Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,
With silken lines, and silver hooks.

These lines open John Donne’s poem “The Bait,” a witty, skeptical reworking of Christopher Marlowe’s pastoral invitation “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (“Come live with me and be my love”). Donne adapts the familiar carpe-diem love-lyric into a metaphysical conceit: the speaker offers not only idyllic pleasures—“golden sands” and “crystal brooks”—but also the language of angling (“silken lines,” “silver hooks”), hinting that courtship can resemble fishing, with allure and entrapment intertwined. The poem belongs to Donne’s early secular verse, circulating in manuscript before later print publication.

On the surface, the speaker reprises the conventional pastoral seduction: an invitation to escape into an ideal landscape of abundance and leisure. Donne’s twist lies in the bait-and-hook imagery: love is presented as both pleasure and strategy, where beauty and promises function as lures. The “silken lines” and “silver hooks” suggest refinement and luxury, yet they also imply capture, complicating the innocence of the pastoral scene. By echoing Marlowe, Donne signals that he is answering a literary tradition as much as wooing a beloved—turning a straightforward invitation into a meditation on desire, persuasion, and the power dynamics of attraction.