56-) English Literature

56-) English Literature

Robert Herrick

Robert Herrick  , (baptized August 24, 1591, London, England—died October 1674, Dean Prior, Devonshire) was a 17th-century English lyric poet and Anglican cleric, the most original of the “sons of Ben [Jonson],” who revived the spirit of the ancient classic lyric. He is best known for Hesperides, a book of poems. This includes the carpe diem poem "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time", with the first line "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may" and he is counted among the Cavalier poets.

Early life

Born in Cheapside, London , Robert Herrick, baptized on August 24, 1591, was the seventh child and fourth son of Nicholas Herrick, a prosperous goldsmith and Julian (or Juliana or Julia) Stone Herrick . He was named after an uncle, Robert Herrick (or Heyrick) , a prosperous Member of Parliament (MP) for Leicester, who had bought the land Greyfriars Abbey stood on after Henry VIII's dissolution in the mid-16th century. He was little more than 14 months old when his father apparently committed suicide by “falling” from an upper story window of his house in Cheapside on November 9, 1592. Nicholas Herrick died in a fall from a fourth-floor window in November 1592, when Robert was a year old (whether this was suicide remains unclear).[His mother never remarried, and it seems more than a coincidence that father figures would loom large in the poet’s Hesperides. One of that collection’s best-known works, for example, is “To the reverend shade of his religious Father,” in which Herrick resurrects his father by eternizing him in poetry: “For my life mortall, Rise from out thy Herse, / And take a life immortal from my Verse.”

The tradition that Herrick received his education at Westminster is based on the words "beloved Westminster" in his poem "Tears to Thamesis", but the allusion is to the city, not the school. It is more likely that he, like his uncle's children, attended The Merchant Taylors' School. In 1607 he became apprenticed to his other uncle, Sir William Herrick, a goldsmith and jeweller to the king. The apprenticeship ended after only six years, when Herrick, aged 22, gained admission at St John's College, Cambridge. He later migrated to Trinity Hall, graduating in 1617. Herrick became a member of the Sons of Ben, a group centred on an admiration for the works of Ben Jonson, to whom he wrote at least five poems. Herrick was ordained into the Church of England in 1623 and in 1629 became the vicar of Dean Prior in Devonshire.

As a boy, Herrick was apprenticed to his uncle, Sir William Herrick, a prosperous and influential goldsmith. In 1613 he went to the University of Cambridge, graduating in 1617. He took his M.A. in 1620 and was ordained in 1623. He then lived for a time in London, cultivating the society of the city’s wits, enlarging his acquaintance with writers (Ben Jonson being the most prominent) and musicians, and enjoying the round of court society. In 1627 he went as a chaplain to the duke of Buckingham on the military expedition to the Île de Ré to relieve La Rochelle from the French Protestants. He was presented with the living of Dean Prior (1629), where he remained for the rest of his life, except when, because of his Royalist sympathies, he was deprived of his post from 1646 until after the Restoration (1660).

By age 16 Herrick was apprenticed to his uncle, but apparently found either Sir William Herrick or the goldsmith trade incompatible, for the ten-year apprenticeship was terminated after six years. At the comparatively advanced age of 22, Herrick matriculated at Saint John’s College, Cambridge. Although his Hesperides would include a large number of commendatory poems to various relatives, none is addressed to Sir William. Extant, however, are 14 letters from young “Robin” to his uncle: full of filial humility, all ask for money out of the nephew’s own inheritance, which was apparently still controlled by Sir William. Limited means would eventually force Herrick to transfer to a less expensive college, Trinity Hall.

Between his graduation from Cambridge in 1617 and his appointment, 12 years later, as vicar of Dean Prior in Devonshire, tantalizingly little is known about Herrick’s life. It is almost certain, however, that some of this time was spent in London, where the budding poet at last found a surrogate father who lived up to his expectations, Ben Jonson. Paterfamilias to “the sons of Ben,” eminent poet, dramatist, actor, man of letters, London’s literary lion, Jonson became the subject of five of Herrick’s poems. Although all of the poems praise Jonson as an artist, the first two to appear in Hesperides, “Upon Master Ben. Johnson. Epigram” and “Another,” are not without ambivalence toward yet another “father” who has died (1637) and left his “son” behind. In the gently humorous “His Prayer to Ben Jonson,” Herrick implicitly promises the kind of “life immortal” (through his poem) that he had explicitly promised Nicholas Herrick in “To the reverend shade of his religious Father.” The poet’s ultimate contentment in his role as a “son of Ben” finds expression in the formality of his epitaph “Upon Ben Jonson” and in the intimacy and nostalgia of “An Ode for him.”

Civil War

In 1647, in the wake of the English Civil War, Herrick was ejected from his vicarage for refusing the Solemn League and Covenant. He returned to London to live in Westminster and depend on the charity of his friends and family. He spent some time preparing his lyric poems for publication and had them printed in 1648 under the title Hesperides; or the Works both Human and Divine of Robert Herrick, with a dedication to the Prince of Wales.

Restoration and later life

When King Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, Herrick petitioned for his own restoration to his living. He had obtained favour by writing verses celebrating the births of both Charles II and his brother James before the Civil War. Herrick became the vicar of Dean Prior again in the summer of 1662 and lived there until his death in October 1674, at the age of 83. His date of death is unknown, but he was buried on 15 October.

Herrick was a bachelor all his life. Many of the women he names in his poems are thought to be fictional [by whom?].