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Compare The Passionate Shepherd To His Love

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Renaissance poet Marlowe, within The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, and the Restoration poet Marvell, within To His Coy Mistress, present love as a necessity. Despite the differing contexts, with their incompatible ethical and moral attitudes, they still concern themselves with the same fundamental idea – that men will assert their patriarchal dominance onto women in order to have sex.

By focussing on the tone of the two poems one can draw similarities within how the male imperative and female reluctance mirrors the social context of time and religious morality. Marlowe evokes this message through the utilisation of the hyperbolic use of the possessive pronoun ‘my’ in accordance with imperatives; “Come live with me and be my love, / And we will all the pleasures prove”. …show more content…

Unlike Shakespeare, who wrote romance, Marlowe is attempting to create passion and the half-rhyme depicts this passion. At times, the person will not understand the desire and it will just simply be there and come to fruition through chance. The line further allows for this female subservience to the man with the possessive pronoun ‘my’ depicting that she is the man’s property and the lack of identity to the woman throughout the poem reiterates this point of view that the male has to assert his dominance through the manifestation of every materialistic aspect of life. The utilisation of ‘my love’ is paradoxical to the nature of

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