The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Presumed portrait of the poet Christopher Marlowe whilst a student at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in 1585.

"The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" (1599), by Christopher Marlowe, is a pastoral poem from the English Renaissance (1485–1603). Marlowe composed the poem in iambic tetrameter (four feet of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable) in six stanzas, and each stanza is composed of two rhyming couplets; thus the first line of the poem reads: "Come live with me and be my love".[1]

  1. ^ Tetrameter. Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory Third Edition. J.A. Cuddon, Ed. (1991) p. 963.