ROBERT HERRICK

[1591-1674]

Robert Herrick was born into a prosperous family of goldsmith After serving as his uncle's apprentice and originating his own patterns in rings and brooches, Herrick was went to St. John's College, but took his degree from Trinity Hall. But he was slow in taking his degrees, slower still in finding himself a career. Clearly he would have liked nothing better than a life of leisured study in London, talking literature and drinking sack with his hero Ben Jonson, while polishing his verses. But social pressures were insistence; he took orders in the church and moved reluctantly to a parish at Dean Prior, in Devonshire.

    As a Londoner, he did not much like the rough West Country or its people, but he gradually adapted to both, settling placidly into his bachelor quarters and secreting poems as a hen lays eggs. For the purposes of these poems, he invented for himself dozens of imaginary mistresses¡ªhectic, bewitching creatures with exotic names; but the maid who kept house for him was prophetically named Prudence. At the top of his poetic bent, in Corinna's Going A-Maying, Herrick produced a truly major lyric on the central theme of his life, the happy reconciliation of nature and nature's god. But much of his poetic work seems casual, even trivial, though one can easily be misled by his apparent carelessness into overlooking a serious strain that lies subsurface. He wrote against Devonshire, and then for it; about his cat, and his spaniel Tracy, and his maid Prudence; a farewell to sack (heart-rending) and a return to it (joyous). A recurrent theme in his work is a skillfully balanced personal paganism¡ªprivate sacrifices to household gods, tiny rituals and allusions to ancient creeds only half-seriously taken. The Puritans would have been scandalized had they realized that this minister of the holy gospel was at least half a pagan, and didn't even have the grace to be ashamed of the fact. Herrick himself did not advertise his beliefs; but when the storm of civil war broke, and the Puritans came to power, they dispossessed him anyhow, and Herrick came down to London with the fruits of his exile. They were published early in 1648 in a fat little octavo volume with two titles, Hesperides for the secular poems, and Noble Numbers for those with sacred subjects. Altogether, there were over 1,200 poems in this one volume, the only publication of Herrick's life. But the time was not right for tiny, playful lyrics; nobody noticed Hesperides, either to applaud or deplore; and Herrick disappeared in silence and oblivion, not to be restored to English literature till the 19th century. He did manage to survive the harsh weather of Puritanism till King Charles was restored in 1660; and that restoration brought him back to Dean Prior, where he lived out his last years quietly, dying at the ripe age of 83.