Using Flowers to Tell Time

ENGL 1171-02

Winter 2016

Dr. Anna Smol

Taylor LeBlanc

Using Flowers to Tell Time

Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, and William Carlos Williams use the imagery of flowers to signify the pastoral theme and its relation to time. Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love” is a traditional pastoral poem that has many of the standard conventions, including flowers that symbolize eternal love. Raleigh’s poem “A Nymph’s Reply” is an anti-pastoral reply to Marlowe’s poem, where flowers symbolize love, but also the inevitability of time passing. Williams’s poem “Raleigh Was Right” is also an anti-pastoral poem, and in this case the flowers symbolize lost love, and time that has already passed. Using the imagery of flowers, these poets are able to allow the readers to see their speaker’s real view on pastoral conventions.

        Christopher Marlowe uses the imagery of flowers to create a beautiful, pastoral world that will last forever. His poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” has many conventional pastoral elements. The title of the poem tells readers that the speaker is a shepherd, and the rest of the poem reveals that he is asking his object of affection to “Come live with me, and be my love” (Marlowe 1). It is not revealed in the poem the reply of the desired person, which implies that his love is still lasting. The speaker expresses his admiration of his love when he says he will make “A gown made of the finest wool” (Marlowe 13) and “Fair-lined slippers for the cold, / With buckles of the purest gold” (Marlowe 16). These valuable objects show how much he values his love, and follow the pastoral convention of things being new and beautiful. Marlowe adds the pastoral element of animals when he talks about how the “Melodious birds sing madrigals” (8), how he gets wool “Which from our pretty lambs we pull” (16), and when he talks about how “The shepherd-swains shall dance and sing” (21). Nature is an important pastoral element and it is an important element of this poem. Specifically, Marlowe uses flowers to create an image of beauty, comfort, and loveliness that will entice the speaker’s love to be with him forever. He uses flowers in his poem as if they represent the everlasting beauty of his love for his object of desire. This is shown when Marlowe says “And I will make thee beds of roses, / And a thousand fragrant posies; / A cap of flowers,” (9-11). But with following the pastoral conventions, Marlowe speaks only of the beneficial aspects and the timeless beauty of flowers, and ignores the biological aspect that they will always wither and die in the end.

        In his poem “The Nymph’s Reply”, Sir Walter Raleigh not only acknowledges the biological aspect of flowers, but uses it as a symbol. He takes the elements of Marlowe’s pastoral setting and looks at them more realistically. He says that while flowers can be symbols of love and beauty, they are fleeting, they “Soon break, soon wither,” (Raleigh 15) and are “soon forgotten, - / In folly ripe, in reason rotten” (Raleigh 15-16). The flowers cannot be a comparison for love because if that is the case, then the love is not real and will not last. Raleigh also criticises other conventions of the pastoral, to further his point that all things change over time. The nymph, who is the critical speaker, says that: