Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" is full of figurative language, especially the metaphor. In contrast to a simile, which uses "like" or "as" to compare two different things, the metaphor uses an implicit (implied but not explicitly stated) analogy to equate two different things. Marlowe's "Shepherd" abounds with examples of metaphor. For example, at the end of the second stanza, Marlowe's shepherd describes a scene in which "Melodious birds sing Madrigals" (8). The birds aren't actually singing madrigals (a style of song sung by humans); rather, Marlowe's using a metaphor to compare the musical nature of the birds' songs to a madrigal. By doing so, he idealizes the birds' singing and paints a vivid image of natural beauty for his audience. Likewise, in the next line, the shepherd says, "I will make thee beds of Roses" (9), and here he's using a metaphor to idealize the comfort with which he and his love will be sleeping in his idyllic, pastoral paradise. There are other examples of metaphor in the poem, and they're pretty easy to spot once you get the hang of it, so I'd encourage you to search Marlowe's verse for more examples.
No comments:
Post a Comment