Poem: "The Lamb's Plea To Them Both"

[jjhunter]

In 1592, Christopher Marlowe wrote a delightfully insipid poem called 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love', featuring a horny shepherd attempting to win his love over with various gifts and promises. Four years later, Sir Walter Raleigh penned 'The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd', in which the titular Nymph absolutely skewers the shepherd's every attempt at charm, incidentally subverting the pastoral mode in which both poems are written. Zoom forward some four hundred years, during which several other poets throw in their two cents, and you get another voice--me--taking up the banner of the humble lamb.

Given how important context is for getting all the jokes, I'm including 'The Passionate Shepherd' and 'The Nymph's Reply' in full here under cuts, and 'The Lamb's Plea To Them Both' at the end.


The Passionate Shepherd to His Love
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields
Woods or steepy mountain yields

And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flower, and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me and be my love.

The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.



The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold,
When rivers rage and rocks grow cold;
And Philomel becometh dumb;
The rest complain of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields;
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy bed of roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies,
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten,
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,
Thy coral clasps and amber studs,
All these in me no means can move
To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last and love still breed,
Had joys no date nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move
To live with thee and be thy love.


The Lamb's Plea To Them Both
If all the world were soft and green
And not a lupine creature seen
If all that then I would approve;
Abandon me for wooing love!

We'd happ'ly stand, my folk and I,
Watching the Nymph and shepherd fly,
With crunch of grass, to which sweet song
The nightingale might sing along.

O Nymph! My shepherd's lost his head;
He mutters oaths, neglects his bed;
And what care I in winter's cold
For woolen dress and buckle gold?

A wise, aged ewe still fair like thee
Will only tease the ram he be;
Return his heart and let it roam
Else I be shorn and locked from home.

O Master, let me eat the belt
And nibble roses for my pelt,
For such a love is not to be;
There's no excuse for leaving me

Enjoy the sun and eat thy grass
And let this fit of passion pass;
If all my pleas thy heart may move,
Then live with me free from such love!


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

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Consciously or not, I think most poetry is in conversation with other poetry. Do you enjoy such conversations, or find them intimidating? How much of an educational barrier is potentially there for one's audience when one draws on greater conversations and cultural references, and how might one lower the barrier without compromising on the richness gained by consciously including those contexts?

Comments

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>The Lamb's Plea To Them Both<<

*laugh* Very apt.

>>Consciously or not, I think most poetry is in conversation with other poetry.<<

I think that some poetry is, but not necessarily most.

>> Do you enjoy such conversations, or find them intimidating? <<

I think it's fun, but then I am dauntless for a poet. I write the stuff live.

>>How much of an educational barrier is potentially there for one's audience when one draws on greater conversations and cultural references, and how might one lower the barrier without compromising on the richness gained by consciously including those contexts?<<

It depends on your goal and your audience. If you want to write poetry that can reach as wide an audience as possible, then write about something everyone will recognize and use common vocabulary. But if you want to speak to the many experiences which are particular to a given culture or group, which also deserve poetry, then maximize use of concepts, customs, and words that are characteristic of the source.

Education is no barrier to poetry. None. You don't even need to be literate to enjoy it; poetry predated literature by thousands of years. It is possible to write poetry from the perspective of any group that they will enjoy, and other people may find enlightening.

Example: I used to design coursework for adult remedial education in a prison. We had a literature class. The guys were overwhelmingly Latino or black. So I introduced them to Lorna Dee Cervantes and Langston Hughes and so forth. Most of them had never seen poetry written by their own people, about experiences they could relate to. They didn't know it existed. They'd only seen stuff by famous white men. But oh, they loved the poetry that I assigned -- the bluesey poems about substance abuse, the grungy poems about hotwiring cars, the incisive poems about race relations. I'd give them exercises and say, "Forget whatever nonsense you were taught in the crummy schools you attended before. Sit down and write a poem about your experiences, in your speech." They'd do it. Some of them did it really well. We'd get about one or two students per class who would just catch on fire.

That still makes me smile.

[syntaxofthings]

Poor lamb! :)

I agree with ysabetwordsmith that poetry can be for everybody, but, like everything, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. Perhaps people should write poetry based on their favorite TV shows and popular movies in order to play off of the cultural references (of which I never understand any). With the huge scope of media available to us now, it's hard to keep track of the conversation if you're not actively doing so... I think one of the few ways to make the conversation more accessible is by doing things like this: sharing poems written in response to poems and setting aside a place for people to share their work so that busy people (me) don't have to seek it out (because we're not taught how to do so anymore in school).