Nobody in this poem works. The shepherd who invites his beloved to live with him promises hills, rivers, roses and gold buckles, but never mentions a hard winter, a sick lamb or a wet day on the hillside. Christopher Marlowe, the Elizabethan dramatist who wrote *Doctor Faustus* and died young in 1593, gives us a countryside edited down to its most delicious parts. The poem's charm, and its trick, lies in how smoothly it does this.
At its heart the poem is a seduction. The speaker wants his love to say yes, and each stanza adds another item to his case. He opens with an invitation, "Come live with me, and be my love", and promises that "we will all the pleasures prove", where "prove" means to try or experience. The landscape arrives in a rush of nouns: "hills and valleys, dales and fields". The pile-up suggests abundance, as if there were so much pleasure on offer that he could hardly list it all.
The form does a lot of the persuading. Six quatrains, each made of two rhyming couplets, move in short lines of eight syllables with a steady, light beat. The result sounds like something you could sing. The couplets click shut like small promises: *rocks* and *flocks*, *cold* and *gold*, *buds* and *studs*. Even the rhymes are agreeable. Only in the final stanza does the pairing of "sing" and "morning" loosen into a near-rhyme, and by then the speaker's rhythm is so well established that we hardly notice.
The imagery moves from landscape to wardrobe, and the mix is revealing. The beloved will have "beds of roses", "a cap of flowers" and a gown of wool pulled from "our pretty lambs". Then the rustic items begin to glitter: slippers with "buckles of the purest gold", and a belt of "straw and ivy buds, / With coral clasps and amber studs". It is a strange outfit, half meadow and half jeweller's shop, and it hints that this shepherd is offering something no real shepherd could afford. Even the birds are more refined than they should be. They sing "madrigals", a word that suggests polished, courtly part-songs rather than birdsong, so that nature seems to put on an entertainment for the couple. The rivers are conveniently "shallow", so nothing here can hurt anyone. Only the verb "pull", in the line about the lambs' wool, lets a little real farm labour slip through.
The poem's structure also repays a close look. The opening line comes back at the end of the fifth stanza and again, slightly reworded, in the sixth: "Then live with me, and be my love." This refrain makes the poem feel like a spell being repeated. But the offer is phrased as a condition: "*if* these pleasures may thee move", "*if* these delights thy mind may move". The speaker sounds confident, yet he ends on a question rather than a command. The verbs also change. For most of the poem he says "I will make thee", but in the last stanza it is the "shepherd swains" who "shall dance and sing / For thy delight". The pleasures keep multiplying, and the beloved herself never gets a word in.
That silence is part of why the poem matters. It is one of the best-known English examples of the pastoral, the tradition that imagines country life as leisure, music and flowers. It is also a poem that invites an answer, and it famously got one. Sir Walter Raleigh is traditionally credited with "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd", which says in effect that flowers fade and seasons turn, so such promises cannot last. Raleigh's reply works because Marlowe's poem has left so much out. Time, work, age and weather are all missing, and the speaker's whole argument depends on our not missing them.
What makes the poem last is that it works both ways. Read at face value, it is a graceful love song, bright and musical. Read more suspiciously, it is a masterclass in persuasion, with a perfect world offered in perfect couplets by someone who badly wants an answer.