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“The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is a pastoral lyric featuring a speaker who attempts to entice his beloved to stay with him in the country. Significantly, the speaker doesn’t entice his beloved through a sustained argument about why they should stay. Instead, he begins with a stanza in which he invites them to stay, then proceeds to enumerate a long list of luxurious material goods he’ll provide them if they agree. Finally, he closes the poem with a refrain in which he reaffirms his invitation for them to stay with him. These three movements generate the poem’s basic structure:

     Stanzas 1–2: Invitation
     Stanzas 3–5: Enumeration
     Stanza 6: Invitation (refrain)

The poem’s closing refrain deserves additional comment, particularly for the way it amplifies the poem’s songlike quality. Marlowe wrote the poem in iambic tetrameter, which is a meter that has an intrinsic sing-song sound. The use of rhyming couplets also recalls songs, the lyrics to which are often written in couplets. Likewise, refrains are a common feature in songs. In this poem, the refrain works by repeating the same couplet twice, in slightly altered form, at the end of the fifth and sixth stanzas. Ending with this moment of repetition gives the poem a form of closure that structurally mimics the end of a song.

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