On the "Childhood of the Yeare": Herrick's Hesperides New Year's Poems

On the "Childhood of the Yeare": Herrick's Hesperides New Year's Poems by Janie Caves McCauley The rich folklore and Christian tradition associated with the New Year's season provided a variety of materials for late Renaissance writers in England. Among major poets of the seventeenth century who wrote New Year's pieces are Donne, Jonson, Crashaw, Carew, Suckling, and Herrick. Their poems range in tone from Carew's idolatrous Petrarchan compliment "A New-Year's Sacrifice: To Lucinda" to Crashaw's lavish devotional "In the Glorious Epiphanie of our Lord God, A Hymn Sung as by the Three Kings." Of the more than twenty New Year's poems by well-known writers of the period, the eight by Herrick constitute the most interesting group. Whereas the five New Year's pieces appearing in His Noble Numbers reflect a sincere, extreme devotion to Christ, the three in Hesperides constitute a kind of resistance literature which alludes to the political turmoil of the age. Evident in this paradigm of the poet's wide-ranging knowledge of folklore as well as of Christian tradition and doctrine is Herrick's skill at integrating and transmitting a complex network of allusions and symbols. The universality of the seasonal festivities depicted in the Hesperides New Year's group would have been especially forceful for Herrick's readers, given the religious controversies at the core of their strife-ridden era. Inherent in the poet's use of archetypes of origin, decay, and regeneration is the implication that disparate religious sects share a common heritage of beliefs and customs which they may not acknowledge. More importantly, this small group of poems about time offers Herrick's readers hope and strength in a troubled age by arguing that all such worldly strife is fleeting. The most popular type of New Year's poem of the English Renaissance was the personal gift poem. Works in this genre include both formal compliments to monarchs or patrons and personal expressions of the poet's feelings addressed to friends and loved ones. Gifts were exchanged at New Year's rather than Christmas in Herrick's day, probably because of New Year's proximity on the calendar to January 6, or the Epiphany, an appropriate time to commemorate the Wise Men's gift-giving to the Christ Child. Ben Herrick's New Year's Poems73 Jonson refers to New Year's gifts in the introductory octave of "A New-Yeares Gift Sung to King Charles, 1635" — "New Yeares, expect new gifts" (1. I)1 — and Carew describes them in the opening lines of "A New-Year's Sacrifice: To Lucinda": "Those that can give, open their hands this day; / Those that cannot, yet hold them up to Pray·"2 Herrick's personal gift poem "A New-yeares gift sent to Sir Simeon Steward" is addressed to a fellow poet, friend from his days at Cambridge, and patron. According to Ann Baynes Coirò, the piece is one of "only two poems with political implications" that predate Herrick's leaving London for Dean Prior.3 Described internally as "a jolly / Verse crown'd with Yvie and Holly" (1. 9), the poem nevertheless begins with a catalogue of topical allusions which, Coirò and T.G.S. Cain concur, refer to political events of great interest to Londoners during the Christmas season of 1623.4 But this listing of rumors of military disaster, machinations, and political strife is a negative catalogue — a list of what the poet does not send news of at a time of new beginnings. Herrick instead urges Steward to look to the future with optimism: Call not to mind those fled Decembers; But think on these, that are t'appeare, As daughters to the instant yeare: Sit crown'd with Rose-buds, and carouse, Till Liber Pater twirles the house About your eares; and lay upon The yeare (your cares) that's fled and gon. . . . And thus, throughout, with Christmas playes Frolick the full twelve Holy-dayes. (11. 38-44, 49-50)5 The younger Charles Cotton in "The New Year: To Mr. W. T.," a New Year's poem admired by Charles Lamb,6 issues the same kind of prohibition against...