![]() ![]() When all birds else do of their music fail, ![]() Is, when love’s honey has a dash of gall. Love’s of itself too sweet the best of all Tears, though they’re here below the sinner’s brine, Things are uncertain and the more we get, In depth of silence, heard and seen of none.Īll has been plunder’d from me but my wit: And the pretty feet? Not only are they the subject of one of his poems (another is on Julia’s “pretty” legs) but they also testify to his mastery of metrics, even in such a brief space. I leave it to you to make up your own mind on the merits or demerits of Robert Herrick’s brief poems, coarse, cleanly-wanton or otherwise. That range … makes “cleanly-Wantonnesse” an apt phrase to characterize his amatory verses.” Whether they were flesh and blood or, as modern consensus has it, pretty fictions is of little consequence: Herrick is only conforming to the common poetic practice of the time when he addresses his uniformly young and beautiful Julias, Corinnas, and Antheas…. Herrick’s love poetry ranges from the bawdy to the neo-Petrarchan. Another is offered by The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21). “Herrick surpasses all his contemporaries as an epigrammatist, both in variety of theme and delicacy of finish, and is almost as supreme in the epigrammatic art as in the lyric.” It does, however, take a dim view of those epigrams I have included below as Brief Coarse Poems, disdaining “his scurrilous distichs, which reflect the nastiness of Martial without his wit, and which were discharged against hapless parishioners at Dean Prior, or enemies in town.”Īccording to the Poetry Foundation page on him, “Herrick never married, and literary gossips have reveled in speculations about the identities of the fourteen “mistresses” …. Palgrave that ‘his directness of speech with clear and simple presentation of thought, a fine artist working with conscious knowledge of his art, of an England of his youth in which he lives and moves and loves, clearly assigns him to the first place as a lyrical poet in the strict and pure sense of the phrase’. ( Hesperides also includes the much shorter Noble Numbers, his first book, of spiritual works, first published in 1647.) His poems dealt with English country life and its seasons, village customs, complimentary poems to various ladies and his friends, themes taken from classical writings and poems about his Christian faith. It has been said of Herrick’s style by F. Herrick wrote over 2,500 poems, about half of which appear in this, his major work. Hesperides is a book of poetry published in 1648 by Robert Herrick. Herrick was a bachelor all his life, and many of the women he names in his poems are thought to be fictional. He lived there until his death in October 1674, at the age of 83. In 1647, in the wake of the English Civil War, he was ejected from his vicarage on political grounds. He returned to London, where he depended on the charity of his friends and family. When King Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, Herrick petitioned for his own restoration to his living and became the vicar of Dean Prior again in the summer of 1662. He was ordained in 1623 and in 1629 became the vicar of Dean Prior in Devonshire. The apprenticeship ended after six years when Herrick, at age twenty-two, matriculated at St John’s College, Cambridge. In 1607 he became apprenticed to his uncle, Sir William Herrick, who was a goldsmith and jeweler to the king. Born in London, his father died in a fall from a fourth-floor window in November 1592, when Robert was a year old (whether this was suicide remains unclear). He loved the richness of sensuality and the variety of life, and this is shown vividly in such poems as Cherry-ripe, Delight in Disorder and Upon Julia’s Clothes.Robert Herrick (1591 –1674) was an English poet and cleric, best known for his book of poems, Hesperides. Herrick never married, and none of his love-poems seem to connect directly with any one beloved woman. He is best known for his book of poems, Hesperides. Robert Herrick (baptised 24 August 1591 – buried 15 October 1674) was a 17th-century English lyric poet and cleric. Download cover art Download CD case insert Delight in Disorder ![]()
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