Outer composition

The poem “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” by Sir Walter Raleigh consists of six stanzas, each having four lines or verses. The verses rhyme in couplets, two by two (aabb), for instance:

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 by thy love. (ll. 1-4)

The poem’s outer composition imitates that of Christopher Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love”. Both poems have six stanzas and five verses and their rhyming patterns are the same. Read together, the two poems form a dialogue in which two characters address each other, with the shepherd making promises and the nymph refusing his proposal and offering reasons why she cannot accept. 

The first and the last stanzas contain the actual answer to the sh...