Carpe Diem Versus Tempus Fugit

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Carpe diem versus tempus fugit “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is a poem written by Christopher Marlowe who was an English poet born in 1564. This talented poet and playwright, was unfortunately killed in a tavern fight at the age of 29 (Modern Philology, 2005). Christopher Marlowe was “probably the greatest English dramatist before Shakespeare” (Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 2013). His most important plays are “Tamburlaine the Great”, “Doctor Faustus”, and “Edward II”. Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is a pastoral lyric, which is a poetic form that “tends to be an idealization of shepherds life, and, by so being, creates an image of a peaceful and uncorrupted existence” (Cuddon, 644). The poem is constructed of six stanzas, each of four lines, with the same structure. It is written in very regular iambic tetrameter, which means there are four iambs per line. Iambic meter is said to be “the most common in English poetry” (Barnet, 531). Iambic rhythm “is the commonest type of foot in all English verse because it fits the prevailing natural pattern of English words and phrases” (Cuddon, 408). It gives the impression of flow and is very pleasant to read. The rhythm of the poem makes it regular and musical, which is very appealing to the ear. The poem has basic rhyme scheme of AABB, which means each stanza is made of two rhyming couplets. Christopher Marlowe’s lyric is “one of the most influential poems of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean ages - helped popularize both the ‘invitation-to-love’ and ‘catalog-of-delights’ motifs in British literature” (Explicator, 2007). The lyric opens with probably one of the most romantic lines that one can think of: “Come live with me and be my love” (Marlowe, 724). The first verse sets up the two main figures in the poem: the speaker and the addressee. The title makes the reader believe that the

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