Essay on The Pessimistic Nymph

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The Pessimistic Nymph In the poem “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”, the nymph rejects the shepherd’s offer to be her lover because all the things the shepherd is offering will soon wither away. Whether it is the love he offers or the material things he promises her, she doesn’t buy into the shepherd’s ideals of what their love could be. The pessimistic respond of the nymph continues all throughout the poem except for the last stanza where she mentions that perhaps their love could work if existence wasn’t so complicated but even then she gives the shepherd a standard that could never be achieved. The nymph is well aware that the love the shepherd promises her can’t last forever. In the first stanza the nymph talks about love not being immortal, “If all the world and love were young”. She makes it clear that love peters away; it doesn’t have the same amount of passion as it does in the beginning. She also mentions the seasons to get her point across, “Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall”. Just like the seasons their love could not be everlasting, soon troubles would inevitably creep in. What the shepherd is offering is not realistic to what a relationship is really like. In a sense the nymph’s personal view of what love is really like do not match up with the shepherd’s romantic view because the shepherd acts on passion and not reason. The nymph also says that all the material things the shepherd is offering her are only going to last for a short period of time. “They cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten: In folly ripe, in reason rotten”. She is well aware that the shepherd is offering her all these things while he is in a euphoric state of love. She’s basically pointing out that his euphoric state won’t last forever, eventually reality will have to set in and all of the material things he promised will be long gone and forgotten. Latter on she expresses that she’s not impressed by the shepherd’s offerings of more material things, “Thy belt of straw and Ivy buds, The Coral clasps and amber studs, all these in me no mean can move to come to thee and be thy
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