The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Marlowe achieved critical reception during his time for his use of blank verse, which is an unrhyming verse in iambic pentameter lines. Eventually, that became the standard for the era. In this case, the poem is composed in iambic tetrameter, meaning that it consists of four feet of unstressed and stressed syllables. Each stanza contains rhyming couplets, and poem follows a feminine AABB rhyme scheme. Feminine rhyme employs unstressed syllables followed by stressed syllables. Examples of feminine rhyme include “love” (Line 1) and “prove” (Line 2) as well as “field” (Line 3) and “yields” (Line 4).

While some versions of the poem contain seven stanzas, other versions contain only six. Each stanza contains four lines, making the poem a quatrain. The stanzas rely on enjambment, the continuation of a line or verse without the pause in a couplet or the stanza. For example, the lines “By shallow Rivers to whose falls / Melodious birds sing Madrigals” (Lines 9-10) are enjambed with no pause between “falls” (Line 9) and “Melodious” (Line 10). The enjambment both concentrates the shepherd’s thoughts and creates more musicality.