"You May For Ever Tarry": Herrick's Endings

I. piece by piece in hesperides

In "The Argument of his Book," Robert Herrick delimits the scope of Hesperides to the local and the earthbound, tendering a bouquet of minor, alliterative beauties:

I sing of Brooks, of Blossomes, Birds, and Bowers:Of April, May, of June, and July-Flowers.I sing of May-poles, Hock-carts, Wassails, Wakes,Of Bride-grooms, Brides, and of their Bridall-cakes.I write of Youth, of Love, and have AccesseBy these, to sing of cleanly-Wantonnesse.I sing of Dewes, of Raines, and piece by pieceOf Balme, of Oyle, of Spice, and Amber-Greece.I sing of Times trans-shifting; and I writeHow Roses first came Red, and Lillies White.I write of Groves, of Twilights, and I singThe Court of Mab, and of the Faerie-King.I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.¹

Beginning with brooks and bowers, Herrick gets still more microscopic mid-poem, singing too of "Dewes, of Raines, and piece by piece / Of Balme, of Oyle, of Spice, and Amber-Greece." By the final line microscopy dilates into telescopy, the singer vaulting from Mab and the Faerie-King to Hell and Heaven, in a single unfurling sentence that arrogates to Hesperides a brimming universality, from streams to salvation, with all the seasonal, bodily, joyous, and sorrowful stuff of life compressed between. Yet despite this sweep, the "Argument" moves from noun to noun erratically, with no logic of progression other than a paratactic gathering of poetic categories. "Dewes" and "Raines" precede the weightier topic of "times trans-shifting," but this is succeeded by a diminution to "Groves" and "Twilights." He ends, it is true, with heaven and hell, an eschatologically fit finish, but with no supporting mention of good or sin these feel less earned or progressive than glibly totalizing. Even the trajectory from the first word "I" to the last word "all" only seems progressive. Rather than a stand-alone "all," this "all" on which the poem ends is a small "all," an idiomatic "all" yoked to "after." That Herrick hopes to have heaven after pause all can be read as a solemn desire, the "all" making reference to a life of accident and best intentions, sins venial and unavoidable. But "after all" taken as a phrase lends the hope a countering blitheness, the most cavalier of shrugs. The gesture of summary is also a gesture of release, even of sprezzatura: his care for salvation, clung to after all has passed, is leavened with carelessness. After encompassing the whole world, his sonnet half-sweeps it away.

We encounter a similar equipoise in the parenthetical, which is typographically thrown away and yet, metrically, given weight with a rhyme at the end of the following line ("all") and a slant-rhyme with the mid-line "hell": "I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall) / Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all." This "ever shall" serves as a presentiment for the rest of the volume, in which Herrick sings ceaselessly not of heaven exactly (although a place of bliss home to a bibulous Ben Jonson is reported) but of ends both spatial and temporal: welcome endings, like the maidenhood that ends in marriage and childbirth or lovely female bodies that taper to tender nipples and honeyed lips, as well as bitter endings, like night and winter, lost fame, the destruction of Hesperides, and death.

By his own metric Herrick is a master of the neat ending, with his well-turned epigrams and small-sized songs whose coupleted lines lock together like a hinged trinket, whatever conclusion they mete out granted a measure more authority by the very smoothness of the rhymes, the way they snap shut on their own verdicts. His poems are often described in the literature as exquisite and miniaturist, slight but precisely formed, with a polish reflective of his background in goldsmithing.² Even those who disparage him as a poet of the anthologies, "known for a few quotable pieces, but of no sustained or consistent achievement," seem...