Renaissance Poetry Test Format Example: Why so pale and wan, fond lover? Prithee, why so pale? Title: Song Poet: John Suckling • This poem by John Suckling, a cavalier poet, demonstrates a favorite theme of Elizabethan times—unrequited love. In this poem, the speaker queries his friend, who displays the conventional Petrarchan symptoms of a love-sick man—paleness, weakness, muteness, dullness. It ends in an ironic twist declaring that if the lover’s suffering will not change the woman’s mind, then she should go to the devil. This is a light-hearted treatment of a theme that others such as Sidney treated with a more serious tone. • • • • If all the world and love were young And truth in every shepherd’s tongue These pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee, and be thy love Poem: The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd Poet: Sir Walter Raleigh • This poem is a response to Christopher Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love.” The original poem was an invitation to enjoy the pleasures of nature with the shepherd, making the poem a pastoral one. This response with the nymph as the speaker is a negative one with the theme that time destroys natural items. The response is written in 4-line stanzas echoing the original form in form and in subject.