The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd Themes
Man and the Natural World
Nature certainly has a big role to play in this poem, and it's not exactly complementary to man's existence. In "The Nymph's Reply," nature is a constant reminder that death is all around us. Nice,...
Immortality
For someone with her head decidedly out of the clouds, the nymph in "The Nymph's Reply" spends an awful lot of time hypothesizing about what her life would be like if "youth could last" (21) and "a...
Time
We get the feeling that, much like the crocodile from Peter Pan, time is stalking our speaker. "The Nymph's Reply" is full of references to the inevitability of time, seasonal change, and eventual...
Foolishness and Folly
You know how everyone has that one friend who loves to "act a fool"? Yeah, the nymph in "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" is definitely not that friend. In fact, she seems downright determined to...