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 Accesse
By these, to sing of cleanly Wantonnesse.
[…]
I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)
Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.
ROBERT HERRICK: ‘The Argument of His Book’, Hesperides (1648)
Herrick, unlike Suckling and Lovelace, did not belong to the landed gentry, but his family was wealthy; and although his father, a prosperous goldsmith, committed suicide by hurling himself to his death from a fourth-floor window a mere sixteen months after Robert’s birth, the Queen’s Almoner was ‘moved with charity’, and did not, as was usual with suicides, confiscate the Herrick estate for the Crown. In 1607 he was apprenticed to his wealthy uncle Sir William Herrick, a goldsmith like Herrick’s father. It is not known where Robert attended school, but he was already writing poetry by the age of nineteen and in 1613 entered St John’s College, Cambridge, where, as a fellow commoner (an honour reserved for the sons of wealthy families), he lived a lavish existence. He later moved to Trinity Hall and graduated in 1617. Herrick was ordained a priest in 1623, and as army chaplain accompanied the Duke of Buckingham on his disastrous expedition to the Isle of Rhé to help the Protestants of La Rochelle. As a reward for his efforts he received the Devonshire living of Dean Prior, where he took up residence in September 1630. He languished in what he called ‘dull Devonshire’, but drew consolation from his books, his pet animals (he apparently taught a pig to drink from a tankard), the devotion of his housekeeper, Prudence, and the writing of poetry. He confessed in ‘Discontents in Devon’ that he always wrote better in places he ‘loath’d so much’.
Having left Dean Prior without his bishop’s permission, he spent some time in London living with Tomasin Parsons, more than a quarter of a century his junior. Parliament ejected him from his living in 1647, after which he returned to London. Hesperides was published in 1648, and in 1660 he was reinstated at Dean Prior, where he remained till his death fourteen years later. ‘Hesperides’ derives from Greek mythology, and originally referred to the nymphs, daughters of Hesperus, who guarded the garden where the golden apples grew in the Isles of the Blest, at the western extremity of the earth; hence it means the garden watched over by the nymphs. Herrick’s Hesperides contains some 1,400 poems, mostly short, and includes elegies, hymns and songs that have attracted an astonishing array of composers, including Bax, Berkeley, Brian, Bridge, Burrows, Coleridge-Taylor, Davies, Delius, Foulds, Gurney, Hart, Holbrooke, Howells, Parry, Quilter, Rawsthorne, Stanford, Vaughan Williams and Warlock. By far the most prolific composer of Herrick’s poems is Fritz Hart (1874–1949) with more than 120 settings. The 1,130 secular poems of Hesperides heavily outweigh the 272 divine ‘noble numbers’. The poems are characterized by a wonderful cantabile elegance and focus on the themes of love, transience and death, although his love poems, instead of dealing with real people and emotions, concentrate rather on exterior elegance. Less successful is that part of Hesperides devoted to religious poems: Noble Numbers. He was very much a ‘muse poet’, as Robert Graves would have called him, and some of his finest poems are addressed to his many ‘mistresses’: Anthea, Perilla, Electra, Blanch, Judith, Silvia and, of course, Julia. The well-known portrait of Herrick by Schiavonetti – luxuriant curly hair, a huge bulbous nose, fleshy hedonistic cheeks and a neatly mustachioed upper lip – suggests a man of the world rather than a priest. Despite the grace of much of his verse, Herrick was also capable of writing swingeing epigrams about his contemporaries, which were inexplicably omitted from the Oxford University Press edition of his works.
Hesperides has proved to be one of the richest sources for English Song in our literature, and contains some of the most polished and elegant verse in the language. Swinburne, who called Herrick ‘the greatest song-writer ever born of English race’, was also aware of the poet’s limited range and wrote, naughtily but with some perception:
The sturdy student who tackles his Herrick as a schoolboy is expected to tackle his Horace, in a spirit of pertinacious and stolid straightforwardness, will probably find himself before long so nauseated by the incessant inhalation of spices and flowers, condiments and kisses that if a musk-rat ran over the page it could hardly be less endurable to the physical than it is to the spiritual stomach.
The elder brother of William Lawes, Henry was the most important songwriter of the mid-seventeenth century. He wrote over 400 songs, of which 38 are settings of Carew, 16 of Waller and 14 of Herrick. He also set celebrated poems by Suckling and Lovelace, and not only composed the songs for Milton’s Arcades but also arranged for Milton to write Comus, premiered at Ludlow Castle on 29 September 1634. All the above poets, in early editions of their works, proudly stated that Lawes had set their poems, and several of them wrote poems about the composer, praising the way in which he never allowed the music to submerge the poem. ‘But you alone may truly boast/That not a Syllable is lost […]’ wrote Waller in ‘To Mr. Henry Lawes’; while Milton’s sonnet ‘To Mr. H. Lawes, on his Aires’ makes it clear that music’s function is not to get in the way: ‘Harry, whose tuneful and well-measur’d Song/First taught our English Musick how to span/Words with just note and accent […]’. Herrick, in his poem on Henry Lawes, see below, cites the lute virtuoso Jacques Gaultier and the celebrated singer Laniere. From 1653 to 1658 Lawes published three books of Ayres and Dialogues, in the first of which he condemned his fellow composers’ predilection for foreign music and poetry.
Among the Mirtles, as I walkt,
Love and my sighs thus intertalkt:
Tell me, said I, in deep distresse,
Where I may find my Shepardesse.
Thou foole, said Love, know’st thou not this?
In every thing that’s sweet, she is.
In yond’ Carnation goe and seek,
There thou shalt find her lip and cheek:
In that ennamel’d Pansie by,
There thou shalt have her curious eye:
In bloome of Peach, and Roses bud,
There waves the Streamer of her blood.
’Tis true, said I, and thereupon
I went to pluck them one by one,
To make of parts an union;
But on a sudden all were gone.
At which I stopt; Said Love, these be
The true resemblances of thee;
For as these flowers, thy joyes must die,
And in the turning of an eye;
And all thy hopes of her must wither,
Like those short sweets ere knit together.
Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a flying:
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.
The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,
The higher he’s a getting;
The sooner will his Race be run,
And neerer he’s to Setting.
That Age is best, which is the first,
When Youth and Blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times, still succeed the former.
Then be not coy, but use your time;
And while ye may, goe marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
You may for ever tarry.
(Dring)
Bid me to live, and I will live
Thy Protestant2 to be:
Or bid me love, and I will give
A loving heart to thee.
A heart as soft, a heart as kind,
A heart as sound and free,
As in the whole world thou canst find,
That heart Ile give to thee.
Bid that heart stay, and it will stay,
To honour thy Decree:
Or bid it languish quite away,
And’t shall doe so for thee.
Bid me to weep, and I will weep,
While I have eyes to see:
And having none, yet I will keep
A heart to weep for thee.
Bid me despaire, and Ile despaire,
Under that Cypresse tree:
Or bid me die, and I will dare
E’en Death, to die for thee.
Thou art my life, my love, my heart,
The very eyes of me:
And hast command of every part,
To live and die for thee.
Why I tye about thy wrist,
Julia, this my silken twist;
For what other reason is’t,
But to shew thee how in part,
Thou my pretty Captive art?
But thy Bondslave is my heart:
’Tis but silke that bindeth thee,
Knap the thread, and thou art free:
But ’tis otherwise with me;
I am bound, and fast bound so,
That from thee I cannot go,
If I co’d, I wo’d not so.
So look the mornings when the Sun
Paints them with fresh Vermilion:
So Cherries blush, and Kathern Peares1,
And Apricocks, in youthfull yeares:
So Corrols looke more lovely Red,
And Rubies lately polishèd:
So purest Diaper doth shine,
Stain’d by the beames of Clarret wine:
As Julia looks when she doth dress
Her either cheeke with bashfulness.
Shut not so soon; the dull-ey’d night
Ha’s not as yet begunne
To make a seisure1 on the light,
Or to seale up the Sun.
No Marigolds yet closèd are;
No shadowes great appeare;
Nor doth the early Shepheard’s Starre2
Shine like a spangle here.
Stay but till my Julia close
Her life-begetting eye;
And let the whole world then dispose
It selfe to live or dye.
Her Eyes the Glow-worme lend thee,
The Shooting Starres attend thee;
And the Elves also,
Whose little eyes glow,
Like the sparks of fire, befriend thee.
No Will-o’th’-Wispe mis-light thee;
Nor Snake, or Slow-worme bite thee:
But on, on thy way
Not making a stay,
Since Ghost ther’s none to affright thee.
Let not the darke thee cumber;
What though the Moon do’s slumber?
The Starres of the night
Will lend thee their light,
Like Tapers cleare without number.
Then Julia let me wooe thee,
Thus, thus to come unto me:
And when I shall meet
Thy silv’ry feet,
My soule Ile poure into thee.
Dew sate on Julia’s haire,
And spangled too,
Like Leaves that laden are
With trembling Dew:
Or glitter’d to my sight,
As when the Beames
Have their reflected light,
Daunc’t by the Streames.
Cherrie-Ripe, Ripe, Ripe, I cry,
Full and faire ones; come and buy:
If so be, you ask me where
They do grow? I answer, There,
Where my Julia’s lips doe smile;
There’s the Land, or Cherry-Ile:
Whose plantations fully show
All the yeere, where Cherries grow.
(Horn)
Faire daffadills, we weep to see
You haste away so soone;
As yet the early-rising Sun
Has not attain’d his Noone.
Stay, stay
Untill the hasting day
Has run
But to the Even-song;
And, having pray’d together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a Spring;
As quick a growth to meet Decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours doe, and drie
Away
Like to the Summer’s raine;
Or as the pearles of Mornings dew,
Ne’r to be found againe.
(Bax, Britten, Dring, Herbert, Rawsthorne, Vaughan Williams)
Charm me asleep, and melt me so
With thy Delicious Numbers;
That being ravisht, hence I goe
Away in easie slumbers.
Ease my sick head,
And make my bed,
Thou Power that canst sever
From me this ill:
And quickly still:
Though thou not kill
My Fever.
Thou sweetly canst convert the same
From a consuming fire,
Into a gently-licking flame,
And make it thus expire.
Then make me weep
My paines asleep;
And give me such reposes,
That I, poore I,
May think, thereby,
I live and die
’Mongst Roses.
Fall on me like a silent dew,
Or like those Maiden showrs,
Which, by the peepe of day, doe strew
A Baptime1 o’re the flowers.
Melt, melt my paines,
With thy soft straines;
With full delight,
I leave this light;
And take my flight
For Heaven.
Welcome, Maids of Honour,
You doe bring
In the Spring;
And wait upon her.
She has Virgins many,
Fresh and faire;
Yet you are
More sweet then any.
Y’are the Maiden Posies,
And so grac’t,
To be plac’d
’Fore Damask Roses.
Yet though thus respected,
By and by
Ye doe lie,
Poore Girles, neglected.
First, April, she with mellow showrs
Opens the way for early flowers;
Then after her comes smiling May,
In a more rich and sweet array;
Next enters June, and brings us more
Jems, then those two, that went before:
Then (lastly) July comes, and she
More wealth brings in, then all those three.
When as in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (me thinks) how sweetly flowes
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast1 mine eyes and see
That brave Vibration each way free;
O how that glittering taketh me!
Thou art to all lost love the best,
The onely true plant found,
Wherewith young men and maids distrest,
And left of love, are crown’d.
When once the Lovers Rose is dead,
Or laid aside forlorne;
Then Willow-garlands, ’bout the head,
Bedew’d with tears, are worne.
When with Neglect, (the Lover’s bane)
Poore Maids rewarded be,
For their love lost; their onely gaine
Is but a Wreathe from thee.
And underneath thy cooling shade,
(When weary of the light)
The love-spent Youth, and love-sick Maid,
Come to weep out the night.
Charms, that call down the moon from out her sphere,
On this sick youth work your enchantments here:
Bind up his senses with your numbers, so,
As to entrance his paine, or cure his woe.
Fall gently, gently, and a while him keep
Lost in the civil Wildernesse of sleep:
That done, then let him, dispossest of paine,
Like to a slumbring Bride, awake againe.