Notes Toward Defining "Herrickian" Style

        Herrick's poems differ from those of any other poet we have read other than those of Jonson and Spenser, in that their author apparently supervised their printing in 1648.  What does that mean for both poets' relationship with the prior culture in which aristocrats, and those who wished to emulate them, circulated their work in loose or bound manuscript leaves?  Often such poems were anonymous, and they were nearly all without titles.  Something is happening here.  How would you recognize a Herrick poem by style and/or content?  Pick some representative examples and work out what is "Herrickian" about them.  For example, he plays with line length, sometimes producing regularized rhyming pentameter couplets ("Dreams"), but also producing stanzas that veer from hexameter (6 feet) to pentameter (5 feet) to tetrameter (4 feet) ("Corinna's Gone A-Maying").  His longest poems occur in tetrameter or pentameter couplets ("The Vine," "Hock Cart," and "His Farewell to Sack"), whereas the shorter poems tend to be tetrameter or even trimeter lines, sometimes in couplets and sometimes in stanzas ("To the Virgins..." and "Delight in Disorder").  He also likes terrza rima (3-line stanzas rhyming aaa, bbb, etc.--"Upon Julia's Clothes"-but not for sacred subjects like the meter's great example, Dante's Divina comedia).  Do you see thematic repetition of attitudes and metaphors and rhetorical strategies?  In those combinations of form and content hides the style of the poet, what he chooses to handle and how he handles it.