57-) English Literature
Ribert Herrick
Poetic
style and stature
The
influence of Ben Jonson, however, goes beyond these poetic tributes. More than
any of the other “sons,” Herrick follows Jonson’s prescription for “writing
well.” For example, Jonson recommended reading “the best Authors,” particularly
“the Ancients,” and Herrick has long been recognized for his more than nodding
acquaintance with the works of classical writers such as the legendary Greek
poet of wine, women, and song, Anacreon; and with Roman poets, especially
Horace and Martial, but also Catullus, Tibullus, and Ovid (all of whom Herrick
mentions, quotes, or borrows from). Although the ancients and the best moderns
must be employed as models, Jonson counseled, the aspiring poet’s own
sensibility should be imposed on the borrowed subjects, themes, and styles.
This injunction Herrick also obeys—in “Anacreontike,” for example—in scores of
classically styled epigrams, epitaphs, odes, and lyrics, and even in imitations
of Jonson himself such as “Delight in Disorder.” Jonson was also a strong
proponent of revision, and thus Herrick, in “His request to Julia,” writes, “Better
‘twere my Book were dead, / Then to live not perfected.” Jonson finally
admitted, however, that one cannot be a poet without endowments such as
“nature,” genius or talent, and “art,” the kind of craftsmanship that can
transform the stuff of human life into poetry. The endurance of Herrick’s work
and the growth of his reputation demonstrate that he possessed both.
Herrick
became well known as a poet about 1620–30; many manuscript commonplace books
from that time contain his poems. The only book that Herrick published was
Hesperides (1648), which included His Noble Numbers, a collection of poems on
religious subjects with its own title page dated 1647 but not previously
printed. Hesperides contained about 1,400 poems, mostly very short, many of
them being brief epigrams. His work appeared after that in miscellanies and
songbooks; the 17th-century English composer Henry Lawes and others set some of
his songs.
Herrick
wrote elegies, satires, epigrams, love songs to imaginary mistresses, marriage
songs, complimentary verse to friends and patrons, and celebrations of rustic
and ecclesiastical festivals. The appeal of his poetry lies in its truth to
human sentiments and its perfection of form and style. Frequently light,
worldly, and hedonistic and making few pretensions to intellectual profundity,
it yet covers a wide range of subjects and emotions, ranging from lyrics
inspired by rural life to wistful evocations of life and love’s evanescence and
fleeting beauty. Herrick’s lyrics are notable for their technical mastery and
the interplay of thought, rhythm, and imagery that they display. As such, they
are typical of the Cavalier poets, a group identifiable by its politics—loyal
to Charles I during the English Civil Wars—and the distinct tone and style of
its members’ verse. As a poet, Herrick was steeped in the classical tradition;
he was also influenced by English folklore and lyrics, by Italian madrigals, by
the Bible and patristic literature, and by contemporary English writers,
notably Jonson and Robert Burton.
Almost
forgotten in the 18th century, and in the 19th century alternately applauded
for his poetry’s lyricism and condemned for its “obscenities,” Robert Herrick
is, in the latter half of the 20th century, finally becoming recognized as one
of the most accomplished nondramatic poets of his age. Long dismissed as merely
a “minor poet” and, as a consequence, neglected or underestimated by scholars
and critics, the achievement represented by his only book, the collection of
poems entitled Hesperides: Or, The Works Both Humane & Divine (1648), is
gradually coming to be more fully appreciated. While some of his individual
poems—“To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” and
“Corinna’s going a Maying,” for example—are among the most popular of all time,
recent examinations of his Hesperides as a whole have begun to reveal a Herrick
whose artistry in the arrangement of his volume approximates the artistry of
his individual works and whose sensibility is complex but coherent, subtle as
well as substantive. In short, Robert Herrick, who was proud to be one of “the
Sons of Ben,” has begun to be seen, along with his literary father Ben Jonson,
as one of the most noteworthy figures of early-17th-century English poetry.
Herrick
wrote over 2,500 poems, about half of which appear in his major work,
Hesperides. Hesperides also includes the much shorter Noble Numbers, his first
book of spiritual works, first published in 1648. He is well known for his
style, and in his earlier works for frequent references to lovemaking and the
female body. His later poetry was of a more spiritual and philosophical nature.
Among his most famous short poetical sayings are the unique monometers, such as
number 475, "Thus I / Pass by / And die,/ As one / Unknown / And gone."
Herrick
sets out his subject-matter in the poem he printed at the beginning of his
collection, "The Argument of his Book". He dealt with English country
life and its seasons, village customs, complimentary poems to various ladies
and his friends, themes taken from classical writings, and a solid bedrock of
Christian faith, not intellectualized but underpinning the rest. It has been
said of Herrick's style that "his directness of speech with clear and
simple presentation of thought, a fine artist working with conscious knowledge
of his art, of an England of his youth in which he lives and moves and loves,
clearly assigns him to the first place as a lyrical poet in the strict and pure
sense of the phrase."
Herrick
never married and none of his love poems seems to connect directly with any one
woman. He loved the richness of sensuality and the variety of life. This
appears vividly in such poems as "Cherry-ripe", "Delight in
Disorder" and "Upon Julia's Clothes".
The
overriding message in Herrick's work is that life is short, the world beautiful
and love splendid. We must use the short time we have to make the most of it.
This message is clear in "To the Virgins, to make much of Time",
"To Daffodils", "To Blossoms" and "Corinna's Going A
Maying", where the warmth and exuberance of a seemingly kind and jovial
personality comes over.
The
opening stanza in one of his more famous poems, "To the Virgins, to Make
Much of Time", runs:
Gather
ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old
Time is still a-flying;
And
this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow
will be dying.
This
is an example of the carpe diem genre, whose popularity Herrick's poems helped
to revive.
His
poems were none too popular on publication. A style influenced by Ben Jonson,
the classical Roman writers and the late Elizabethan era must have seemed
old-fashioned to an audience tuned to the complexities of metaphysical poets
such as John Donne and Andrew Marvell. His work was rediscovered in the early
19th century and has been regularly printed since.[9]
The
Victorian poet Swinburne described Herrick as "the greatest song writer
ever born of English race".[10] Despite his use of classical allusions and
names, Herrick's poems are easier for modern readers than those of many of his
contemporaries.
In
1623 Herrick took holy orders, though there is no record of his being assigned
to any particular parish. This step, at the mature age of 32, may indicate that
he was unable to find preferment elsewhere. As a poet, however, public
recognition would come his way in the form of a generous mention in Richard
James’s The Muses Dirge (1625). Despite this tribute and Herrick’s evident itch
for literary fame, his name did not by any means become a household word during
his long lifetime.
The
next record of Herrick’s activities is from 1627, when he became one of the
several chaplains who accompanied George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, in
a crusade to liberate French Protestants on the Isle of Rhé. A disastrous
combination of illness among the troops, effective military action by the
French, and a storm at sea while Buckingham’s ships were retreating to England
resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the expedition. Small wonder that shortly
thereafter, in 1629, Herrick exchanged a life of danger for one of apparent
safety by accepting a nomination to the vicarage of Dean Prior, a hamlet in
Devonshire, far to the southwest of London.
He
was installed as vicar on October 29, 1630. To become a country parson at age
39 had to have been a radical change from Herrick’s former life among literati,
courtiers, and assorted military adventurers. The part of the West Country to
which his new calling took him is even now largely rural: in the 17th century
it was remote in the extreme. In 1630 the two nearest cities of size, Exeter to
the northeast and Plymouth to the southwest, would both have been nearly a
day’s ride away. The capital was a five-day journey. Herrick’s church, of Saint
George the Martyr (which still stands), though attractive, was modest, and the
adjacent vicarage (portions of which have been incorporated into the existing
dwelling) was more modest still.
Herrick
may have expected this post to be temporary. He had, after all, highly placed
friends. Moreover (although their dating is not certain), works of his such as
“A Christmas Caroll” and “The New-yeeres Gift” would be set to music by the
well-known musician Henry Lawes and sung before King Charles I. Herrick also
cultivated the royal family with a series of flattering poems. Indeed, the
king, though he was nine years younger than Herrick, emerges in Hesperides as
yet another father figure. In the encomium “To the King, Upon comming with his
Army into the West, through a conflation of paternal archetypes Charles is
presented as a tutelary deity, a husband, and a conquering hero. The king’s
declining fortunes in the 1640s, however, must have made it difficult to
sustain faith in his power and in his capacity to protect and nurture, to be a
father to his subjects. As intimated by Herrick’s body of religious verse, His
Noble Numbers (published with Hesperides), the needs that his natural and other
fathers were unable to meet he comes to find in his Heavenly Father.
Herrick
served as vicar of Dean Prior for 31 years with some interruptions. Herrick was
every inch the Royalist (as his panegyrics to Charles I and Charles, Prince of
Wales, make evident) and, if his religious poems are any indication, a rather
traditional Anglican, even though he resided in a part of the country strongly
sympathetic to the Puritan cause and, during the Civil War, to the
parliamentary forces. Such parsons were anathema to the victorious Puritans,
and in 1647 the poet was among the 142 Devonshire clergymen expelled from their
parishes for their convictions. Returning to his post during the Restoration,
Herrick served for 14 more years until his death at the end of harvest season
in 1674.
About
his expulsion Herrick must have had mixed feelings. He was, after all, a
Londoner born and bred, university educated, and friend and acquaintance to
some of the political and cultural powers of the land. In a poem with the
explicitly autobiographical title of “To Dean-bourn, a rude river in Devon, by
which sometimes he lived” (which may have been occasioned by his expulsion)
Herrick rails, first, against the countryside, symbolized by this small stream:
Dean-bourn,
farewell; I never look to see
Deane,
or thy warty incivility.
Thy
rockie bottome, that doth teare thy streams,
And
makes them frantick, ev’n to all extreames;
To
my content, I never sho’d behold,
Were
thy streames silver, or thy rocks all gold.
Clearly,
more than a river is on the poet’s mind:
Rockie
thou art; and rockie we discover
Thy
men; and rockie are thy wayes all over.
O
men, O manners; Now, and ever knowne
To
be A Rockie Generation!
A
people currish; churlish as the seas;
And
rude (almost) as rudest Salvages.
With
whom I did, and may re-sojourne when
Rockes
turn to Rivers, Rivers turn to Men.
What
the poem deplores is the primitiveness, not only of the countryside but of the
people themselves, who represent nature unimproved by art—that is, by
civilization and culture.
Another
poem possibly inspired by Herrick’s enforced departure from the West Country is
“His Return to London.” Here the emphasis shifts from the misery of time spent
in “the dull confines of the drooping West” to the joys of London, “blest place
of my Nativitie!” London is England’s Rome—“O Place! O People! Manners! fram’d
to please”—and Herrick’s “home.” Herrick does not consider himself banished
from Dean Prior; he was banished to it: “by hard fate sent / Into a long and
irksome banishment.” He would rather die than return to Devonshire, and he asks
that his “sacred Reliques” be buried in London.
Either
these poems represent the artistic advantages of poetic license or Herrick
changed his mind: in 1660 he personally petitioned to be returned to his former
vicarage in “the drooping West,” and that petition was granted. There is a good
deal of evidence that Herrick was in fact employing exaggeration for poetic
effect in “To Deanbourn” and “His Return to London.” His attitude toward
country life, like his attitudes on a wealth of topics (love and women,
government, social class, even religion and poetry), was creatively ambivalent,
as his well-known epigram “Discontents in Devon” demonstrates:
More
discontents I never had
Since
I was born, then here;
Where
I have been, and still am sad,
In
this dull Devon-shire:
Yet
justly too I must confesse;
I
ne’r invented such
Ennobled
numbers for the Presse,
Then
where I loath’d so much.
Musing
on the mystery of creativity, on the relationship between milieu and
productivity (as this most self-conscious poet does more than once), he has to
conclude that for Robert Herrick the poet country life cannot be all bad. Even
this grudging admission does not begin to suggest the vision of art and life
that emerges from the more than 1,400 poems of Herrick’s Hesperides. This fact,
plus the very number and variety of these poems, as well as their arrangement
(and thus their relationships to each other), make the issue of how Herrick’s
book should be approached a crucial one.
Today
most readers encounter Herrick in anthology selections. That is, in a sense,
how he was first read, in the days when a limited number of his poems
circulated in manuscript. When he collected his oeuvre for publication,
however, he clearly had something else in mind. He seems to have been the first
poet—and still the only important poet—to gather practically all of his verses
into one elaborately designed volume and see it through the presses. From the
beginning of that volume Herrick makes it plain that he expects his audience to
read his entire book, to read it in the order in which it is printed, and,
above all, to read it with understanding and appreciation. Then as now, such an
understanding and appreciation require that the reader develop some kind of
approach to the text, and here Herrick volunteers his services.
Hesperides
is the only major collection of poetry in English to open with a versified
table of contents. This guide hints strongly at what type of poet Herrick
thinks he is, and thus, by implication, how his book is to be approached. “The
Argument of his Book” begins, “I Sing”—suggesting Herrick sees himself as a
lyric poet—“of Brooks, of Blossomes, Birds, and Bowers: / Of April, May, of
June, and July-Flowers”—suggesting he is also a pastoral poet. Pastoral poets,
of course, valorize a life lived close to the beauties of nature (often
opposing it to life lived in the decadent city) and idealize that life by
focusing on the countryside in its most benign seasons. Elsewhere in Hesperides
there is ample warrant for approaching Herrick as a pastoral poet, even though
not all nor even most of his poems can be classified as bucolic.
Another
approach to Herrick’s collection, however, may be hinted at in succeeding lines
of “The Argument of his Book”: “I sing of May-poles, Hock-carts, Wassails,
Wakes, / Of Bride-grooms, Brides, and of their Bridall-Cakes.” Maypoles and
hockcarts (wagons in which the last fruits of the harvest are brought in) suggest
English country life and, consequently, domesticated (rather than Greek, Roman,
or biblical) pastoral. Love, of course, is also a common subject of bucolic
poetry, but all of the images in these particular lines also have to do with
ceremonies—special, often sanctified, events that figure importantly in human
life and are fraught with significance as well as emotion. Poetry, or at least
the reading of it, can be thought of as a kind of ritual, so perhaps Herrick is
indicating here that he is a poet of ceremony and a ceremonial poet. Elsewhere
in Hesperides there is warrant for taking this approach as well. Lines 5 and 6
of Herrick’s “Argument” begin with a different phrase, “I write”—less
suggestive of a lyric poet—“of Youth, of Love, and have Accesse / By these, to
sing of cleanly-Wantonnesse.” Although youth, love, and sex (Herrick’s
memorable phrase suggests sex without sin, something of a novel notion in the
17th century) have traditionally been subjects of lyric poetry, “I write” may
hint at the hundreds of epigrams on amatory themes and the score of other
subjects that are scattered throughout Hesperides. A productive approach to
Herrick’s collection must also accommodate these short, pithy poems that treat
something other than bucolic or ceremonial themes.
In
the remainder of “The Argument” Herrick indexes his other subjects—some
natural, such as “Dewes” and “Raines, “Spice, and Amber-Greece,” some
philosophical, such as transiency (“Times transshifting”), and some
supernatural, such as “the Fairie-King.” Herrick concludes by announcing that
he is also a religious poet and a Christian man: “I write of Hell; I sing (and
ever shall) / Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.” Herrick’s list is by
no means exhaustive. He does not tell the reader that Hesperides includes
political poems, ranging from flattering portraits of royalty and nobility to
acerbic comments on government officials, practices, and policies. Nor does
Herrick forewarn the reader that the collection also includes shockingly
naturalistic, even scatological, epigrams. He also does not reveal that
Hesperides is historically and morally grounded in numerous poems that pay
tribute to an assortment of relatives, friends, and patrons (much as his
“Father Jonson” so often did) by transforming them into representations of a
Christian-humanistic ethos. In addition, Herrick only hints at the existence of
his poems of the good life, works that, in the Cavalier tradition, celebrate
friendship and sociability, the pleasures of fine food and drink, of conviviality
in general.
The
poet’s more sober, philosophical vein, which surfaces in so many of the most
important works in Hesperides, is signaled by the memorable phrase “Times
trans-shifting”—the notion that everything that lives is subject to temporality
and flux. Decline and death are inevitable. Though a Christian priest, Herrick
is capable of contemplating death without transfiguration, seeing the grave as
the end of all that is good, as ultimate oblivion, nothingness. He views this
grim possibility with equanimity, with a poise that is intellectual as well as
emotional. Like the classical Stoic, he responds to the prospect of his
inevitable death by affirming life, but life lived modestly and taken as it
comes, the bad with the good. Like the serious Epicurean, Herrick seeks to
maximize pleasure and minimize pain by following the classical principle of
moderation. Even the good life, in Herrick’s vision, tends to be scaled down to
modest expectations: love and friendship, good food and drink, ordinary
pastimes, and, above all, poetry.
Although
he is not always solemn, Herrick is often serious, and he takes “good verses”
seriously indeed. No English poet of importance is so involved in writing
poetry about poetry, about its readers, about poets, and about himself as a
poet. Self-referential poems interspersed throughout Hesperides are among the
book’s most memorable. Some are self-presentations: for example, “The bad
season makes the poet sad” shows Herrick pondering why the Civil War has
stifled his creativity, and “Upon his Verses” slyly declares that (unlike some
poets) he is no plagiarist. At times Herrick waxes philosophical, contemplating
the relationship between life and art metaphorically in “Delight in Disorder,”
for instance, or avuncular, as when he leaves to posterity his “Lyrick for
Legacies.”
Posterity,
in fact, is much on Herrick’s mind. Time and time again he reiterates his faith
in “the eternizing power of poetry.” This theme combines his poems about poetry
with his neo-Stoical vein: since, as the title of one epigram proclaims,
“Poetry perpetuates the poet,” as well as the poet’s subjects, Herrick can
triumph over “Times trans-shifting” and live beyond death through his verses.
Hesperides thus becomes his eternal monument, preserving his name and his fame
forever:
Trust
to good Verses, then;
They
onley will aspire,
When
Pyramids, as men,
Are
lost, i’th’ funerall fire.
The
title of the poem in which these lines appear, “To Live Merrily, and to Trust
to Good Verses,” has sometimes been regarded as encapsulating the spirit of
Hesperides. Such a view is too reductive to be entirely valid, but also too
much in the neighborhood of the truth to be dismissed out of hand. Herrick
exhibits an almost Roman gusto for the good life, and to such a life poetry is
central. Poetry, however, is also connected with death, or with the denial of
death.
For
Herrick poetry becomes a secular religion and the symbolic foundation of
Hesperides. The last work in the collection is a pattern poem in the shape of a
classical column, “The Pillar of Fame.” On this pillar made of words Herrick’s
collected “humane works” symbolically rest, just as Herrick’s art is grounded
in the belief that it can secure eternal fame for him, be a monument
“Out-during Marble, Brasse, or Jet.” It is not an entirely misplaced belief:
Robert Herrick, the obscure country parson and sometime poet, today is better
known than most of the famous and infamous of his age.
Herrick
never married, and literary gossips have reveled in speculations about the
identities of the 14 “mistresses” (in the 17th century, inamoratas, lady
friends, or merely admired acquaintances) to whom he addressed 158 poems.
Whether they were flesh and blood or, as modern consensus has it, pretty
fictions, is of little consequence: Herrick is only conforming to the common
poetic practice of the time when he addresses his uniformly young and beautiful
Julias, Corinnas, and Antheas. Where he does not conform is in his penning of
romantic verses to identifiable women whose real names he supplies—for example,
Elizabeth Wheeler, Lettice Yard, and Katherine Bradshaw. His poems to these
flesh-and-blood, well-born ladies, however, tend to be more “cleanly” than
“wanton.”
Herrick’s
love poetry ranges from the bawdy (“The Vine”) to the neo-Petrarchan (“To
Anthea, who may command him anything”). That range, but also Herrick’s
normative representation of love, makes “cleanly-Wantonnesse” an apt phrase to
characterize his amatory verses. The phrase suggests an accommodation between
nature and civilization, between life and art, and between the romantic and the
sexual that reflects Herrick’s inclination toward the via media.
In
addition to the love complaints and celebrations of the mistress so common to
17th-century love poetry, Herrick also treats subjects readers might think of
as “modern.” For example, one poem, frequently anthologized, is “Upon Julia’s
Clothes”:
When
as in silks my Julia goes,
Then,
then (me thinks) how sweetly flowes
That
liquefaction of her clothes.
Next,
when I cast mine eyes and see
That
brave Vibration each way free;
O
how that glittering taketh me!
Herrick
also brings his “invention” to bear upon more traditional forms of love poetry.
For example, in “To Phillis to love and live with him,” he avoids much of what
had become the clichés of the invitation-to-love by shifting the scene of this
pastoral subgenre indoors and having the lover woo the lady with citified
gifts. Another pastoral invitation-poem with a difference, “Corinna’s going a
Maying,” is one of Herrick’s most admired work. Here the lady is being seduced
out of bed to join in the ceremonies of May Day, when the town goes into the
country to gather greenery, thereby transforming the country into the town and
vice versa. What makes the poem most memorable is its final stanza, where
Herrick, with his customary Stoic realism, reminds Corinna (and his reader)
that, as creatures of nature, we are all subject to time, that time flies, and
thus youth and love are not forever:
Come,
let us goe, while we are in our prime;
And
take the harmlesse follie of the time.
We shall grow old apace, and die
Before we know our liberty.
Our life is short; and our dayes run
As fast away as do’s the Sunne;
And
as a vapour, or a drop of raine
Once
lost, can ne’r be found againe :
So when or you or I are made
A fable, song, or fleeting shade;
All love, all liking, all delight
Lies drown’d with us in endlesse night.
Then
while time serves, and we are but decaying;
Come,
my Corinna, come, let’s goe a Maying.
It
is but another step to the grim vision of Andrew Marvell’s “To his Coy
Mistress,” which likewise denies that love can offer transcendence
Critical
consensus holds that Herrick is also particularly successful in the genre of
the marriage poem. He wrote two of them, both for actual weddings, and they are
among the longest and most ambitious of his efforts. Both are ceremonial works
in a dual sense: they depict and elevate the rituals that follow the marriage
service and, as ceremonial works themselves, they participate in those rituals.
“A Nuptiall Song” is especially noteworthy for its intricate prosody, lush
imagery, and humor combined with pathos. The poet who lived a single life and
revealed in “No spouse but a Sister” that he could be more than a little
cynical about wedded bliss—
A
Bachelour I will
Live
as I have liv’d still,
And
never take a wife
To
crucifie my life
—also
waxed eloquent about other people’s weddings and even acknowledge the
possibility of a “pleasing wife.” The latter phrase comes from a poem entitled
“His age,” in which Herrick fantasizes himself not only old, but married with a
son. He imagines his “young / Iülus” singing and reading his father’s love
lyrics, eventually leading “old” Herrick to conclude that, when all is said and
done, “No lust there’s like to Poetry.”
Herrick’s
invention is notable too in that poetic mode with which he most identifies
himself, the pastoral. He can write the most conventional sort of Arcadian
dialogue, but is more likely, to take his classical models and English them, as
he does in “The Country life.” This poem, addressed to his high-ranking friend
and patron, Endymion Porter, after drawing a conventional contrast between the
“Sweet Country life” and the frantic existence to be found in “Courts, and
Cities,” goes on to follow Porter as he makes the rounds of his rural estate.
Here classical images of “enameld Meads” (picture-perfect meadows) and piping
shepherds are mixed with more familiar vignettes, such as a whistling plowman,
and native English pastimes such as the “Morris-dance.”
In
the similarly titled “A Country life,” another Anglicized pastoral, Herrick
praises his older brother Thomas for being one who “Could’st leave the City,
for exchange, to see / The Countries sweet simplicity.” The poem, indeed,
advises practicing rural simplicity and cultivating rural innocence, and it
gradually develops an ethos of as well as a prescription for the good life.
Herrick describes his brother as a person who possesses a good conscience, who
understands and applies the principle of moderation in all things, including
love. In aphorism after aphorism Herrick builds up the kind of portrait of the
ideal person that his ethical epigrams and personal encomiums also paint. Such
a person should be Stoical, like Thomas—“thou liv’st fearlesse; and thy face
ne’r shewes / Fortune when she comes or goes”—and should be satisfied with what
the countryside affords, for “Content makes all Ambrosia.” Amid such familiar
English sounds as “singing Crickits by thy fire” and English sights such as a “green-ey’d
Kitling” chasing a “brisk Mouse,” Thomas realizes that “Wealth cannot make a
life, but Love.” Such aphorisms, embedded in a pastoral-advisive poem, indicate
how Herrick synthesizes his bucolic, ritualistic, and epigrammatic strains.
Most
pastoral poets tend to be city types nostalgic for a golden age or for an
impossible rural ideal. Herrick is appreciative of the native English country
culture, but he is at the same time aware of its socioeconomic base. Herrick
explores relationships between social class and perception in the poem entitled
“The Hock-cart, or Harvest home.” This too is a ceremonial as well as a
pastoral work, for not only is its subject a country ritual but the poem itself
is structured like a ritual: as speaker, Herrick serves as the master of the
revels for this celebration of the end of the harvest on the estate of his
friend, the earl of Westmorland. Herrick calls together the farmhands, the
“Sons of Summer,” whose physical labors support their betters (like himself and
Westmorland), and invites the earl to enjoy the sights and sounds of the
various folk rituals. The poet then urges the “brave boys” into the great hall
for a feast and a series of toasts—first, of course, “to your Lords health,”
then “to the Plough (the Common-wealth),” that is, the symbol of the
agricultural economy upon which all subsist. In the very midst of the
festivities, however, Herrick bluntly reminds these laborers that although
they, like oxen, fatten up in this time of plenty, both men and animals must in
the spring go back to working the land. In conclusion Herrick recalls to them
the economic foundations of the master-servant relationship:
And,
you must know, your Lords word’s true,
Feed
him ye must, whose food fils you.
And
that this pleasure is like raine,
Not
sent ye for to drowne your paine ,
But
for to make it spring againe.
This
is real-world pastoral in which landowners and laborers exist in a symbiotic
relationship and holidays help insure that farm work (“your paine”) will resume
when springtime comes.
Herrick
may be the only important English poet to refer to his housemaid in his poetry
(and he does so more than once). Such things do not make the old Royalist a
democrat, but they do say something about his sensibility, which it would be
presumptuous to call “modern.” He recognizes that ordinary people and ordinary
life can be as much the stuff of poetry as great ones and glamour. The poem
goes on to illustrate the principle “What ever comes”—whether it be garden
vegetables, modest housing, freedom from debt, or sound sleep—”content makes
sweet.” The country life is a quiet and private life—”We blesse our Fortunes,
when we see / Our own beloved privacie”—and, for this famestruck poet, one of
surprisingly agreeable anonymity: “[We] like our living, where w’are known / To
very few, or else to none.”
“A
Thanksgiving to God, for his House” is likewise everyday pastoral, this time in
the shape of an informal, rambling, and genial prayer. Herrick’s vicarage
alongside the Exeter-Plymouth road is a “little house, whose humble Roof / Is
weatherproof; / Under the sparres of which I lie / Both soft, and drie.” The
idealized self-image he presents here is one that accords well with this house:
he thanks God for his humility—“Low is my porch, as is my Fate”—for his charity
and hospitality, for simple food such as “my beloved Beet,” for “Wassaile
Bowles to drink,” and for a “teeming Hen” and “healthfull Ewes.” One central
domestic image of universal appeal sums up this poet’s content in the country:
Some
brittle sticks of Thorne or Briar
Make me a fire,
Close
by whose living coale I sit,
And glow like it.
Herrick’s
images allow one to believe that this former university wit, man-about-London,
military veteran, and friend of the great is genuinely thankful for his humble
country living in Dean Prior:
All
these, and better Thou dost send
Me, to this end,
That
I should render, for my part,
A thankfull heart [.]
“A
Thanksgiving to God, for his House” is to be found in Herrick’s collection of
religious poetry, His Noble Numbers: Or, His Pious Pieces, and an overarching
pattern of that collection may help explain why, despite his own protestations,
Herrick returned to his West Country vicarage after the Restoration. Although
bound with the 1648 Hesperides, His Noble Numbers has its own title page
bearing a 1647 date, which suggests that the work may have been intended to be
printed earlier and separately. Whatever the reasons for deciding to combine
the two books, the result was a happy one. Although it has been something of a
critical cliché that this successful secular poet strangely fails as a sacred
one, Herrick is one poet, not two, and his collections are linked thematically,
stylistically, structurally, and by the author’s “unifying personality.” The
neo-Stoicism of the secular verse had since the Middle Ages been seen as
eminently compatible with a Christian ethos, and so it proves to be in both of
Herrick’s collections. Likewise, the pastoral stance of Hesperides reappears in
His Noble Numbers, though less frequently. As might be expected in the case of
religious verse, Herrick’s epigrammatic and ceremonial modes predominate. His
tendency to experiment with the length of his lines and to employ short lines
(more than any other notable English poet) is almost as apparent in His Noble
Numbers as in Hesperides. The majority of the “Pious Pieces,” like the poems in
Hesperides, cannot be dated, but it is reasonable to assume that, just as
Herrick wrote secular verse after he took holy orders, as a good Christian he
probably wrote a certain amount of religious poetry before he became a priest.
Moreover, it is the case that poems in Hesperides, especially those in the
philosophical or meditative modes, can be viewed as pious pieces in the broader
sense of that phrase.
In
contrast to the originality and smooth assuredness of “The Argument of his
Book,” the opening poem of His Noble Numbers is the ritualistic “His
Confession,” which begs God to forgive all of Herrick’s works of “wanton
wit”—the poems, ironically, that would win him his fame. The next poem, “His
Prayer for Absolution,” repeats this refrain, begging pardon for his
“unbaptized Rhimes” (which Herrick nonetheless printed) “Writ in my wild
unhallowed Times.” These retraction-poems express the tension many 17th-century
writers experienced between their desire to write secular verse and their sense
of obligation to their faith.
These
two poems are followed by a series of seven epigrams in which Herrick assumes
the role of theologian (interestingly enough, the vicar of Dean Prior never
explicitly adopts the role of priest in this collection). These succinct poems
paradoxically explore the nature but ultimate unknowability of God. Many of the
sacred epigrams in the collection are theological in nature, some of them quite
abstract and abstruse, thus disproving the view that Herrick’s religion is
“childlike.” Everywhere, the figure of the deity is dominant. In the first
third of His Noble Numbers, God tends to be a remote figure who is both threatening
and benign. Poems in which the Heavenly Father punishes his wicked children far
outnumber those in which he exhibits paternal love. The initial third of
Herrick’s “Pious Pieces” also includes “His Creed,” a poem that, because it
sets forth the most basic Christian doctrine in 16 terse lines—as any versified
catechism should—has led critics who have failed to read carefully all of His
Noble Numbers to characterize the poet’s Christianity as “simplistic.”
The
second third of Herrick’s sacred collection is marked by several ambitious
lyrics on the infant Christ. Indeed, the Son of God figures more prominently in
the middle section than in the first, and the effect is to soften the image of
the Almighty as a punishing father. Consequently, the initial ambivalence about
God expressed early in His Noble Numbers begins to dissipate. The most original
poem in this group, however, “The white Island: or place of the Blest,”
exhibits a mood and tone that are mixed, even elusive. The image of heaven as a
white island seems to have been Herrick’s own, and not all readers will find it
congenial. In contrast to existence on Earth (characterized as “the Isle of
Dreames”), in “that Whiter Island” above, “Things are evermore sincere; /
Candor here, and lustre there / Delighting.” Readers may be forgiven if they
find Herrick’s promises of abstract “Pleasures” and “fresh joyes” unconvincing.
This poem is one of very few in which Herrick’s intentions are unclear,
reminding the reader, perhaps, how of the Earth, earthy, he is.
The
final third of His Noble Numbers, like the rest of the collection, is made up
mainly of sacred epigrams, almost any of which could serve as a kind of
versified “text” on which a sermon could be based. Many of these epigrams, such
as “Predestination,” offer succinct explanations of Christian doctrine or, such
as “Almes,” are advisory or admonitory in nature. More personal is an important
work in this part of the collection, “His meditation upon Death,” whose speaker
sounds very much like the neo-Stoical Herrick of the secular poems—that is, one
who professes to be “content” even if his earthly hours are numbered, and
“indifferent” if a long life lies before him: living well, not long, is the
key. Herrick vows to contemplate his own death every night when he retires, to
“shun the least Temptation to a sin,” and expresses quiet confidence that, if
he dies, he will “rise triumphant in my Funerall.” But what most marks this
final group of religious poems is its emphasis upon a more human and humane
deity. For example, one of several prayers entitled “To God” asks the Almighty
to set aside the kind of “stately terrors” that evoked such anxiety from
Herrick in the first third of the collection, urging God to “talke with me
familiarly,” to become the kind of nurturing father figure the poet has sought
for so long. Another poem named “To God” serves in a sense as the valediction
of Herrick’s book. It asks his Heavenly Father to do what this poet has
requested of a succession of friends, relatives, and patrons throughout
Hesperides—to place a crown of “Lawrell” on his brow. “That done,” Herrick
concludes, “with Honour Thou dost me create / Thy Poet, and Thy Prophet
Lawreat.” His final image of the sacred poet, then, is identical to that of
John Milton—as one who not only writes religious verse but through whom God
himself can speak.
His
Noble Numbers is actually brought to a close, however, with a dramatic series
of ten poems on the Crucifixion and its aftermath, described as if the speaker
(and the reader) are actual witnesses of the events. The first of these, “Good
Friday: Rex Tragicus, or Christ going to His Crosse,” is one of Herrick’s most
ambitious sacred works, an internal “dialogue of one” with this “markt-out
man,” who must “this day act the Tragedian,” with the Cross for his stage. The
Crucifixion scene is vividly evoked by theatrical metaphor, by Herrick’s
mordantly witty descriptions of the “audience,” and through dramatic irony (the
reader, for example, knows what part “that sowre Fellow, with his vinegar” will
eventually play in this tragedy).
With
similar artistic boldness, Herrick, in “His Saviours words, going to the
Crosse,” has Christ touchingly describe himself as “a man of misierie!” A
pattern poem in the shape of a cross follows, and the collection concludes with
three works in which Herrick continues his role as a biblical character, here
an Everyman who seeks out “his Saviours Sepulcher,” and discovers, in “His
coming to the Sepulcher,” that “my sweet Savior’s gone!” But instead of the
predictable celebration of the Resurrection to climax the poem (and indeed the
collection as a whole), Herrick portrays himself as bewildered by the absence
of Christ’s body, wondering, “Is He, from hence, gone to the shades beneath, /
To vanquish Hell, as here He conquer’d Death?” Then, like a newly fledged hero
of faith, Herrick vows, “If so; I’le thither follow, without feare; / And live
in Hell, if that my Christ stayes there.” The envisioned scenario is
extraordinary and perhaps unprecedented. The poem itself, indeed the sequence
which it concludes, is a tour de force, as striking an ending to Herrick’s
collection as “The Argument of his Book” and its self-referential successors
are a beginning.
In
the absence of much evidence, it is difficult to determine the kind of
reception Hesperides received on its publication in 1648. The time, certainly,
was far from propitious. Herrick’s world, riven and exhausted by the Civil War,
would be turned completely upside down with the execution, only a year later,
of the king to whom he had been so devoted. What is certain is that his book
did not explode upon the literary scene nor did it, during his lifetime, bring
him the literary fame he so avidly desired. He lived for 26 more years and died
a poor country parson, whom no fellow poet seems to have commemorated with a
verse-epitaph, much less an elegy. Most remarkably, in that 26 years, he
appears to have ceased to write poetry: no extant poem from that period can
with absolute certainty be attributed to him. It is as if the composition of
all of those 1,402 “Works Both Humane & Divine” and their painstaking
arrangement had exhausted Herrick’s creativity. He may have been embittered by
his fate as a poet, and as a man, but one doubts it. Herrick was at once a
realist about art and life and an optimist, one who knew all about careless
readers and carping critics but who could still hope for a favorable judgment
from time. That hope, of course, has been realized. Just as he predicted,
Herrick’s tombstone has vanished, but in the last one hundred years at least,
his better monument, his poetry, has led to his becoming more widely loved and
more profoundly respected than even he, dreaming of literary immortality in
remotest Devonshire, might have imagined.
In
literature
Herrick
appears in James Branch Cabell's "Concerning Corrina", published in
his 1916 short-story volume The Certain Hour: Dizain des Poëtes. The story
strongly suggests that the poet was an adept of the dark arts. Though
technically a mystery or horror story, it is best classed as a philosophical
comedy.
Herrick
is a major character in Rose Macaulay's 1932 historical novel They Were
Defeated.
Samuel
Beckett's play Happy Days has the character Winnie quote from Herrick's
"To the Virgins to Make Much of Time".[11][12]
Ken
Bruenin his debut novel Rilke on Black makes Herrick's two-line poem
"Dreams" a favorite with the protagonist Nick. Robert Herrick is one
of many historical characters in the alternate history series 1632. The
dedication in Thomas Burnett Swann's Will-o-the-Wisp (1976, ISBN 9780552103589)
is "A novel suggested by the life of Robert Herrick, poet, vicar, and
pagan". Herrick was referred to by the character Clement in HBO's
'Industry' (December 2020), in view of a candle on a birthday cake representing
the passing of precious time.
In
music
The
first composers to set Herrick to music were near-contemporaries: at least 40
settings of 31 poems appear in manuscript and printed songbooks of 1624–1683,
by Henry and William Lawes, John Wilson, Robert Ramsey and others. It is clear
from references within Hesperides that many other settings have not survived.
From
the early 20th century, Herrick's verse became popular with a range of
composers. One of them, Fritz Hart, was by far the most prolific, with more
than 120 settings composed throughout his life, mostly collected in Fourteen
Songs, op. 10 (1912), Twenty-One Songs, op. 23 (1916), Twenty Five Songs in
five sets, opp. 50–54 (1922), Nine Sets of Four Songs Each, opp. 82–90 (1930),
Three Sets of Five Songs, opp. 148–150 (1941), and Two Sets of Five Songs, opp.
166–167 (1948).
Other
settings from this period include:
Arnold
Bax: To Daffodils; Eternity
Lennox
Berkeley: How love came in
Havergal
Brian: The Mad Maid's Song; Why dost thou wound, and break my heart?; The Night
Piece
Frank
Bridge: The Primrose; The Hag; Fair Daffodils
Benjamin
Britten: Spring Symphony (To Violets); Five Flower Songs (To Daffodils; The
Succession of the Four Sweet Months)
Benjamin
Burrows: Upon Love; The Olive Branch; The Wounded Cupid; To Music
Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor: The Guest (Scena)
Jean
Coulthard: Threnody (Here a solemn fast we keep), choral setting (1935)
Walford
Davies: Eternity; Noble Numbers, op. 28 (Weigh me the fire; God's Dwelling;
Grace for a Child; What Sweeter Music)
Frederick
Delius: To Daffodils
George
Dyson: To Music
Christopher
Edmunds: The Bellman
John
Foulds: To Music
Ivor
Gurney: To Violets; Lullaby
Joseph
Holbrooke: To Dianeme
Herbert
Howells: Here she lies, a pretty bud
Peter
Hurford: Litany to the Holy Spirit
Hubert
Parry: Julia
Roger
Quilter: To Julia, op. 8 (The Bracelet ; The Maiden Blush; To Daisies; The
Night Piece; Julia's Hair; Cherry Ripe). To Electra; Tulips
Dagmar
de Corval Rybner: Bid Me to Live [17]
Alan
Rawsthorne: To Daffodils
Hugh
S. Roberton: Here a solemn fast we keep (threnody for equal voices, 1929)
Charles
Villiers Stanford: To Carnations; To the Rose; A Welcome Song; To Music
Robert
Still: To Julia; Upon Julia's Clothes
Donald
Tovey: The Mad Maid's Song (in three parts)
Ralph
Vaughan Williams: To Daffodils (two settings)
Peter
Warlock: Two Short Songs (I held love's head; Thou gav'st me leave to kiss)
Leslie
Woodgate: The White Island
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