Ah yes, but the Passionate Shepherd was proposing marriage; Marvell was proposing an affair.
Therein lies the difference.
Marvell's pitch was -- "Let's eat, drink, and bed down together, for tomorrow we die." We do not have his Coy Mistress's reply.
In the case of the Passionate Shepherd, we have both the reply -- and the proposal (courtesy of Christopher Marlowe):
Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields......
etc., etc., etc.
The nymph, looking ahead to housework and middle age and the hard lot of a shepherd's wife, declines. But if she had been offered a one-night fling, under a beech tree on the first of May, who knows?
jbe
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