Notes for "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love."
Pastoral lyric: Poetry that expresses emotions in an idyllic setting. It is related to the term "pasture," and is associated with shepherds writing music to their flocks. The tradition goes back to David in the Bible and Hesiod the Greek poet.
The themes of the poem - carpe diem and the immediate gratification of their sexual passions.
Love in the May countryside will be like a return to the Garden of Eden. There is a tradition that our problems are caused by having too many restrictions, by society. If we could get away from these rules, we could return to a prisitine condition of happiness. The "free love" movement of the 1960's was a recent manifestation of this utopian belief. If the nymph would go a-maying with the shepherd, they would have a perfect life.
In quatrains (4 line stanzas) of iambic tetrameter (8 syllables per line, 4 measures per line with 2 syllables in each measure), the shepherd invites his beloved to experience the joys of nature.
He hopes to return with the nymph to a Edenic life of free love in nature.