat him up. A friend asked Isabela, “What did he think he was doing, as if he planned to court a beauty like you? With such a disfigured face? He looks like a beast!” Isabela looked at him seriously. Carlito’s nose has not fully formed and it somehow gaped, while his lips drooped. He was born that way. Isabela said: “Uglier than a beast I say.” They all laughed. Carlito stayed on the ground of stones, waiting for someone to end his life. All he heard was the empty scorching wind, passing by, leaving so swiftly for something more important. From Idyllic Poem to Parody Short Story Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is a pastoral lyrical poem that shows the innocence of youthful love. The shepherd courts his love and asks him to live with him. He uses pastoral imagery and promises of simple landscape beauty to persuade the lady to love him back and to live with him. Marlowe uses simple language with a musical tone to it through alliteration and internal rhymes. My critical question is: Did the shepherd speak of such idyllic love and reality because of unfulfilled longings instead of truly believing in his promises to his loved one? I came up with this critical question because of the incredible promises of the shepherd to his beloved, especially when he says he would give her a “gown made of the finest wool” (14) and “[f]air-linèd slippers for the cold,/With buckles of the purest gold” (15-16). For a poor shepherd, he must be dreaming if he thinks he can provide these luxuries to the woman he is courting. As a result, I made a short story that is a parody of the poem, almost like James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” where reality clashes with one’s most fervent dreams. I followed the flow of the poem that has melodious language and imaginary imagery because these are what made the poem distinct, although I turned them into the hard realities of a shepherd’s life. Karen F. Stein remarks on the “simple, musical language and fanciful imagery” of the “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” that produce “an idyll of innocent love” (1). I also used musical language and imagined imagery to follow the same language and structure of the poem. While Marlowe talks about “hills and valleys, dales and fields,” I used them in the story as well, but without the romanticized notions of a shepherd’s life. Instead, I created a parody which is the reality of everyday pasturing of sheep, an everyday life crammed with exhaustion, dirt, and frustrations. The hills, woods, valleys, and fields were not spots of perfection for Carlito, but everyday places of burden and toil. Moreover, I used Marlowe’s words to feed the imaginations of Carlito. Sitting on the rocks is the entry into his dream world. In his dreams, he followed the dreams and promises of the shepherd in Marlowe’s poem. For Carlito, his daydreams are as real as Marlowe’s poetry: “They would listen to the rivers and falls singing to them odes of love. He was her king, and she, his queen. The world revolves around them, serving their needs and wants.” The idyllic setting remains, only because it is food for his imagination, his escape from the ruthless reality of his identity and life. I wanted to show Carlito’s life through his imagination. His life is a large contrast to his thoughts. Rodney Stenning Edgecombe notes how other poets provided “sober” responses to Marlowe’s idealized love and characters (40). Indeed, the shepherd in Marlowe’s poem seems to live in a paradise version of a shepherd’s world, detached from the grueling life of everyday poverty, and this is something I turned upside-down to reveal the daily tribulations of a shepherd, including his love life and family issues. Finally, I created a parody with a traumatic ending because I wanted to strip off Marlowe’s poem with its romantic notions about love and innocence. Claire Robinson presents an interesting insight on what Marlowe must be thinking when he wrote the poem. She says that the poem seems too dreamy to be true: “The wistful invitation of the poet to his love to live with him in this impossibly perfect place evokes the pathos of unfulfilled desire and longing” (1). I agree with her because the tone of the poem is so pensive that the attitude of the speaker might as well be that of a daydreamer, someone who wants to escape the ugliness of his life. As a result, my short story ends with an anti-climax. The characters learn that Carlito has a physical deformity and that Isabela has an attitude of a beast. Instead of a pensive tone and idyllic attitude to love and innocence, my short story shatters the dream bubble of the passionate shepherd and shows the world as it is- full of rejection and disappointment because the only true heaven is in one’s imaginings. Works Cited Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning. “Marlowe, Heine, and ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.’”ANQ 17.2 (2004): 39-40. Print. Marlowe, Christopher. “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” 1599. Print. Robinson, Claire. “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” Magill’s Survey of World Literature (2009): 1. Print. Stein, Karen F. “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.” Masterplots II: Poetry, Revised Edition (2002): 1-2. Print. Read More