Speaker

The speaker of the poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” by Christopher Marlowe is a shepherd. We know the speaker is a man from the use of the possessive adjective “his” from the title. 

The speaker is unnamed and, throughout the poem, he does not describe himself. Instead, the speaker presents the promises he makes to his lover to convince them to come and live with him. The speaker only uses the personal pronoun “I” once throughout the text, when he is telling his lover about all the things he will make for them: “And I will make thee” (l. 9). This shows that the focus of the poem is not the speaker but the receiver: the lover.

Throughout the poem, the speaker presents an idyllic  picture of life in the countryside as a shepherd: 

Seeing the Sheph...