Robert Herrick: A Minority Report

Robert Herrick: A Minority Report by Jonathan F.S. Post Robert Herrick wished to belong fully, not just politically, to the ancien regime.1 Born into a family of goldsmiths and later apprenticed to one, then educated at Cambridge before being ordained a priest and settling down as a parson in Devon (only to be later ejected from his living during the Civil War), he found it difficult to be anything but revering — of English customs and rustic charms, of proverbs and tag ends of speech, of sack, ceremony, and the country life (particularly its flora), of friends, of his household, of his king, and most of all, of poetry: poetry as it descended to him from classical lyricists like "Anacreon" (in one of Henri Estienne's frequently reprinted editions of the Carminum),2 Horace, Martial, and Tibullus; as it appeared in contemporaries like Drayton and Jonson ("Saint Ben"); and even, or rather, especially as it was written by "Robert" or, as he further naturalized it, "Robin" Herrick himself. Herrick packed all these sentiments and then some into the 1130 poems that make up his Hesperides, an often beautiful but also baffling collection of lyrics and epigrams: beautiful because few poets in English have seemedto be so triumphantly and naturally lyrical as Herrick, whose name, he reminds us, even rhymes with lyric; but baffling, too, because despite Herrick's profound concern with ceremony in its many forms including his reverence for verse itself, it is still nearly impossible to determine how "seriously" we are meant to take him as a poet: Give me a Cell To dwell, Where no foot hath A path: There will I spend, And end My wearied yeares In teares. ("His wish to privacie")3 2 Jonathan F.S. Post Even by the standards of much nugatory Caroline verse, this poem — and there are literally hundreds like it in Hesperides — is something of a collector's item. (In fact, the Kentucky publisher, Robert Barth, has made a souvenir post card of this poem.) Too slight for a Carew, too sentimental for a Suckling, too slender for even the "Anacreontic" Stanley, it seems to survive as a vestige of the monastic spirit itself, a twenty-three word prayer rendered into rhyming dimeter and monometer lines, a curiosity of sorts, as if Herrick had jotted it down in an off-moment and then quietly disregarded his own wish for privacy. Given Herrick's generous sense of inclusiveness — and there are another three hundred or so poems in the accompanying, less celebrated Noble Numbers — it is hardly surprising that sorting the wheat from the chaff in Hesperides has been a major critical operation at least since the end of the nineteenth century, when Swinburne proclaimed Herrick the greatest song writer in English and thereby implicitly excluded much that did not fall under this rubric.4 (The number of contemporary musical settings of his lyrics, which exceed those of other poets of his generation by a significant margin, would seem to bear out Swinburne's judgment.5) Herrick's most recent editor, in fact, surmised that had the poet published some 150 of his best poems only and done so in the early 1630s, then he might have "laid the foundations for a reputation that would have grown as three or four other volumes appeared at intervals."6 Which 150 poems he does not say; only a few are specified by title. But the drift of the argument is clear and it doesn't rely on exact numbers in any case: if Herrick had played his cards better, he could have been a major poet. He could have been a contender, a bit more like Milton. The notion of Herrick as a "major" poet is an intriguing one and not limited to an editor's amusing fancy that someday a "New Hesperides" might be found. Eliot, too, wrestled with the problem in his own way, initially denying a sense of "continuous conscious purpose" to Herrick's poems only to relent a few sentences later by admitting, "still, there is something more in the whole than in the parts."7 And a number of recent scholars have attempted to define that...