Robert Herrick, Hesperides and Noble Numbers (1648)

Genre: secular songs (Hesperides) and sacred songs (Noble Numbers) using a variety of neoclassical metaphors and poetic forms.

Form: See entries for individual assigned works.

Characters: "Herrick", who bears some resemblence to the parson who reluctantly filled his clerical post in Dean Prior, Devonshire, when he could not get away to carouse with Ben Jonson and the rest in London; his various (almost certainly fictitious) mistresses with singularly unusual names; Prudence Baldwin, "once my maid" (and he means that in a housekeeping sense!).

Individual Songs:  Basically, look for Jonsonian neoclassical uses of metaphor, Donne-like experiments in short verse meter and rhyme, and a purely Herrickian sense of erotic play. Some essential poems for those of you studying for the GREs--

Interpretive Issues and Research Sources:

  1. Comparisons with Marvell, Jonson, and Donne are obvious and useful preparation for analysis (or the exam).   Comparisons with Milton are a greater reach, and perhaps (therefore) more productive.  Herrick's Protestant "paganism" is a remarkable extension of the neoclassical spirit we've been tracking since Jonson (or really, since Surrey starts using blank verse translating Virgil's Aeneid).
    • How do these poets, including Milton, reconcile their immense indebtedness to classical poets, pagans all, with their professed adherence to Protestant Christian teachings?

    For a start, look at the sources for Milton's demons in Book I of Paradise Lost, and you'll see how he follows Dante in selectively appropriating the classical tradition.  Similarly, Herrick follows Jonson's dictum for poetic creation (re: stealing often and well) by picking and choosing his models for surprising appropriateness to the subject and times.

    • Do times repeat, and do human cultures have identifiable, cyclical stages through which they pass?

    For an attempt to describe one such long cultural cycle, I recommend Sypher's Four Stages of Renaissance Style.  To see a brief summary of Sypher's section on Donne as a Mannerist, for instance, click here.  Herrick's amazing art refuses to engage in Mannerist intellectual gyrations, and seems to leap a century ahead toward the balance and restraint of what Sypher calls the "Late Baroque."  However, he never indulges in the spectacular demonstrations of power that a Baroque author like Milton displays.  What accounts for Herrick's ability to resist the forces that drove Donne to such wild excesses, and those that drove Milton to attempt such enormous feats?

  2. Herrick might be paired with Herbert as a young man whose poetic talents were somewhat at odds with his career at a country parsonage.  Both men continued to write despite their social isolation, which might otherwise have stifled their creativity, but they directed their writing in radically different ways.
    • Could you use these two poets' careers to understand  the divisions which wracked the country in the period of the Civil Wars and the Protectorate?
  3. Herrick might be considered a "minor poet" by critics interested in making such lists.  He participated in the revival of the "carpe diem" (seize the day) theme in two famous poems ("Corinna's Gone A-Maying" and "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time"), but his poetic influence on either the form or content of later poets was relatively slight.  His neoclassical style alludes constantly to the Greek and Roman classic-era poets who are his distant models, and to his contemporary "Master," Ben Jonson, who promoted neoclassicism as the most profound way to achieve a correct and lasting poetic style. Neoclassicism is, by definition, nostalgic and accepts limits. The past poets loom large in the neoclassicist's mind as he tries to follow their models without becoming indistinguishable from them. Some writers seem nearly stifled by this pressure to perform, but Herrick characteristically treats the situation with humor, mocking the great debt he owes to his classical and contemporary teachers. See, for instance, "His Prayer to Ben Jonson" (1652). He also can make the old poetry new by transferring its Greek and Roman attitudes and values to the English landscape  (e.g., "The Hock-Cart, or Harvest Home"). Though indulging in the English national habit of considering London the "new Rome," and treating pagan Roman customs or values as eligible for transplantation to the northern Christianized islands of the old Empire, he does not think much of the corollary, explored by Dryden, that England is a nation destined to rule the next Empire. Look for poems in which he sets out the poet's task, as he sees it, in the countryside of this "new Rome," establishing aesthetic rules, judging the passage of time and beauty, and only occasionally commenting upon major political events from afar. "The Bad Season Makes the Poet Sad" captures the limits to Herrick's willingness to acknowledge the political chaos going on around him--look especially at his last line's translation of Horace's ode to his patron, Maecenas (1653). Is Herrick any more than what he represents himself to be, a poet on the margins of society, an ironic commentator upon events his art cannot participate in directly with the real-world engagement of Shakespeare's dramatic tragedies, Jonson's satiric comedies, or the lyrics of Mary Sidney Herbert, Lady Mary Wroth, or John Donne? Or are there poetic "places" outside the poets' immediate times where equally important cultural work is being done while thousands cheer the more central "players"?
  4. Herrick's aesthetic of a "wild civility" might be called an elitist aesthetic since it presupposes that the lady, poem, or other "work of art" will begin with a capacity to achieve the height of neoclassical decorum, control of appearances (the long-run effect of the courtier's emulation of correct models in Hoby/Castiglione).  The problem with this arises when one attempts to participate in its tradition "from outside" (non-male?, non-classically-trained?) or "from below" (non-aristocratic).
    • What do you suppose would be the "inverse" of Herrick's doctrine of "wild civility" as he expresses it in the poems "Delight in Disorder" and "The Lily in a Crystal"?
    • When, in English literary history, will you see the non-male, non-classically-trained, non-aristocratic poets become the norm and control the growth of the canon?
  5. The Norton introduction (by Barbara Lewalski and Robert Adams) mentions RH's hanging out with Ben Jonson at the Apollo Room. A wonderful anecdote survives from the period in the writings of George Gordon, Lord Byron, and in the diary of an early C19 writer named Hobhouse. Jonson and a translator (how louche!) named Joshua Sylvester engaged in a typical coffee-house poetic competition, trading couplets to out-do each other. Sylvester led with "I, Joshua Sylvester / Lay with your sister," to which Jonson replied "I, Ben Jonson / Lay with your wife." Sylvester, an outraged fool, protested "why that's not rhyme," and Jonson replied, "No, but it's true." To see both versions of the anecdote (in text and a footnote) from Peter Cochrane's online edition of the "Prose Preface to 'Don Juan,'" see this link to a .pdf file. Does this help you to interpret Herrick's antic poetic sensibility, especially about his "mistresses"?
  6. For the Luminarium page containing containing more of Herrick's work, click here.

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