THE spirit of Herrick might have been the ‘apparition’ seen Anno 1670, near Cirencester, of whom John Aubrey tells us in his Miscellanies: ‘Being demanded whether a good spirit or a bad, returned no answer, but disappeared with a curious perfume and a most melodious Twang. Mr. W. Lilly believes it was a Fairie.’
Or again, he could have appeared among those spirits that Mr. Thomas Allen, ‘in those darke (Elizabethan) times Astrologer, Mathematician, and Conjurer’, met ‘coming up his stairs like bees’ (John Aubrey, Brief Lives). At other times his spirit resembles those small birds which, according to Antonio Galvano of New Spain,’ live of the dew, and the juyce of flowers and roses. Their feathers bee small and of divers colours. They be greatly esteemed to work gold with. They die or sleepe every yeare in the moneth of October, sitting upon a little bough in a warme and close place. They revive or wake againe in the moneth of April after the flowers be sprung.’
• • • • • •
The poems are as subtle, and as delicate, as the warm airs that awaken those little birds ‘whose feathers be greatly esteemed to work gold with’,— they are faint as the breaths of air and perfume wafting through the branches of the flowering plum, or the stillness of a sweet night.
The night is still,
The darkness knows
How far away
A wavering rill
Of darkness goes;
Though no bough hums,
Between April and May
A streak of plum-blossom comes.
But that exquisite fragment is from a song by Gordon Bottomley, not by Herrick.
In the flawlessly beautiful ‘Lovers how they come and part’, the only emphasis is in the shapes of the pear and plum, the only colour that which steals into them:
A Gyges Ring they beare about them still,
To be, and not seen when and where they will.
They tread on clouds, and though they sometimes fall,
They fall like dew, but make no noise at all.
So silently they one to th’ other come,
As colours steale into the Peare or Plum,
And Aire-like, leave no pression to be seen
Where e’er they met, or parting place has been.
To these shapes the p’s give body, — the first shape being longer and more delicate, tapering down from the roundness, through the long double vowels, to the fading r, — the second rounder, and with more body, because of the enclosing pl and m ‘… So silently’, with the alliterative s’s, the rising vowels, give another, but fainter, embodiment, ‘clouds’ melts into ‘come,’ ‘come’ fades into ‘colours’. ‘Peare or Plum’ have the faintest echo in the p and the pl of ‘parting place’. There is the slightest possible lengthening of line, — a lengthening so faint as to be hardly perceptible, that comes from the wavering movement of the double-vowelled ‘Peare’ and ‘Aire’ (with that hardly-perceptible flutter caused by the r) — and the echo of these in ‘where e’er’. ‘Beare’ has not the same wavering movement, because the b, which begins the word, concentrates it.
In these lovely lines from ‘Corinna going a-Maying’:
Rise; and put on your Foliage, and be seene
To come forth, like the Spring-time, fresh and greene;
And sweet as Flora. Take no care
For Jewels for your Gowne, or Haire:
Feare not; the leaves will strew
Gemms in abundance upon you,
the leaves strew their gems upon us, in the very sound of those incredibly faint, wavering, dropping movements of ‘care’ and ‘Haire’ — (the latter being a little longer in fading than the former) — and in the immaterial fluttering sound of the internal r’s in ‘Spring’, ‘greene’, ‘strew’.
These wavering airs, these faint rills of air that come and go, as with the subtle dropping sound of ‘dew’ and the wavering sound of ‘air’ in the poem ‘Upon Julia’s Haire fill’d with Dew’, — the faint sharpening sound of ‘dew’ softening to the warmer sound of the ‘Ju’ in ‘Julia’ and the sound of ‘too’, the points of light given by the long assonantal e’s of ‘Leaves’, ‘Beames’, ‘Streames’, — the dewy l’s, — these subtleties are like the bloom upon the poem, the differences in the glitter of that dew on leaves and hair.
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.
In ‘The Night-Piece to Julia’ there is a firefly-like darting of the movement, due to the fact that the rhyme occurs internally, in the last word but one, in the first, second, and fifth lines of each verse (excepting in the third verse, where the opportunity does not arise, as the last word is a double-syllabled one):
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.
Thus, thus to come unto me:
And when I shall meet
Thy silv’ry feet,
My soule Ile pour into thee.
Excepting in the third verse, where it does not occur, this internal rhyme gives emphasis, and we have the droning end, in the first two verses, caused by the fact that these lines end, invariably, with the same word, ‘thee’.
Her Eyes the Glow-worme lend thee,
The Shooting Starres attend thee, [etc.]
The whole movement gives us the feeling of a lady in rustling silks flying down the midnight branch-shadowed paths, followed by the firefly-darting sound caused by the much shorter and quicker internal lines:
And the Elves also,
Whose little eyes glow.
The quickness is due to the running movement of ‘And the’ in the first of these two lines, and ‘little’ in the second — words much faster than those in the previous lines — words on which no pause is made. So that we understand from the sound that the lady is in a hurry, as she flies across the moonlit grass, for fear of the will-o’-the-wisp, the snake, and the slow-worm — and that all tiny and bright things are darting from the skies and from the dark woods to help her on her way with their sudden and lovely gleaming.
The poem ‘Upon Julia’s Voice’, with the subtlety of the longer rhyme to ‘voice’ upon ‘noise’ and the dropping sound from ‘chamber’ to ‘Amber’, is largely dependent for beauty on the extremely sweet vowels, enclosed, sometimes, in a most intricate scheme of s’s; the only loud sound in the whole poem being produced by the D in ‘Damned’. In fact, the whole of the verse is built upon a subtle foundation of s’s, — there are only three words beginning with hard consonants in the song, and of these, two are almost muted. I know of no poet — not even Milton or Pope, who could manage sibilants better than Herrick. As for
the vowel-sounds in this poem, they are as smooth and as un-poignant as the lovely voice the poem is praising:
So smooth, so sweet, so silv’ry is thy voice,
As, could they hear, the Damn’d would make no noise,
But listen to thee, (walking in thy chamber),
Melting melodious words to Lutes of Amber.
In the first two lines of ‘The Weeping Cherry’
I saw a Cherry weep, and why?
Why wept it? but for shame,
the alliteration, and the profound vowel-sound in ‘weep’, prolongs the length of the lines (but almost imperceptibly) and makes them heavier, as though the cherry, and the light and lovely branch from which it sprang, were made heavier by that rich weight of dew:
I saw a Cherry weep, and why?
Why wept it? but for shame,
Because my Julia’s lip was by,
And did out-red the same.
But pretty Fondling, let not fall
A tear at all for that:
Which Rubies, Corralls, Scarlets, all
For tincture, wonder at.
And we, too, may wonder at the ‘Rubies, Corralls, Scarlets’. But how are we to explain the faint, soft beauty of ‘The Primrose’ — a poem whose life is as faint as that of the flower, whose perfume is as intangible:
Aske me why I send you here
This sweet Infanta of the yeere?
Aske me why I send to you
This Primrose, thus bepearl’d with dew?
I will whisper to your eares
The sweets of Love are mixt with teares.
Aske me why this flower do’s show
So yellow-green, and sickly too?
Aske me why the stalk so weak
And bending (yet it doth not break?)
I will answer, These discover
What fainting hopes are in a Lover.
These songs and sounds, the faint warm rills of air, and draughts of cooler air, these whispers of air, ripples of air, steal on the ear; the primrose-pale, primrose-scented dews of the early morning poems, fleeting and immaterial, are gone in the moment of a dream. There is neither harshness nor pain, nor is there agony in death, — there is scarcely sorrow…. Only the dew fades on the primrose, the golden beauty of the daffodil.
… We die,
As your hours doe, and drie
Away
Like to the Summer’s raine;
Or as the pearles of Morning’s dew,
Ne’er to be founde againe.
And that fading is only the reason for a new invocation:
So when or you or I are made
A fable, song, or fleeting shade;
All love, all liking, all delight
Lies drown’d with us in endless night.
Then while time serves, and we are but decaying;
Come, my Corinna, come, lets goe a-Maying.
All his funeral songs are only for the passing of a honeybee, dead in the first delicate snows of winter; his bass-notes are like the deep droning sound that comes from a hive. To him, death, and life, and the business of life, were a sweet scent, intangible but rich, like the uncorrupted fame of which he wrote in his epigram ‘To His Honoured Kinsman, Sir William Soame’; — a fame that
Casts forth a light like to a Virgin flame,
And as it shines, it throws a scent about,
As when a Rain-bow in perfumes goes out.