The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, the Freudian way

This poem of Marlowe was introduced to us as an example of a Pastoral Poetry , but little did we know that the poem contains repressed desires, sexual innuendos and imageries when viewed upon the lens that of a Freudian’s.

The title itself is already intriguing. The word “passionate” is such a strong word that suggests extreme emotions describing the man who pleads with a woman. It was seconded by the first line of the poem that imbues a pleasure-seeking behavior of the man. He is not asking for the woman to marry him but only to live with him as to “Come live with me and be my love”. Marlowe being an Elizabethan (a period that exhibits romantic luxuriance) writer is sending a connotation that the woman is being invited to come and make love. Clearly, there is no declaration of love implied in the first line. The man only has this ardent desire to possess the woman sexually that is why she was invited.

The next line mentions, “That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields“. In this line, the man promises the woman to experience pleasure in those locations. For the Shepherd, it appears to him that his expectation is that the pleasures of the world are principally sexual. There’s also a resemblance of those locations mentioned to that of a woman’s body. When the man speaks of pleasure, he actually thinks of the woman’s body that he will yield for. 

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

And the man continues wooing the woman. We can paint from the lines quoted above the lovers’ sexual activities promised if only the woman accepts the man’s invitation. The “rock” describes the man’s horniness, of him getting hard, and when we say “rock”, it can also entail the moving back and forth of the couples in a sexual intercourse.
When the “shepherd feeds his flock”, it’s the woman –deepthroating- him moving his’ all the way to her mouth. The “river” is the fluids in motion during the intercourse. The“melodious birds singing madrigals” is the noise of passion or pleasure spoken or shouted by someone during sex. 

There was also a mention of the word “flowers” which in the freudian’s lense associates it to the woman’s vagina. The bed, whom for all we know provides comfort to us can become evenly romantic when described as a bed filled with roses, or “the bed of roses”. It arrays pleasant different sexual positions giving not only comfort but satisfaction as well.

There was also this dramatic scene in a sexual act when a man slowly undresses a woman piece by piece until only the skin is left to be seen that glitters like “purest gold”.

Lastly, the last stanza of the poem shows how the man lives out his fantasies through a woman that he’d do anything to the extent of promising the improbable and impossible just to get the woman’s affirmation of coming with him. "Come live with me and be my love" was mentioned in the poem for 2 times but the woman’s response was never heard in the poem. Could this be that the woman charges the highest possible price for sex?


JESSICA SERRANO
JOHN HENRY DELIG
BEEN3