Christopher Marlowe

Christopher Marlowe: An Elizabethan Dramatist

Christopher Marlowe, an Elizabethan dramatist, was a wonderful poet of pastoral poetry and using carpe diem themes. He has written many poems, however, three poems in particular, have similar themes. These poems are, “The Passionate Shepherd To His Love”, “The Face That Launch’d A Thousand Ships”, and “Who Ever Loved That Loved Not At First Sight?” All of these poems share two things in common, Christopher Marlowe, and their pastoral and carpe diem themes.

Marlowe was born in 1564 to a shoemaker in Canterbury. Before a long life of writing, he became a spy after going to college at Cambridge University. While becoming a spy, he was sent to jail after a street fight. Excitement and danger was a big part of his life. Another occurrence with the law happened when a fellow dramatist poet, and roommate Thomas Kyd, accused him of making scandalous speeches, and Marlowe was arrested again. At a tavern brawl over who was going to pay for the bill, Marlowe was stabbed above the eye, and died instantly. However, theories of Marlowe’s death vary. Some believe he was assassinated for unknown reasons, and other believe he lived on to write more poetry. It has been declared that Marlowe died in 1593, but all of his famous works live on to this day.

All three poems are filled with pastoral images and carpe diem themes. The mood and visual images of these poems also effect Marlowe’s writing style. In “The Passionate Shepherd To His Love”, Marlowe expresses his love for a woman he wants to run away with and live with in the countryside to be happy and content. The setting of this poem is pastoral, because it speaks of living in an idealized countryside. The speaker is very naпve to the actual world around him because he and his lover can not just sit on rocks and look at shepherds feeding flocks and beautiful valleys all of the time. “And we will sit upon rocks, seeing the shepherds feed their flocks…come with me and be my love.” He does not realize how different the real world is from his description of what he wants life to be like. He explains how he and his lover should “seize the day.” “Come with me . And be my love, and we will all the pleasures prove.” Not everything is always good, but he promises to make her experience happiness always, if she just abandons her real life to be with him. These images of a perfect life together set the laid back, almost melancholy, carpe diem mood.

“The Face That Launch’d A Thousand Ships” speaks of a woman who chose to seize the moment and “run away” from her unhappy lifestyle. Helen Of Troy shows an example of carpe diem and seizes the day by running away to be with the man