The Passionate Shepherd to His Love: Rhyme

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“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” uses a very traditional AABB rhyme scheme for each of its six quatrains. This means that each quatrain is internally organized into two rhyming couplets, which gives the poem a highly structured quality. The use of rhyming couplets is very conventional, particularly for a poem written in the sing-song meter of iambic tetrameter. Indeed, many songs in Western music rely heavily on couplets since the close proximity of the rhymes helps organize lines into easily perceptible units of meaning. By contrast, an ABAB rhyme scheme may work well on the page, but it’s harder to hear in a song. Although “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is a poem and not a song, the use of rhyming couplets nonetheless amplifies the songlike quality of the overall meter. This songlike quality helps maintain the poem’s lighthearted tone, which in turn may help the speaker in convincing the person he’s addressing to stay.

Despite Marlowe’s use of a conventional rhyme scheme, he unexpectedly mixes masculine and feminine rhymes. Masculine rhyme refers to rhymes that fall on a single, stressed syllable at the end of a line. By contrast, feminine rhyme refers to rhymes that involve multiple syllables, and where it’s typical for just the first syllable to be stressed. For an example, consider the following couplet in lines 7–8:

By shallow Rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing Madrigals.

Note how the word “falls” has just one syllable, and that in metrical context it must be stressed. This makes “fall” an example of masculine rhyme. By contrast, the word “madrigals” has three syllables, and the rhyme falls on the last of these. Marlowe renders this rhyme feminine by cleverly playing with our expectations. In ordinary speech, only the first syllable of the word would be stressed: “Mad-ri-gals.” Although metrical context dictates that both the first and last syllables must be stressed, we still hear the syllable “-gals” as being relatively less stressed than “Mad-.” This situation makes for a surprising rhyme between the strong stress of “falls” and the weak stress of “-gals.” In bringing masculine and feminine rhyme together in this way, the poet mirrors the speaker’s desire for union with his beloved.