"The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" by Sir Walter Raleigh, is a reply to the poem written by Christopher Marlowe entitled "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." These two poems are uniform as well as diverse in several ways. They are written with an invariable writing style, yet they have very different opinions on love.
             In "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," the shepherd is expressing his love to the nymph. He asks her to live with him and be his love. In return he promises her everything. The shepherd promises her things that he cannot give her such as "a gown made of the finest wool," and "buckles of the purest gold." I think that he promises her things he cannot give her because he loves her so much. The shepherd wants so bad to make her happy by giving her these wonderful things that I think he starts to believe that it is genuinely possible. "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" is a poem with a materialistic and starry-eyed point of view on love.
             In Raleigh's poem, "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd," the figment from "The Passionate Shepherd" is answered with a practical look on love. The nymph knows that she cannot believe that the shepherd can literally give her everything he promises because he is only a shepherd. He does not have a lot of money, or a lot of material things for that matter. Although she may love him, the nymph realizes that she cannot live with him and love him if he cannot provide for her what he promises. Things could never work out to be anywhere near the way he makes it sound. The shepherd is definitely much more of a dreamer than the nymph, who is extremely down-to-earth.
             The writing styles used for these two poems are nearly mirror images of one another. Both are examples of iambic tetrameter poems. Both poems include many examples of assonance, the repetition of two or more vowel sounds within a line. In the first line of "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," it says "c...