But with this our
knowledge
substantially ends.
Robert Herrick - Lyric Poems
The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of
Robert Herrick, by Robert Herrick
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Title: A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick
Author: Robert Herrick
Editor: Francis Turner Palgrave
Posting Date: August 22, 2008 [EBook #1211]
Release Date: February, 1998
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LYRICAL POEMS ***
FROM THE LYRICAL POEMS OF ROBERT HERRICK
By Robert Herrick
Arranged with introduction by Francis Turner Palgrave
PREFACE
ROBERT HERRICK - Born 1591 : Died 1674
Those who most admire the Poet from whose many pieces a selection only
is here offered, will, it is probable, feel most strongly (with
the Editor) that excuse is needed for an attempt of an obviously
presumptuous nature. The choice made by any selector invites challenge:
the admission, perhaps, of some poems, the absence of more, will be
censured:--Whilst others may wholly condemn the process, in virtue of an
argument not unfrequently advanced of late, that a writer's judgment on
his own work is to be considered final. And his book to be taken as he
left it, or left altogether; a literal reproduction of the original text
being occasionally included in this requirement.
If poetry were composed solely for her faithful band of true lovers and
true students, such a facsimile as that last indicated would have claims
irresistible; but if the first and last object of this, as of the other
Fine Arts, may be defined in language borrowed from a different range
of thought, as 'the greatest pleasure of the greatest number,' it is
certain that less stringent forms of reproduction are required and
justified. The great majority of readers cannot bring either leisure or
taste, or information sufficient to take them through a large mass (at
any rate) of ancient verse, not even if it be Spenser's or Milton's.
Manners and modes of speech, again, have changed; and much that was
admissible centuries since, or at least sought admission, has now, by
a law against which protest is idle, lapsed into the indecorous. Even
unaccustomed forms of spelling are an effort to the eye;--a kind of
friction, which diminishes the ease and enjoyment of the reader.
These hindrances and clogs, of very diverse nature, cannot be
disregarded by Poetry. In common with everything which aims at human
benefit, she must work not only for the 'faithful': she has also the
duty of 'conversion. ' Like a messenger from heaven, it is hers to
inspire, to console, to elevate: to convert the world, in a word, to
herself. Every rough place that slackens her footsteps must be made
smooth; nor, in this Art, need there be fear that the way will ever
be vulgarized by too much ease, nor that she will be loved less by the
elect, for being loved more widely.
Passing from these general considerations, it is true that a selection
framed in conformity with them, especially if one of our older poets be
concerned, parts with a certain portion of the pleasure which poetry may
confer. A writer is most thoroughly to be judged by the whole of what
he printed. A selector inevitably holds too despotic a position over
his author. The frankness of speech which we have abandoned is an
interesting evidence how the tone of manners changes. The poet's own
spelling and punctuation bear, or may bear, a gleam of his personality.
But such last drops of pleasure are the reward of fully-formed taste;
and fully-formed taste cannot be reached without full knowledge.
This, we have noticed, most readers cannot bring. Hence, despite all
drawbacks, an anthology may have its place. A book which tempts many to
read a little, will guide some to that more profound and loving study of
which the result is, the full accomplishment of the poet's mission.
We have, probably, no poet to whom the reasons here advanced to justify
the invidious task of selection apply more fully and forcibly than to
Herrick. Highly as he is to be rated among our lyrists, no one who reads
through his fourteen hundred pieces can reasonably doubt that whatever
may have been the influences,--wholly unknown to us,--which determined
the contents of his volume, severe taste was not one of them. PECAT
FORTITER:--his exquisite directness and simplicity of speech repeatedly
take such form that the book cannot be offered to a very large number of
those readers who would most enjoy it. The spelling is at once arbitrary
and obsolete. Lastly, the complete reproduction of the original text,
with explanatory notes, edited by Mr Grosart, supplies materials equally
full and interesting for those who may, haply, be allured by this little
book to master one of our most attractive poets in his integrity.
In Herrick's single own edition of HESPERIDES and NOBLE NUMBERS, but
little arrangement is traceable: nor have we more than a few internal
signs of date in composition. It would hence be unwise to attempt
grouping the poems on a strict plan: and the divisions under which they
are here ranged must be regarded rather as progressive aspects of a
landscape than as territorial demarcations. Pieces bearing on the poet
as such are placed first; then, those vaguely definable as of idyllic
character, 'his girls,' epigrams, poems on natural objects, on character
and life; lastly, a few in his religious vein. For the text, although
reference has been made to the original of 1647-8, Mr Grosart's
excellent reprint has been mainly followed. And to that edition this
book is indebted for many valuable exegetical notes, kindly placed at
the Editor's disposal. But for much fuller elucidation both of words
and allusions, and of the persons mentioned, readers are referred to Mr
Grosart's volumes, which (like the same scholar's 'Sidney' and 'Donne'),
for the first time give Herrick a place among books not printed only,
but edited.
Robert Herrick's personal fate is in one point like Shakespeare's.
We know or seem to know them both, through their works, with singular
intimacy. But with this our knowledge substantially ends. No private
letter of Shakespeare, no record of his conversation, no account of the
circumstances in which his writings were published, remains: hardly
any statement how his greatest contemporaries ranked him. A group of
Herrick's youthful letters on business has, indeed, been preserved;
of his life and studies, of his reputation during his own time, almost
nothing. For whatever facts affectionate diligence could now gather.
Readers are referred to Mr Grosart's 'Introduction. ' But if, to
supplement the picture, inevitably imperfect, which this gives, we turn
to Herrick's own book, we learn little, biographically, except the
names of a few friends,--that his general sympathies were with the
Royal cause,--and that he wearied in Devonshire for London. So far as is
known, he published but this one volume, and that, when not far from his
sixtieth year. Some pieces may be traced in earlier collections; some
few carry ascertainable dates; the rest lie over a period of near forty
years, during a great portion of which we have no distinct account where
Herrick lived, or what were his employments. We know that he shone with
Ben Jonson and the wits at the nights and suppers of those gods of our
glorious early literature: we may fancy him at Beaumanor, or Houghton,
with his uncle and cousins, keeping a Leicestershire Christmas in the
Manor-house: or, again, in some sweet southern county with Julia and
Anthea, Corinna and Dianeme by his side (familiar then by other names
now never to be remembered), sitting merry, but with just the sadness of
one who hears sweet music, in some meadow among his favourite flowers of
spring-time;--there, or 'where the rose lingers latest. ' . . . . But 'the
dream, the fancy,' is all that Time has spared us. And if it be curious
that his contemporaries should have left so little record of this
delightful poet and (as we should infer from the book) genial-hearted
man, it is not less so that the single first edition should have
satisfied the seventeenth century, and that, before the present, notices
of Herrick should be of the rarest occurrence.
The artist's 'claim to exist' is, however, always far less to be looked
for in his life, than in his art, upon the secret of which the fullest
biography can tell us little--as little, perhaps, as criticism can
analyse its charm. But there are few of our poets who stand less in need
than Herrick of commentaries of this description,--in which too often we
find little more than a dull or florid prose version of what the author
has given us admirably in verse. Apart from obsolete words or allusions,
Herrick is the best commentator upon Herrick. A few lines only need
therefore here be added, aiming rather to set forth his place in the
sequence of English poets, and especially in regard to those near his
own time, than to point out in detail beauties which he unveils in his
own way, and so most durably and delightfully.
When our Muses, silent or sick for a century and more after Chaucer's
death, during the years of war and revolution, reappeared, they brought
with them foreign modes of art, ancient and contemporary, in the forms
of which they began to set to music the new material which the age
supplied. At the very outset, indeed, the moralizing philosophy which
has characterized the English from the beginning of our national
history, appears in the writers of the troubled times lying between the
last regnal years of Henry VIII and the first of his great daughter. But
with the happier hopes of Elizabeth's accession, poetry was once more
distinctly followed, not only as a means of conveying thought, but as a
Fine Art. And hence something constrained and artificial blends with
the freshness of the Elizabethan literature. For its great underlying
elements it necessarily reverts to those embodied in our own earlier
poets, Chaucer above all, to whom, after barely one hundred and fifty
years, men looked up as a father of song: but in points of style
and treatment, the poets of the sixteenth century lie under a double
external influence--that of the poets of Greece and Rome (known
either in their own tongues or by translation), and that of the modern
literatures which had themselves undergone the same classical impulse.
Italy was the source most regarded during the more strictly Elizabethan
period; whence its lyrical poetry and the dramatic in a less degree, are
coloured much less by pure and severe classicalism with its closeness
to reality, than by the allegorical and elaborate style, fancy and fact
curiously blended, which had been generated in Italy under the peculiar
and local circumstances of her pilgrimage in literature and art from
the age of Dante onwards. Whilst that influence lasted, such brilliant
pictures of actual life, such directness, movement, and simplicity
in style, as Chaucer often shows, were not yet again attainable: and
although satire, narrative, the poetry of reflection, were meanwhile
not wholly unknown, yet they only appear in force at the close of this
period. And then also the pressure of political and religious strife,
veiled in poetry during the greater part of Elizabeth's actual reign
under the forms of pastoral and allegory, again imperiously breaks
in upon the gracious but somewhat slender and artificial fashions of
England's Helicon: the DIVOM NUMEN, SEDESQUE QUIETAE which, in some
degree the Elizabethan poets offer, disappear; until filling the
central years of the seventeenth century we reach an age as barren for
inspiration of new song as the Wars of the Roses; although the great
survivors from earlier years mask this sterility;--masking also the
revolution in poetical manner and matter which we can see secretly
preparing in the later 'Cavalier' poets, but which was not clearly
recognised before the time of Dryden's culmination.
In the period here briefly sketched, what is Herrick's portion? His
verse is eminent for sweet and gracious fluency; this is a real note of
the 'Elizabethan' poets. His subjects are frequently pastoral, with a
classical tinge, more or less slight, infused; his language, though not
free from exaggeration, is generally free from intellectual conceits
and distortion, and is eminent throughout for a youthful NAIVETE. Such,
also, are qualities of the latter sixteenth century literature. But if
these characteristics might lead us to call Herrick 'the last of the
Elizabethans,' born out of due time, the differences between him and
them are not less marked. Herrick's directness of speech is accompanied
by an equally clear and simple presentment of his thought; we have,
perhaps, no poet who writes more consistently and earnestly with his
eye upon his subject. An allegorical or mystical treatment is alien
from him: he handles awkwardly the few traditional fables which he
introduces. He is also wholly free from Italianizing tendencies: his
classicalism even is that of an English student,--of a schoolboy,
indeed, if he be compared with a Jonson or a Milton. Herrick's personal
eulogies on his friends and others, further, witness to the extension
of the field of poetry after Elizabeth's age;--in which his enthusiastic
geniality, his quick and easy transitions of subject, have also little
precedent.
If, again, we compare Herrick's book with those of his fellow-poets
for a hundred years before, very few are the traces which he gives of
imitation, or even of study. During the long interval between Herrick's
entrance on his Cambridge and his clerical careers (an interval all but
wholly obscure to us), it is natural to suppose that he read, at
any rate, his Elizabethan predecessors: yet (beyond those general
similarities already noticed) the Editor can find no positive proof of
familiarity. Compare Herrick with Marlowe, Greene, Breton, Drayton,
or other pretty pastoralists of the HELICON--his general and radical
unlikeness is what strikes us; whilst he is even more remote from the
passionate intensity of Sidney and Shakespeare, the Italian graces of
Spenser, the pensive beauty of PARTHENOPHIL, of DIELLA, of FIDESSA, of
the HECATOMPATHIA and the TEARS OF FANCY.
Nor is Herrick's resemblance nearer to many of the contemporaries who
have been often grouped with him. He has little in common with
the courtly elegance, the learned polish, which too rarely redeem
commonplace and conceits in Carew, Habington, Lovelace, Cowley, or
Waller. Herrick has his CONCETTI also: but they are in him generally
true plays of fancy; he writes throughout far more naturally than these
lyrists, who, on the other hand, in their unfrequent successes reach a
more complete and classical form of expression. Thus, when Carew speaks
of an aged fair one
When beauty, youth, and all sweets leave her,
Love may return, but lovers never!
Cowley, of his mistress--
Love in her sunny eyes does basking play,
Love walks the pleasant mazes of her hair:
or take Lovelace, 'To Lucasta,' Waller, in his 'Go, lovely rose,'--we
have a finish and condensation which Herrick hardly attains; a literary
quality alien from his 'woodnotes wild,' which may help us to understand
the very small appreciation he met from his age. He had 'a pretty
pastoral gale of fancy,' said Phillips, cursorily dismissing Herrick in
his THEATRUM: not suspecting how inevitably artifice and mannerism, if
fashionable for awhile, pass into forgetfulness, whilst the simple cry
of Nature partake in her permanence.
Donne and Marvell, stronger men, leave also no mark on our poet. The
elaborate thought, the metrical harshness of the first, could find no
counterpart in Herrick; whilst Marvell, beyond him in imaginative power,
though twisting it too often into contortion and excess, appears to have
been little known as a lyrist then:--as, indeed, his great merits have
never reached anything like due popular recognition. Yet Marvell's
natural description is nearer Herrick's in felicity and insight than any
of the poets named above. Nor, again, do we trace anything of Herbert
or Vaughan in Herrick's NOBLE NUMBERS, which, though unfairly judged if
held insincere, are obviously far distant from the intense conviction,
the depth and inner fervour of his high-toned contemporaries.
It is among the great dramatists of this age that we find the only
English influences palpably operative on this singularly original
writer. The greatest, in truth, is wholly absent: and it is remarkable
that although Herrick may have joined in the wit-contests and
genialities of the literary clubs in London soon after Shakespeare's
death, and certainly lived in friendship with some who had known him,
yet his name is never mentioned in the poetical commemorations of the
HESPERIDES. In Herrick, echoes from Fletcher's idyllic pieces in the
FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS are faintly traceable; from his songs, 'Hear
what Love can do,' and 'The lusty Spring,' more distinctly. But to Ben
Jonson, whom Herrick addresses as his patron saint in song, and ranks
on the highest list of his friends, his obligations are much more
perceptible. In fact, Jonson's non-dramatic poetry,--the EPIGRAMS and
FOREST of 1616, the UNDERWOODS of 1641, (he died in 1637),--supply
models, generally admirable in point of art, though of very unequal
merit in their execution and contents, of the principal forms under
which we may range Herrick's HESPERIDES. The graceful love-song, the
celebration of feasts and wit, the encomia of friends, the epigram
as then understood, are all here represented: even Herrick's vein in
natural description is prefigured in the odes to Penshurst and Sir
Robert Wroth, of 1616. And it is in the religious pieces of the NOBLE
NUMBERS, for which Jonson afforded the least copious precedents, that,
as a rule, Herrick is least successful.
Even if we had not the verses on his own book, (the most noteworthy
of which are here printed as PREFATORY,) in proof that Herrick was no
careless singer, but a true artist, working with conscious knowledge of
his art, we might have inferred the fact from the choice of Jonson as
his model. That great poet, as Clarendon justly remarked, had 'judgment
to order and govern fancy, rather than excess of fancy: his productions
being slow and upon deliberation. ' No writer could be better fitted for
the guidance of one so fancy-free as Herrick; to whom the curb, in the
old phrase, was more needful than the spur, and whose invention, more
fertile and varied than Jonson's, was ready at once to fill up
the moulds of form provided. He does this with a lively facility,
contrasting much with the evidence of labour in his master's work.
Slowness and deliberation are the last qualities suggested by Herrick.
Yet it may be doubted whether the volatile ease, the effortless grace,
the wild bird-like fluency with which he
Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air
are not, in truth, the results of exquisite art working in cooperation
with the gifts of nature. The various readings which our few remaining
manuscripts or printed versions have supplied to Mr Grosart's
'Introduction,' attest the minute and curious care with which Herrick
polished and strengthened his own work: his airy facility, his seemingly
spontaneous melodies, as with Shelley--his counterpart in pure lyrical
art within this century--were earned by conscious labour; perfect
freedom was begotten of perfect art;--nor, indeed, have excellence and
permanence any other parent.
With the error that regards Herrick as a careless singer is closely
twined that which ranks him in the school of that master of elegant
pettiness who has usurped and abused the name Anacreon; as a mere
light-hearted writer of pastorals, a gay and frivolous Renaissance
amourist. He has indeed those elements: but with them is joined the
seriousness of an age which knew that the light mask of classicalism and
bucolic allegory could be worn only as an ornament, and that life held
much deeper and further-reaching issues than were visible to the narrow
horizons within which Horace or Martial circumscribed the range of their
art. Between the most intensely poetical, and so, greatest, among the
French poets of this century, and Herrick, are many points of likeness.
He too, with Alfred de Musset, might have said
Quoi que nous puissions faire,
Je souffre; il est trop tard; le monde s'est fait vieux.
Une immense esperance a traverse la terre;
Malgre nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux.
Indeed, Herrick's deepest debt to ancient literature lies not in the
models which he directly imitated, nor in the Anacreontic tone which
with singular felicity he has often taken. These are common to many
writers with him:--nor will he who cannot learn more from the great
ancient world ever rank among poets of high order, or enter the
innermost sanctuary of art. But, the power to describe men and things as
the poet sees them with simple sincerity, insight, and grace: to paint
scenes and imaginations as perfect organic wholes;--carrying with it the
gift to clothe each picture, as if by unerring instinct, in fit metrical
form, giving to each its own music; beginning without affectation,
and rounding off without effort;--the power, in a word, to leave
simplicity, sanity, and beauty as the last impressions lingering on our
minds, these gifts are at once the true bequest of classicalism, and the
reason why (until modern effort equals them) the study of that Hellenic
and Latin poetry in which these gifts are eminent above all other
literatures yet created, must be essential. And it is success in
precisely these excellences which is here claimed for Herrick. He is
classical in the great and eternal sense of the phrase: and much more
so, probably, than he was himself aware of. No poet in fact is so far
from dwelling in a past or foreign world: it is the England, if not of
1648, at least of his youth, in which he lives and moves and loves: his
Bucolics show no trace of Sicily: his Anthea and Julia wear no 'buckles
of the purest gold,' nor have anything about them foreign to Middlesex
or Devon. Herrick's imagination has no far horizons: like Burns and
Crabbe fifty years since, or Barnes (that exquisite and neglected
pastoralist of fair Dorset, perfect within his narrower range as
Herrick) to-day, it is his own native land only which he sees and
paints: even the fairy world in which, at whatever inevitable interval,
he is second to Shakespeare, is pure English; or rather, his elves live
in an elfin county of their own, and are all but severed from humanity.
Within that greater circle of Shakespeare, where Oberon and Ariel and
their fellows move, aiding or injuring mankind, and reflecting human
life in a kind of unconscious parody, Herrick cannot walk: and it may
have been due to his good sense and true feeling for art, that here,
where resemblance might have seemed probable, he borrows nothing from
MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM or TEMPEST. if we are moved by the wider range
of Byron's or Shelley's sympathies, there is a charm, also, in this
sweet insularity of Herrick; a narrowness perhaps, yet carrying with
it a healthful reality absent from the vapid and artificial
'cosmopolitanism' that did such wrong on Goethe's genius. If he has
not the exotic blooms and strange odours which poets who derive from
literature show in their conservatories, Herrick has the fresh breeze
and thyme-bed fragrance of open moorland, the grace and greenery of
English meadows: with Homer and Dante, he too shares the strength and
inspiration which come from touch of a man's native soil.
What has been here sketched is not planned so much as a criticism in
form on Herrick's poetry as an attempt to seize his relations to his
predecessors and contemporaries. If we now tentatively inquire what
place may be assigned to him in our literature at large, Herrick has no
single lyric to show equal, in pomp of music, brilliancy of diction, or
elevation of sentiment to some which Spenser before, Milton in his own
time, Dryden and Gray, Wordsworth and Shelley, since have given us.
Nor has he, as already noticed, the peculiar finish and reserve (if
the phrase may be allowed) traceable, though rarely, in Ben Jonson and
others of the seventeenth century. He does not want passion; yet
his passion wants concentration: it is too ready, also, to dwell on
externals: imagination with him generally appears clothed in forms
of fancy. Among his contemporaries, take Crashaw's 'Wishes': Sir J.
Beaumont's elegy on his child Gervase: take Bishop King's 'Surrender':
My once-dear Love! --hapless, that I no more
Must call thee so. . . . The rich affection's store
That fed our hopes, lies now exhaust and spent,
Like sums of treasure unto bankrupts lent:--
We that did nothing study but the way
To love each other, with which thoughts the day
Rose with delight to us, and with them set,
Must learn the hateful art, how to forget!
--Fold back our arms, take home our fruitless loves,
That must new fortunes try, like turtle doves
Dislodged from their haunts. We must in tears
Unwind a love knit up in many years.
In this one kiss I here surrender thee
Back to thyself: so thou again art free:--
take eight lines by some old unknown Northern singer:
When I think on the happy days
I spent wi' you, my dearie,
And now what lands between us lie,
How can I be but eerie!
How slow ye move, ye heavy hours,
As ye were wae and weary!
It was na sae ye glinted by
When I was wi' my dearie:--
--O! there is an intensity here, a note of passion beyond the deepest of
Herrick's. This tone (whether from temperament or circumstance or
scheme of art), is wanting to the HESPERIDES and NOBLE NUMBERS: nor does
Herrick's lyre, sweet and varied as it is, own that purple chord,
that more inwoven harmony, possessed by poets of greater depth and
splendour,--by Shakespeare and Milton often, by Spenser more rarely.
But if we put aside these 'greater gods' of song, with Sidney,--in the
Editor's judgment Herrick's mastery (to use a brief expression), both
over Nature and over Art, clearly assigns to him the first place as
lyrical poet, in the strict and pure sense of the phrase, among all
who flourished during the interval between Henry V and a hundred years
since. Single pieces of equal, a few of higher, quality, we have,
indeed, meanwhile received, not only from the master-singers who did not
confine themselves to the Lyric, but from many poets--some the unknown
contributors to our early anthologies, then Jonson, Marvell, Waller,
Collins, and others, with whom we reach the beginning of the wider sweep
which lyrical poetry has since taken. Yet, looking at the whole work,
not at the selected jewels, of this great and noble multitude, Herrick,
as lyrical poet strictly, offers us by far the most homogeneous,
attractive, and varied treasury. No one else among lyrists within the
period defined, has such unfailing freshness: so much variety within
the sphere prescribed to himself: such closeness to nature, whether
in description or in feeling: such easy fitness in language: melody so
unforced and delightful. His dull pages are much less frequent: he has
more lines, in his own phrase, 'born of the royal blood': the
Inflata rore non Achaico verba
are rarer with him: although superficially mannered, nature is so much
nearer to him, that far fewer of his pieces have lost vitality and
interest through adherence to forms of feeling or fashions of thought
now obsolete. A Roman contemporary is described by the younger Pliny in
words very appropriate to Herrick: who, in fact, if Greek in respect
of his method and style, in the contents of his poetry displays the
'frankness of nature and vivid sense of life' which criticism assigns
as marks of the great Roman poets. FACIT VERSUS, QUALES CATULLUS AUT
CALVUS. QUANTUM ILLIS LEPORIS, DULCEDINIS, AMARITUDINIS AMORIS! INSERIT
SANE, SED DATA OPERA, MOLLIBUS LENIBUSQUE DURIUSCULOS QUOSDAM; ET
HOC, QUASI CATULLUS AUT CALVUS. Many pieces have been, here refused
admittance, whether from coarseness of phrase or inferior value: yet
these are rarely defective in the lyrical art, which, throughout the
writer's work, is so simple and easy as almost to escape notice through
its very excellence. In one word, Herrick, in a rare and special sense,
is unique.
To these qualities we may, perhaps, ascribe the singular neglect which,
so far as we may infer, he met with in his own age, and certainly in
the century following. For the men of the Restoration period he was
too natural, too purely poetical: he had not the learned polish, the
political allusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn, which were
then and onwards demanded from poetry. In the next age, no tradition
consecrated his name; whilst writers of a hundred years before were then
too remote for familiarity, and not remote enough for reverence. Moving
on to our own time, when some justice has at length been conceded to
him, Herrick has to meet the great rivalry of the poets who, from Burns
and Cowper to Tennyson, have widened and deepened the lyrical sphere,
making it at once on the one hand more intensely personal, on the other,
more free and picturesque in the range of problems dealt with: whilst at
the same time new and richer lyrical forms, harmonies more intricate and
seven-fold, have been created by them, as in Hellas during her golden
age of song, to embody ideas and emotions unknown or unexpressed under
Tudors and Stuarts. To this latter superiority Herrick would, doubtless,
have bowed, as he bowed before Ben Jonson's genius. 'Rural ditties,' and
'oaten flute' cannot bear the competition of the full modern orchestra.
Yet this author need not fear! That exquisite: and lofty pleasure which
it is the first and the last aim of all true art to give, must, by its
own nature, be lasting also. As the eyesight fluctuates, and gives the
advantage to different colours in turn, so to the varying moods of the
mind the same beauty does not always seem equally beautiful. Thus from
the 'purple light' of our later poetry there are hours in which we
may look to the daffodil and rose-tints of Herrick's old Arcadia, for
refreshment and delight. And the pleasure which he gives is as eminently
wholesome as pleasurable. Like the holy river of Virgil, to the souls
who drink of him, Herrick offers 'securos latices. ' He is conspicuously
free from many of the maladies incident to his art. Here is no
overstrain, no spasmodic cry, so wire-drawn analysis or sensational
rhetoric, no music without sense, no mere second-hand literary
inspiration, no mannered archaism:--above all, no sickly sweetness, no
subtle, unhealthy affectation. Throughout his work, whether when it is
strong, or in the less worthy portions, sanity, sincerity, simplicity,
lucidity, are everywhere the characteristics of Herrick: in these, not
in his pretty Pagan masquerade, he shows the note,--the only genuine
note,--of Hellenic descent. Hence, through whatever changes and fashions
poetry may pass, her true lovers he is likely to 'please now, and please
for long. ' His verse, in the words of a poet greater than himself, is of
that quality which 'adds sunlight to daylight'; which is able to 'make
the happy happier. ' He will, it may be hoped, carry to the many Englands
across the seas, east and west, pictures of English life exquisite
in truth and grace:--to the more fortunate inhabitants (as they must
perforce hold themselves! ) of the old country, her image, as she was two
centuries since, will live in the 'golden apples' of the West, offered
to us by this sweet singer of Devonshire. We have greater poets, not a
few; none more faithful to nature as he saw her, none more perfect in
his art;--none, more companionable:--
F. T. P.
Dec. 1876
C H R Y S O M E L A
A SELECTION FROM THE LYRICAL POEMS OF ROBERT HERRICK
PREFATORY
1. THE ARGUMENT OF HIS BOOK
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, 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 bridal-cakes.
I write of Youth, of Love;--and have access
By these, to sing of cleanly wantonness;
I sing of dews, of rains, and, piece by piece,
Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris.
I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write
How roses first came red, and lilies white.
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The court of Mab, and of the Fairy King.
I write of Hell; I sing, and ever shall
Of Heaven,--and hope to have it after all.
2. TO HIS MUSE
Whither, mad maiden, wilt thou roam?
Far safer 'twere to stay at home;
Where thou mayst sit, and piping, please
The poor and private cottages.
Since cotes and hamlets best agree
With this thy meaner minstrelsy.
There with the reed thou mayst express
The shepherd's fleecy happiness;
And with thy Eclogues intermix:
Some smooth and harmless Bucolics.
There, on a hillock, thou mayst sing
Unto a handsome shepherdling;
Or to a girl, that keeps the neat,
With breath more sweet than violet.
There, there, perhaps such lines as these
May take the simple villages;
But for the court, the country wit
Is despicable unto it.
Stay then at home, and do not go
Or fly abroad to seek for woe;
Contempts in courts and cities dwell
No critic haunts the poor man's cell,
Where thou mayst hear thine own lines read
By no one tongue there censured.
That man's unwise will search for ill,
And may prevent it, sitting still.
3. WHEN HE WOULD HAVE HIS VERSES READ
In sober mornings, do not thou rehearse
The holy incantation of a verse;
But when that men have both well drunk, and fed,
Let my enchantments then be sung or read.
When laurel spirts i' th' fire, and when the hearth
Smiles to itself, and gilds the roof with mirth;
When up the Thyrse is raised, and when the sound
Of sacred orgies, flies A round, A round;
When the rose reigns, and locks with ointments shine,
Let rigid Cato read these lines of mine.
4. TO HIS BOOK
Make haste away, and let one be
A friendly patron unto thee;
Lest, rapt from hence, I see thee lie
Torn for the use of pastery;
Or see thy injured leaves serve well
To make loose gowns for mackarel;
Or see the grocers, in a trice,
Make hoods of thee to serve out spice.
5. TO HIS BOOK
Take mine advice, and go not near
Those faces, sour as vinegar;
For these, and nobler numbers, can
Ne'er please the supercilious man.
6. TO HIS BOOK
Be bold, my Book, nor be abash'd, or fear
The cutting thumb-nail, or the brow severe;
But by the Muses swear, all here is good,
If but well read, or ill read, understood.
7. TO MISTRESS KATHARINE BRADSHAW, THE LOVELY, THAT CROWNED HIM WITH LAUREL
My Muse in meads has spent her many hours
Sitting, and sorting several sorts of flowers,
To make for others garlands; and to set
On many a head here, many a coronet.
But amongst all encircled here, not one
Gave her a day of coronation;
Till you, sweet mistress, came and interwove
A laurel for her, ever young as Love.
You first of all crown'd her; she must, of due,
Render for that, a crown of life to you.
8. TO HIS VERSES
What will ye, my poor orphans, do,
When I must leave the world and you;
Who'll give ye then a sheltering shed,
Or credit ye, when I am dead?
Who'll let ye by their fire sit,
Although ye have a stock of wit,
Already coin'd to pay for it?
--I cannot tell: unless there be
Some race of old humanity
Left, of the large heart and long hand,
Alive, as noble Westmorland;
Or gallant Newark; which brave two
May fost'ring fathers be to you.
If not, expect to be no less
Ill used, than babes left fatherless.
9.
But with this our knowledge substantially ends. No private
letter of Shakespeare, no record of his conversation, no account of the
circumstances in which his writings were published, remains: hardly
any statement how his greatest contemporaries ranked him. A group of
Herrick's youthful letters on business has, indeed, been preserved;
of his life and studies, of his reputation during his own time, almost
nothing. For whatever facts affectionate diligence could now gather.
Readers are referred to Mr Grosart's 'Introduction. ' But if, to
supplement the picture, inevitably imperfect, which this gives, we turn
to Herrick's own book, we learn little, biographically, except the
names of a few friends,--that his general sympathies were with the
Royal cause,--and that he wearied in Devonshire for London. So far as is
known, he published but this one volume, and that, when not far from his
sixtieth year. Some pieces may be traced in earlier collections; some
few carry ascertainable dates; the rest lie over a period of near forty
years, during a great portion of which we have no distinct account where
Herrick lived, or what were his employments. We know that he shone with
Ben Jonson and the wits at the nights and suppers of those gods of our
glorious early literature: we may fancy him at Beaumanor, or Houghton,
with his uncle and cousins, keeping a Leicestershire Christmas in the
Manor-house: or, again, in some sweet southern county with Julia and
Anthea, Corinna and Dianeme by his side (familiar then by other names
now never to be remembered), sitting merry, but with just the sadness of
one who hears sweet music, in some meadow among his favourite flowers of
spring-time;--there, or 'where the rose lingers latest. ' . . . . But 'the
dream, the fancy,' is all that Time has spared us. And if it be curious
that his contemporaries should have left so little record of this
delightful poet and (as we should infer from the book) genial-hearted
man, it is not less so that the single first edition should have
satisfied the seventeenth century, and that, before the present, notices
of Herrick should be of the rarest occurrence.
The artist's 'claim to exist' is, however, always far less to be looked
for in his life, than in his art, upon the secret of which the fullest
biography can tell us little--as little, perhaps, as criticism can
analyse its charm. But there are few of our poets who stand less in need
than Herrick of commentaries of this description,--in which too often we
find little more than a dull or florid prose version of what the author
has given us admirably in verse. Apart from obsolete words or allusions,
Herrick is the best commentator upon Herrick. A few lines only need
therefore here be added, aiming rather to set forth his place in the
sequence of English poets, and especially in regard to those near his
own time, than to point out in detail beauties which he unveils in his
own way, and so most durably and delightfully.
When our Muses, silent or sick for a century and more after Chaucer's
death, during the years of war and revolution, reappeared, they brought
with them foreign modes of art, ancient and contemporary, in the forms
of which they began to set to music the new material which the age
supplied. At the very outset, indeed, the moralizing philosophy which
has characterized the English from the beginning of our national
history, appears in the writers of the troubled times lying between the
last regnal years of Henry VIII and the first of his great daughter. But
with the happier hopes of Elizabeth's accession, poetry was once more
distinctly followed, not only as a means of conveying thought, but as a
Fine Art. And hence something constrained and artificial blends with
the freshness of the Elizabethan literature. For its great underlying
elements it necessarily reverts to those embodied in our own earlier
poets, Chaucer above all, to whom, after barely one hundred and fifty
years, men looked up as a father of song: but in points of style
and treatment, the poets of the sixteenth century lie under a double
external influence--that of the poets of Greece and Rome (known
either in their own tongues or by translation), and that of the modern
literatures which had themselves undergone the same classical impulse.
Italy was the source most regarded during the more strictly Elizabethan
period; whence its lyrical poetry and the dramatic in a less degree, are
coloured much less by pure and severe classicalism with its closeness
to reality, than by the allegorical and elaborate style, fancy and fact
curiously blended, which had been generated in Italy under the peculiar
and local circumstances of her pilgrimage in literature and art from
the age of Dante onwards. Whilst that influence lasted, such brilliant
pictures of actual life, such directness, movement, and simplicity
in style, as Chaucer often shows, were not yet again attainable: and
although satire, narrative, the poetry of reflection, were meanwhile
not wholly unknown, yet they only appear in force at the close of this
period. And then also the pressure of political and religious strife,
veiled in poetry during the greater part of Elizabeth's actual reign
under the forms of pastoral and allegory, again imperiously breaks
in upon the gracious but somewhat slender and artificial fashions of
England's Helicon: the DIVOM NUMEN, SEDESQUE QUIETAE which, in some
degree the Elizabethan poets offer, disappear; until filling the
central years of the seventeenth century we reach an age as barren for
inspiration of new song as the Wars of the Roses; although the great
survivors from earlier years mask this sterility;--masking also the
revolution in poetical manner and matter which we can see secretly
preparing in the later 'Cavalier' poets, but which was not clearly
recognised before the time of Dryden's culmination.
In the period here briefly sketched, what is Herrick's portion? His
verse is eminent for sweet and gracious fluency; this is a real note of
the 'Elizabethan' poets. His subjects are frequently pastoral, with a
classical tinge, more or less slight, infused; his language, though not
free from exaggeration, is generally free from intellectual conceits
and distortion, and is eminent throughout for a youthful NAIVETE. Such,
also, are qualities of the latter sixteenth century literature. But if
these characteristics might lead us to call Herrick 'the last of the
Elizabethans,' born out of due time, the differences between him and
them are not less marked. Herrick's directness of speech is accompanied
by an equally clear and simple presentment of his thought; we have,
perhaps, no poet who writes more consistently and earnestly with his
eye upon his subject. An allegorical or mystical treatment is alien
from him: he handles awkwardly the few traditional fables which he
introduces. He is also wholly free from Italianizing tendencies: his
classicalism even is that of an English student,--of a schoolboy,
indeed, if he be compared with a Jonson or a Milton. Herrick's personal
eulogies on his friends and others, further, witness to the extension
of the field of poetry after Elizabeth's age;--in which his enthusiastic
geniality, his quick and easy transitions of subject, have also little
precedent.
If, again, we compare Herrick's book with those of his fellow-poets
for a hundred years before, very few are the traces which he gives of
imitation, or even of study. During the long interval between Herrick's
entrance on his Cambridge and his clerical careers (an interval all but
wholly obscure to us), it is natural to suppose that he read, at
any rate, his Elizabethan predecessors: yet (beyond those general
similarities already noticed) the Editor can find no positive proof of
familiarity. Compare Herrick with Marlowe, Greene, Breton, Drayton,
or other pretty pastoralists of the HELICON--his general and radical
unlikeness is what strikes us; whilst he is even more remote from the
passionate intensity of Sidney and Shakespeare, the Italian graces of
Spenser, the pensive beauty of PARTHENOPHIL, of DIELLA, of FIDESSA, of
the HECATOMPATHIA and the TEARS OF FANCY.
Nor is Herrick's resemblance nearer to many of the contemporaries who
have been often grouped with him. He has little in common with
the courtly elegance, the learned polish, which too rarely redeem
commonplace and conceits in Carew, Habington, Lovelace, Cowley, or
Waller. Herrick has his CONCETTI also: but they are in him generally
true plays of fancy; he writes throughout far more naturally than these
lyrists, who, on the other hand, in their unfrequent successes reach a
more complete and classical form of expression. Thus, when Carew speaks
of an aged fair one
When beauty, youth, and all sweets leave her,
Love may return, but lovers never!
Cowley, of his mistress--
Love in her sunny eyes does basking play,
Love walks the pleasant mazes of her hair:
or take Lovelace, 'To Lucasta,' Waller, in his 'Go, lovely rose,'--we
have a finish and condensation which Herrick hardly attains; a literary
quality alien from his 'woodnotes wild,' which may help us to understand
the very small appreciation he met from his age. He had 'a pretty
pastoral gale of fancy,' said Phillips, cursorily dismissing Herrick in
his THEATRUM: not suspecting how inevitably artifice and mannerism, if
fashionable for awhile, pass into forgetfulness, whilst the simple cry
of Nature partake in her permanence.
Donne and Marvell, stronger men, leave also no mark on our poet. The
elaborate thought, the metrical harshness of the first, could find no
counterpart in Herrick; whilst Marvell, beyond him in imaginative power,
though twisting it too often into contortion and excess, appears to have
been little known as a lyrist then:--as, indeed, his great merits have
never reached anything like due popular recognition. Yet Marvell's
natural description is nearer Herrick's in felicity and insight than any
of the poets named above. Nor, again, do we trace anything of Herbert
or Vaughan in Herrick's NOBLE NUMBERS, which, though unfairly judged if
held insincere, are obviously far distant from the intense conviction,
the depth and inner fervour of his high-toned contemporaries.
It is among the great dramatists of this age that we find the only
English influences palpably operative on this singularly original
writer. The greatest, in truth, is wholly absent: and it is remarkable
that although Herrick may have joined in the wit-contests and
genialities of the literary clubs in London soon after Shakespeare's
death, and certainly lived in friendship with some who had known him,
yet his name is never mentioned in the poetical commemorations of the
HESPERIDES. In Herrick, echoes from Fletcher's idyllic pieces in the
FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS are faintly traceable; from his songs, 'Hear
what Love can do,' and 'The lusty Spring,' more distinctly. But to Ben
Jonson, whom Herrick addresses as his patron saint in song, and ranks
on the highest list of his friends, his obligations are much more
perceptible. In fact, Jonson's non-dramatic poetry,--the EPIGRAMS and
FOREST of 1616, the UNDERWOODS of 1641, (he died in 1637),--supply
models, generally admirable in point of art, though of very unequal
merit in their execution and contents, of the principal forms under
which we may range Herrick's HESPERIDES. The graceful love-song, the
celebration of feasts and wit, the encomia of friends, the epigram
as then understood, are all here represented: even Herrick's vein in
natural description is prefigured in the odes to Penshurst and Sir
Robert Wroth, of 1616. And it is in the religious pieces of the NOBLE
NUMBERS, for which Jonson afforded the least copious precedents, that,
as a rule, Herrick is least successful.
Even if we had not the verses on his own book, (the most noteworthy
of which are here printed as PREFATORY,) in proof that Herrick was no
careless singer, but a true artist, working with conscious knowledge of
his art, we might have inferred the fact from the choice of Jonson as
his model. That great poet, as Clarendon justly remarked, had 'judgment
to order and govern fancy, rather than excess of fancy: his productions
being slow and upon deliberation. ' No writer could be better fitted for
the guidance of one so fancy-free as Herrick; to whom the curb, in the
old phrase, was more needful than the spur, and whose invention, more
fertile and varied than Jonson's, was ready at once to fill up
the moulds of form provided. He does this with a lively facility,
contrasting much with the evidence of labour in his master's work.
Slowness and deliberation are the last qualities suggested by Herrick.
Yet it may be doubted whether the volatile ease, the effortless grace,
the wild bird-like fluency with which he
Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air
are not, in truth, the results of exquisite art working in cooperation
with the gifts of nature. The various readings which our few remaining
manuscripts or printed versions have supplied to Mr Grosart's
'Introduction,' attest the minute and curious care with which Herrick
polished and strengthened his own work: his airy facility, his seemingly
spontaneous melodies, as with Shelley--his counterpart in pure lyrical
art within this century--were earned by conscious labour; perfect
freedom was begotten of perfect art;--nor, indeed, have excellence and
permanence any other parent.
With the error that regards Herrick as a careless singer is closely
twined that which ranks him in the school of that master of elegant
pettiness who has usurped and abused the name Anacreon; as a mere
light-hearted writer of pastorals, a gay and frivolous Renaissance
amourist. He has indeed those elements: but with them is joined the
seriousness of an age which knew that the light mask of classicalism and
bucolic allegory could be worn only as an ornament, and that life held
much deeper and further-reaching issues than were visible to the narrow
horizons within which Horace or Martial circumscribed the range of their
art. Between the most intensely poetical, and so, greatest, among the
French poets of this century, and Herrick, are many points of likeness.
He too, with Alfred de Musset, might have said
Quoi que nous puissions faire,
Je souffre; il est trop tard; le monde s'est fait vieux.
Une immense esperance a traverse la terre;
Malgre nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux.
Indeed, Herrick's deepest debt to ancient literature lies not in the
models which he directly imitated, nor in the Anacreontic tone which
with singular felicity he has often taken. These are common to many
writers with him:--nor will he who cannot learn more from the great
ancient world ever rank among poets of high order, or enter the
innermost sanctuary of art. But, the power to describe men and things as
the poet sees them with simple sincerity, insight, and grace: to paint
scenes and imaginations as perfect organic wholes;--carrying with it the
gift to clothe each picture, as if by unerring instinct, in fit metrical
form, giving to each its own music; beginning without affectation,
and rounding off without effort;--the power, in a word, to leave
simplicity, sanity, and beauty as the last impressions lingering on our
minds, these gifts are at once the true bequest of classicalism, and the
reason why (until modern effort equals them) the study of that Hellenic
and Latin poetry in which these gifts are eminent above all other
literatures yet created, must be essential. And it is success in
precisely these excellences which is here claimed for Herrick. He is
classical in the great and eternal sense of the phrase: and much more
so, probably, than he was himself aware of. No poet in fact is so far
from dwelling in a past or foreign world: it is the England, if not of
1648, at least of his youth, in which he lives and moves and loves: his
Bucolics show no trace of Sicily: his Anthea and Julia wear no 'buckles
of the purest gold,' nor have anything about them foreign to Middlesex
or Devon. Herrick's imagination has no far horizons: like Burns and
Crabbe fifty years since, or Barnes (that exquisite and neglected
pastoralist of fair Dorset, perfect within his narrower range as
Herrick) to-day, it is his own native land only which he sees and
paints: even the fairy world in which, at whatever inevitable interval,
he is second to Shakespeare, is pure English; or rather, his elves live
in an elfin county of their own, and are all but severed from humanity.
Within that greater circle of Shakespeare, where Oberon and Ariel and
their fellows move, aiding or injuring mankind, and reflecting human
life in a kind of unconscious parody, Herrick cannot walk: and it may
have been due to his good sense and true feeling for art, that here,
where resemblance might have seemed probable, he borrows nothing from
MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM or TEMPEST. if we are moved by the wider range
of Byron's or Shelley's sympathies, there is a charm, also, in this
sweet insularity of Herrick; a narrowness perhaps, yet carrying with
it a healthful reality absent from the vapid and artificial
'cosmopolitanism' that did such wrong on Goethe's genius. If he has
not the exotic blooms and strange odours which poets who derive from
literature show in their conservatories, Herrick has the fresh breeze
and thyme-bed fragrance of open moorland, the grace and greenery of
English meadows: with Homer and Dante, he too shares the strength and
inspiration which come from touch of a man's native soil.
What has been here sketched is not planned so much as a criticism in
form on Herrick's poetry as an attempt to seize his relations to his
predecessors and contemporaries. If we now tentatively inquire what
place may be assigned to him in our literature at large, Herrick has no
single lyric to show equal, in pomp of music, brilliancy of diction, or
elevation of sentiment to some which Spenser before, Milton in his own
time, Dryden and Gray, Wordsworth and Shelley, since have given us.
Nor has he, as already noticed, the peculiar finish and reserve (if
the phrase may be allowed) traceable, though rarely, in Ben Jonson and
others of the seventeenth century. He does not want passion; yet
his passion wants concentration: it is too ready, also, to dwell on
externals: imagination with him generally appears clothed in forms
of fancy. Among his contemporaries, take Crashaw's 'Wishes': Sir J.
Beaumont's elegy on his child Gervase: take Bishop King's 'Surrender':
My once-dear Love! --hapless, that I no more
Must call thee so. . . . The rich affection's store
That fed our hopes, lies now exhaust and spent,
Like sums of treasure unto bankrupts lent:--
We that did nothing study but the way
To love each other, with which thoughts the day
Rose with delight to us, and with them set,
Must learn the hateful art, how to forget!
--Fold back our arms, take home our fruitless loves,
That must new fortunes try, like turtle doves
Dislodged from their haunts. We must in tears
Unwind a love knit up in many years.
In this one kiss I here surrender thee
Back to thyself: so thou again art free:--
take eight lines by some old unknown Northern singer:
When I think on the happy days
I spent wi' you, my dearie,
And now what lands between us lie,
How can I be but eerie!
How slow ye move, ye heavy hours,
As ye were wae and weary!
It was na sae ye glinted by
When I was wi' my dearie:--
--O! there is an intensity here, a note of passion beyond the deepest of
Herrick's. This tone (whether from temperament or circumstance or
scheme of art), is wanting to the HESPERIDES and NOBLE NUMBERS: nor does
Herrick's lyre, sweet and varied as it is, own that purple chord,
that more inwoven harmony, possessed by poets of greater depth and
splendour,--by Shakespeare and Milton often, by Spenser more rarely.
But if we put aside these 'greater gods' of song, with Sidney,--in the
Editor's judgment Herrick's mastery (to use a brief expression), both
over Nature and over Art, clearly assigns to him the first place as
lyrical poet, in the strict and pure sense of the phrase, among all
who flourished during the interval between Henry V and a hundred years
since. Single pieces of equal, a few of higher, quality, we have,
indeed, meanwhile received, not only from the master-singers who did not
confine themselves to the Lyric, but from many poets--some the unknown
contributors to our early anthologies, then Jonson, Marvell, Waller,
Collins, and others, with whom we reach the beginning of the wider sweep
which lyrical poetry has since taken. Yet, looking at the whole work,
not at the selected jewels, of this great and noble multitude, Herrick,
as lyrical poet strictly, offers us by far the most homogeneous,
attractive, and varied treasury. No one else among lyrists within the
period defined, has such unfailing freshness: so much variety within
the sphere prescribed to himself: such closeness to nature, whether
in description or in feeling: such easy fitness in language: melody so
unforced and delightful. His dull pages are much less frequent: he has
more lines, in his own phrase, 'born of the royal blood': the
Inflata rore non Achaico verba
are rarer with him: although superficially mannered, nature is so much
nearer to him, that far fewer of his pieces have lost vitality and
interest through adherence to forms of feeling or fashions of thought
now obsolete. A Roman contemporary is described by the younger Pliny in
words very appropriate to Herrick: who, in fact, if Greek in respect
of his method and style, in the contents of his poetry displays the
'frankness of nature and vivid sense of life' which criticism assigns
as marks of the great Roman poets. FACIT VERSUS, QUALES CATULLUS AUT
CALVUS. QUANTUM ILLIS LEPORIS, DULCEDINIS, AMARITUDINIS AMORIS! INSERIT
SANE, SED DATA OPERA, MOLLIBUS LENIBUSQUE DURIUSCULOS QUOSDAM; ET
HOC, QUASI CATULLUS AUT CALVUS. Many pieces have been, here refused
admittance, whether from coarseness of phrase or inferior value: yet
these are rarely defective in the lyrical art, which, throughout the
writer's work, is so simple and easy as almost to escape notice through
its very excellence. In one word, Herrick, in a rare and special sense,
is unique.
To these qualities we may, perhaps, ascribe the singular neglect which,
so far as we may infer, he met with in his own age, and certainly in
the century following. For the men of the Restoration period he was
too natural, too purely poetical: he had not the learned polish, the
political allusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn, which were
then and onwards demanded from poetry. In the next age, no tradition
consecrated his name; whilst writers of a hundred years before were then
too remote for familiarity, and not remote enough for reverence. Moving
on to our own time, when some justice has at length been conceded to
him, Herrick has to meet the great rivalry of the poets who, from Burns
and Cowper to Tennyson, have widened and deepened the lyrical sphere,
making it at once on the one hand more intensely personal, on the other,
more free and picturesque in the range of problems dealt with: whilst at
the same time new and richer lyrical forms, harmonies more intricate and
seven-fold, have been created by them, as in Hellas during her golden
age of song, to embody ideas and emotions unknown or unexpressed under
Tudors and Stuarts. To this latter superiority Herrick would, doubtless,
have bowed, as he bowed before Ben Jonson's genius. 'Rural ditties,' and
'oaten flute' cannot bear the competition of the full modern orchestra.
Yet this author need not fear! That exquisite: and lofty pleasure which
it is the first and the last aim of all true art to give, must, by its
own nature, be lasting also. As the eyesight fluctuates, and gives the
advantage to different colours in turn, so to the varying moods of the
mind the same beauty does not always seem equally beautiful. Thus from
the 'purple light' of our later poetry there are hours in which we
may look to the daffodil and rose-tints of Herrick's old Arcadia, for
refreshment and delight. And the pleasure which he gives is as eminently
wholesome as pleasurable. Like the holy river of Virgil, to the souls
who drink of him, Herrick offers 'securos latices. ' He is conspicuously
free from many of the maladies incident to his art. Here is no
overstrain, no spasmodic cry, so wire-drawn analysis or sensational
rhetoric, no music without sense, no mere second-hand literary
inspiration, no mannered archaism:--above all, no sickly sweetness, no
subtle, unhealthy affectation. Throughout his work, whether when it is
strong, or in the less worthy portions, sanity, sincerity, simplicity,
lucidity, are everywhere the characteristics of Herrick: in these, not
in his pretty Pagan masquerade, he shows the note,--the only genuine
note,--of Hellenic descent. Hence, through whatever changes and fashions
poetry may pass, her true lovers he is likely to 'please now, and please
for long. ' His verse, in the words of a poet greater than himself, is of
that quality which 'adds sunlight to daylight'; which is able to 'make
the happy happier. ' He will, it may be hoped, carry to the many Englands
across the seas, east and west, pictures of English life exquisite
in truth and grace:--to the more fortunate inhabitants (as they must
perforce hold themselves! ) of the old country, her image, as she was two
centuries since, will live in the 'golden apples' of the West, offered
to us by this sweet singer of Devonshire. We have greater poets, not a
few; none more faithful to nature as he saw her, none more perfect in
his art;--none, more companionable:--
F. T. P.
Dec. 1876
C H R Y S O M E L A
A SELECTION FROM THE LYRICAL POEMS OF ROBERT HERRICK
PREFATORY
1. THE ARGUMENT OF HIS BOOK
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, 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 bridal-cakes.
I write of Youth, of Love;--and have access
By these, to sing of cleanly wantonness;
I sing of dews, of rains, and, piece by piece,
Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris.
I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write
How roses first came red, and lilies white.
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The court of Mab, and of the Fairy King.
I write of Hell; I sing, and ever shall
Of Heaven,--and hope to have it after all.
2. TO HIS MUSE
Whither, mad maiden, wilt thou roam?
Far safer 'twere to stay at home;
Where thou mayst sit, and piping, please
The poor and private cottages.
Since cotes and hamlets best agree
With this thy meaner minstrelsy.
There with the reed thou mayst express
The shepherd's fleecy happiness;
And with thy Eclogues intermix:
Some smooth and harmless Bucolics.
There, on a hillock, thou mayst sing
Unto a handsome shepherdling;
Or to a girl, that keeps the neat,
With breath more sweet than violet.
There, there, perhaps such lines as these
May take the simple villages;
But for the court, the country wit
Is despicable unto it.
Stay then at home, and do not go
Or fly abroad to seek for woe;
Contempts in courts and cities dwell
No critic haunts the poor man's cell,
Where thou mayst hear thine own lines read
By no one tongue there censured.
That man's unwise will search for ill,
And may prevent it, sitting still.
3. WHEN HE WOULD HAVE HIS VERSES READ
In sober mornings, do not thou rehearse
The holy incantation of a verse;
But when that men have both well drunk, and fed,
Let my enchantments then be sung or read.
When laurel spirts i' th' fire, and when the hearth
Smiles to itself, and gilds the roof with mirth;
When up the Thyrse is raised, and when the sound
Of sacred orgies, flies A round, A round;
When the rose reigns, and locks with ointments shine,
Let rigid Cato read these lines of mine.
4. TO HIS BOOK
Make haste away, and let one be
A friendly patron unto thee;
Lest, rapt from hence, I see thee lie
Torn for the use of pastery;
Or see thy injured leaves serve well
To make loose gowns for mackarel;
Or see the grocers, in a trice,
Make hoods of thee to serve out spice.
5. TO HIS BOOK
Take mine advice, and go not near
Those faces, sour as vinegar;
For these, and nobler numbers, can
Ne'er please the supercilious man.
6. TO HIS BOOK
Be bold, my Book, nor be abash'd, or fear
The cutting thumb-nail, or the brow severe;
But by the Muses swear, all here is good,
If but well read, or ill read, understood.
7. TO MISTRESS KATHARINE BRADSHAW, THE LOVELY, THAT CROWNED HIM WITH LAUREL
My Muse in meads has spent her many hours
Sitting, and sorting several sorts of flowers,
To make for others garlands; and to set
On many a head here, many a coronet.
But amongst all encircled here, not one
Gave her a day of coronation;
Till you, sweet mistress, came and interwove
A laurel for her, ever young as Love.
You first of all crown'd her; she must, of due,
Render for that, a crown of life to you.
8. TO HIS VERSES
What will ye, my poor orphans, do,
When I must leave the world and you;
Who'll give ye then a sheltering shed,
Or credit ye, when I am dead?
Who'll let ye by their fire sit,
Although ye have a stock of wit,
Already coin'd to pay for it?
--I cannot tell: unless there be
Some race of old humanity
Left, of the large heart and long hand,
Alive, as noble Westmorland;
Or gallant Newark; which brave two
May fost'ring fathers be to you.
If not, expect to be no less
Ill used, than babes left fatherless.
9. NOT EVERY DAY FIT FOR VERSE
'Tis not ev'ry day that I
Fitted am to prophesy:
No, but when the spirit fills
The fantastic pannicles,
Full of fire, then I write
As the Godhead doth indite.
Thus enraged, my lines are hurl'd,
Like the Sibyl's, through the world:
Look how next the holy fire
Either slakes, or doth retire;
So the fancy cools:--till when
That brave spirit comes again.
10. HIS PRAYER TO BEN JONSON
When I a verse shall make,
Know I have pray'd thee,
For old religion's sake,
Saint Ben, to aid me
Make the way smooth for me,
When, I, thy Herrick,
Honouring thee on my knee
Offer my Lyric.
Candles I'll give to thee,
And a new altar;
And thou, Saint Ben, shalt be
Writ in my psalter.
11. HIS REQUEST TO JULIA
Julia, if I chance to die
Ere I print my poetry,
I most humbly thee desire
To commit it to the fire:
Better 'twere my book were dead,
Than to live not perfected.
12. TO HIS BOOK
Go thou forth, my book, though late,
Yet be timely fortunate.
It may chance good luck may send
Thee a kinsman or a friend,
That may harbour thee, when I
With my fates neglected lie.
If thou know'st not where to dwell,
See, the fire's by. --Farewell!
13. HIS POETRY HIS PILLAR
Only a little more
I have to write:
Then I'll give o'er,
And bid the world good-night.
'Tis but a flying minute,
That I must stay,
Or linger in it:
And then I must away.
O Time, that cut'st down all,
And scarce leav'st here
Memorial
Of any men that were;
--How many lie forgot
In vaults beneath,
And piece-meal rot
Without a fame in death?
Behold this living stone
I rear for me,
Ne'er to be thrown
Down, envious Time, by thee.
Pillars let some set up
If so they please;
Here is my hope,
And my Pyramides.
14. TO HIS BOOK
If hap it must, that I must see thee lie
Absyrtus-like, all torn confusedly;
With solemn tears, and with much grief of heart,
I'll recollect thee, weeping, part by part;
And having wash'd thee, close thee in a chest
With spice; that done, I'll leave thee to thy rest.
15. UPON HIMSELF
Thou shalt not all die; for while Love's fire shines
Upon his altar, men shall read thy lines;
And learn'd musicians shall, to honour Herrick's
Fame, and his name, both set and sing his lyrics.
To his book's end this last line he'd have placed:--
Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste.
IDYLLICA
16. THE COUNTRY LIFE:
TO THE HONOURED MR ENDYMION PORTER,
GROOM OF THE BED-CHAMBER TO HIS MAJESTY
Sweet country life, to such unknown,
Whose lives are others', not their own!
But serving courts and cities, be
Less happy, less enjoying thee.
Thou never plough'st the ocean's foam
To seek and bring rough pepper home:
Nor to the Eastern Ind dost rove
To bring from thence the scorched clove:
Nor, with the loss of thy loved rest,
Bring'st home the ingot from the West.
No, thy ambition's master-piece
Flies no thought higher than a fleece:
Or how to pay thy hinds, and clear
All scores: and so to end the year:
But walk'st about thine own dear bounds,
Not envying others' larger grounds:
For well thou know'st, 'tis not th' extent
Of land makes life, but sweet content.
When now the cock (the ploughman's horn)
Calls forth the lily-wristed morn;
Then to thy corn-fields thou dost go,
Which though well soil'd, yet thou dost know
That the best compost for the lands
Is the wise master's feet, and hands.
There at the plough thou find'st thy team,
With a hind whistling there to them:
And cheer'st them up, by singing how
The kingdom's portion is the plough.
This done, then to th' enamell'd meads
Thou go'st; and as thy foot there treads,
Thou seest a present God-like power
Imprinted in each herb and flower:
And smell'st the breath of great-eyed kine,
Sweet as the blossoms of the vine.
Here thou behold'st thy large sleek neat
Unto the dew-laps up in meat:
And, as thou look'st, the wanton steer,
The heifer, cow, and ox draw near,
To make a pleasing pastime there.
These seen, thou go'st to view thy flocks
Of sheep, safe from the wolf and fox,
And find'st their bellies there as full
Of short sweet grass, as backs with wool:
And leav'st them, as they feed and fill,
A shepherd piping on a hill.
For sports, for pageantry, and plays,
Thou hast thy eves, and holydays:
On which the young men and maids meet,
To exercise their dancing feet:
Tripping the comely country Round,
With daffadils and daisies crown'd.
Thy wakes, thy quintels, here thou hast,
Thy May-poles too with garlands graced;
Thy Morris-dance; thy Whitsun-ale;
Thy shearing-feast, which never fail.
Thy harvest home; thy wassail bowl,
That's toss'd up after Fox i' th' hole:
Thy mummeries; thy Twelve-tide kings
And queens; thy Christmas revellings:
Thy nut-brown mirth, thy russet wit,
And no man pays too dear for it. --
To these, thou hast thy times to go
And trace the hare i' th' treacherous snow:
Thy witty wiles to draw, and get
The lark into the trammel net:
Thou hast thy cockrood, and thy glade
To take the precious pheasant made:
Thy lime-twigs, snares, and pit-falls then
To catch the pilfering birds, not men.
Robert Herrick, by Robert Herrick
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Title: A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick
Author: Robert Herrick
Editor: Francis Turner Palgrave
Posting Date: August 22, 2008 [EBook #1211]
Release Date: February, 1998
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LYRICAL POEMS ***
FROM THE LYRICAL POEMS OF ROBERT HERRICK
By Robert Herrick
Arranged with introduction by Francis Turner Palgrave
PREFACE
ROBERT HERRICK - Born 1591 : Died 1674
Those who most admire the Poet from whose many pieces a selection only
is here offered, will, it is probable, feel most strongly (with
the Editor) that excuse is needed for an attempt of an obviously
presumptuous nature. The choice made by any selector invites challenge:
the admission, perhaps, of some poems, the absence of more, will be
censured:--Whilst others may wholly condemn the process, in virtue of an
argument not unfrequently advanced of late, that a writer's judgment on
his own work is to be considered final. And his book to be taken as he
left it, or left altogether; a literal reproduction of the original text
being occasionally included in this requirement.
If poetry were composed solely for her faithful band of true lovers and
true students, such a facsimile as that last indicated would have claims
irresistible; but if the first and last object of this, as of the other
Fine Arts, may be defined in language borrowed from a different range
of thought, as 'the greatest pleasure of the greatest number,' it is
certain that less stringent forms of reproduction are required and
justified. The great majority of readers cannot bring either leisure or
taste, or information sufficient to take them through a large mass (at
any rate) of ancient verse, not even if it be Spenser's or Milton's.
Manners and modes of speech, again, have changed; and much that was
admissible centuries since, or at least sought admission, has now, by
a law against which protest is idle, lapsed into the indecorous. Even
unaccustomed forms of spelling are an effort to the eye;--a kind of
friction, which diminishes the ease and enjoyment of the reader.
These hindrances and clogs, of very diverse nature, cannot be
disregarded by Poetry. In common with everything which aims at human
benefit, she must work not only for the 'faithful': she has also the
duty of 'conversion. ' Like a messenger from heaven, it is hers to
inspire, to console, to elevate: to convert the world, in a word, to
herself. Every rough place that slackens her footsteps must be made
smooth; nor, in this Art, need there be fear that the way will ever
be vulgarized by too much ease, nor that she will be loved less by the
elect, for being loved more widely.
Passing from these general considerations, it is true that a selection
framed in conformity with them, especially if one of our older poets be
concerned, parts with a certain portion of the pleasure which poetry may
confer. A writer is most thoroughly to be judged by the whole of what
he printed. A selector inevitably holds too despotic a position over
his author. The frankness of speech which we have abandoned is an
interesting evidence how the tone of manners changes. The poet's own
spelling and punctuation bear, or may bear, a gleam of his personality.
But such last drops of pleasure are the reward of fully-formed taste;
and fully-formed taste cannot be reached without full knowledge.
This, we have noticed, most readers cannot bring. Hence, despite all
drawbacks, an anthology may have its place. A book which tempts many to
read a little, will guide some to that more profound and loving study of
which the result is, the full accomplishment of the poet's mission.
We have, probably, no poet to whom the reasons here advanced to justify
the invidious task of selection apply more fully and forcibly than to
Herrick. Highly as he is to be rated among our lyrists, no one who reads
through his fourteen hundred pieces can reasonably doubt that whatever
may have been the influences,--wholly unknown to us,--which determined
the contents of his volume, severe taste was not one of them. PECAT
FORTITER:--his exquisite directness and simplicity of speech repeatedly
take such form that the book cannot be offered to a very large number of
those readers who would most enjoy it. The spelling is at once arbitrary
and obsolete. Lastly, the complete reproduction of the original text,
with explanatory notes, edited by Mr Grosart, supplies materials equally
full and interesting for those who may, haply, be allured by this little
book to master one of our most attractive poets in his integrity.
In Herrick's single own edition of HESPERIDES and NOBLE NUMBERS, but
little arrangement is traceable: nor have we more than a few internal
signs of date in composition. It would hence be unwise to attempt
grouping the poems on a strict plan: and the divisions under which they
are here ranged must be regarded rather as progressive aspects of a
landscape than as territorial demarcations. Pieces bearing on the poet
as such are placed first; then, those vaguely definable as of idyllic
character, 'his girls,' epigrams, poems on natural objects, on character
and life; lastly, a few in his religious vein. For the text, although
reference has been made to the original of 1647-8, Mr Grosart's
excellent reprint has been mainly followed. And to that edition this
book is indebted for many valuable exegetical notes, kindly placed at
the Editor's disposal. But for much fuller elucidation both of words
and allusions, and of the persons mentioned, readers are referred to Mr
Grosart's volumes, which (like the same scholar's 'Sidney' and 'Donne'),
for the first time give Herrick a place among books not printed only,
but edited.
Robert Herrick's personal fate is in one point like Shakespeare's.
We know or seem to know them both, through their works, with singular
intimacy. But with this our knowledge substantially ends. No private
letter of Shakespeare, no record of his conversation, no account of the
circumstances in which his writings were published, remains: hardly
any statement how his greatest contemporaries ranked him. A group of
Herrick's youthful letters on business has, indeed, been preserved;
of his life and studies, of his reputation during his own time, almost
nothing. For whatever facts affectionate diligence could now gather.
Readers are referred to Mr Grosart's 'Introduction. ' But if, to
supplement the picture, inevitably imperfect, which this gives, we turn
to Herrick's own book, we learn little, biographically, except the
names of a few friends,--that his general sympathies were with the
Royal cause,--and that he wearied in Devonshire for London. So far as is
known, he published but this one volume, and that, when not far from his
sixtieth year. Some pieces may be traced in earlier collections; some
few carry ascertainable dates; the rest lie over a period of near forty
years, during a great portion of which we have no distinct account where
Herrick lived, or what were his employments. We know that he shone with
Ben Jonson and the wits at the nights and suppers of those gods of our
glorious early literature: we may fancy him at Beaumanor, or Houghton,
with his uncle and cousins, keeping a Leicestershire Christmas in the
Manor-house: or, again, in some sweet southern county with Julia and
Anthea, Corinna and Dianeme by his side (familiar then by other names
now never to be remembered), sitting merry, but with just the sadness of
one who hears sweet music, in some meadow among his favourite flowers of
spring-time;--there, or 'where the rose lingers latest. ' . . . . But 'the
dream, the fancy,' is all that Time has spared us. And if it be curious
that his contemporaries should have left so little record of this
delightful poet and (as we should infer from the book) genial-hearted
man, it is not less so that the single first edition should have
satisfied the seventeenth century, and that, before the present, notices
of Herrick should be of the rarest occurrence.
The artist's 'claim to exist' is, however, always far less to be looked
for in his life, than in his art, upon the secret of which the fullest
biography can tell us little--as little, perhaps, as criticism can
analyse its charm. But there are few of our poets who stand less in need
than Herrick of commentaries of this description,--in which too often we
find little more than a dull or florid prose version of what the author
has given us admirably in verse. Apart from obsolete words or allusions,
Herrick is the best commentator upon Herrick. A few lines only need
therefore here be added, aiming rather to set forth his place in the
sequence of English poets, and especially in regard to those near his
own time, than to point out in detail beauties which he unveils in his
own way, and so most durably and delightfully.
When our Muses, silent or sick for a century and more after Chaucer's
death, during the years of war and revolution, reappeared, they brought
with them foreign modes of art, ancient and contemporary, in the forms
of which they began to set to music the new material which the age
supplied. At the very outset, indeed, the moralizing philosophy which
has characterized the English from the beginning of our national
history, appears in the writers of the troubled times lying between the
last regnal years of Henry VIII and the first of his great daughter. But
with the happier hopes of Elizabeth's accession, poetry was once more
distinctly followed, not only as a means of conveying thought, but as a
Fine Art. And hence something constrained and artificial blends with
the freshness of the Elizabethan literature. For its great underlying
elements it necessarily reverts to those embodied in our own earlier
poets, Chaucer above all, to whom, after barely one hundred and fifty
years, men looked up as a father of song: but in points of style
and treatment, the poets of the sixteenth century lie under a double
external influence--that of the poets of Greece and Rome (known
either in their own tongues or by translation), and that of the modern
literatures which had themselves undergone the same classical impulse.
Italy was the source most regarded during the more strictly Elizabethan
period; whence its lyrical poetry and the dramatic in a less degree, are
coloured much less by pure and severe classicalism with its closeness
to reality, than by the allegorical and elaborate style, fancy and fact
curiously blended, which had been generated in Italy under the peculiar
and local circumstances of her pilgrimage in literature and art from
the age of Dante onwards. Whilst that influence lasted, such brilliant
pictures of actual life, such directness, movement, and simplicity
in style, as Chaucer often shows, were not yet again attainable: and
although satire, narrative, the poetry of reflection, were meanwhile
not wholly unknown, yet they only appear in force at the close of this
period. And then also the pressure of political and religious strife,
veiled in poetry during the greater part of Elizabeth's actual reign
under the forms of pastoral and allegory, again imperiously breaks
in upon the gracious but somewhat slender and artificial fashions of
England's Helicon: the DIVOM NUMEN, SEDESQUE QUIETAE which, in some
degree the Elizabethan poets offer, disappear; until filling the
central years of the seventeenth century we reach an age as barren for
inspiration of new song as the Wars of the Roses; although the great
survivors from earlier years mask this sterility;--masking also the
revolution in poetical manner and matter which we can see secretly
preparing in the later 'Cavalier' poets, but which was not clearly
recognised before the time of Dryden's culmination.
In the period here briefly sketched, what is Herrick's portion? His
verse is eminent for sweet and gracious fluency; this is a real note of
the 'Elizabethan' poets. His subjects are frequently pastoral, with a
classical tinge, more or less slight, infused; his language, though not
free from exaggeration, is generally free from intellectual conceits
and distortion, and is eminent throughout for a youthful NAIVETE. Such,
also, are qualities of the latter sixteenth century literature. But if
these characteristics might lead us to call Herrick 'the last of the
Elizabethans,' born out of due time, the differences between him and
them are not less marked. Herrick's directness of speech is accompanied
by an equally clear and simple presentment of his thought; we have,
perhaps, no poet who writes more consistently and earnestly with his
eye upon his subject. An allegorical or mystical treatment is alien
from him: he handles awkwardly the few traditional fables which he
introduces. He is also wholly free from Italianizing tendencies: his
classicalism even is that of an English student,--of a schoolboy,
indeed, if he be compared with a Jonson or a Milton. Herrick's personal
eulogies on his friends and others, further, witness to the extension
of the field of poetry after Elizabeth's age;--in which his enthusiastic
geniality, his quick and easy transitions of subject, have also little
precedent.
If, again, we compare Herrick's book with those of his fellow-poets
for a hundred years before, very few are the traces which he gives of
imitation, or even of study. During the long interval between Herrick's
entrance on his Cambridge and his clerical careers (an interval all but
wholly obscure to us), it is natural to suppose that he read, at
any rate, his Elizabethan predecessors: yet (beyond those general
similarities already noticed) the Editor can find no positive proof of
familiarity. Compare Herrick with Marlowe, Greene, Breton, Drayton,
or other pretty pastoralists of the HELICON--his general and radical
unlikeness is what strikes us; whilst he is even more remote from the
passionate intensity of Sidney and Shakespeare, the Italian graces of
Spenser, the pensive beauty of PARTHENOPHIL, of DIELLA, of FIDESSA, of
the HECATOMPATHIA and the TEARS OF FANCY.
Nor is Herrick's resemblance nearer to many of the contemporaries who
have been often grouped with him. He has little in common with
the courtly elegance, the learned polish, which too rarely redeem
commonplace and conceits in Carew, Habington, Lovelace, Cowley, or
Waller. Herrick has his CONCETTI also: but they are in him generally
true plays of fancy; he writes throughout far more naturally than these
lyrists, who, on the other hand, in their unfrequent successes reach a
more complete and classical form of expression. Thus, when Carew speaks
of an aged fair one
When beauty, youth, and all sweets leave her,
Love may return, but lovers never!
Cowley, of his mistress--
Love in her sunny eyes does basking play,
Love walks the pleasant mazes of her hair:
or take Lovelace, 'To Lucasta,' Waller, in his 'Go, lovely rose,'--we
have a finish and condensation which Herrick hardly attains; a literary
quality alien from his 'woodnotes wild,' which may help us to understand
the very small appreciation he met from his age. He had 'a pretty
pastoral gale of fancy,' said Phillips, cursorily dismissing Herrick in
his THEATRUM: not suspecting how inevitably artifice and mannerism, if
fashionable for awhile, pass into forgetfulness, whilst the simple cry
of Nature partake in her permanence.
Donne and Marvell, stronger men, leave also no mark on our poet. The
elaborate thought, the metrical harshness of the first, could find no
counterpart in Herrick; whilst Marvell, beyond him in imaginative power,
though twisting it too often into contortion and excess, appears to have
been little known as a lyrist then:--as, indeed, his great merits have
never reached anything like due popular recognition. Yet Marvell's
natural description is nearer Herrick's in felicity and insight than any
of the poets named above. Nor, again, do we trace anything of Herbert
or Vaughan in Herrick's NOBLE NUMBERS, which, though unfairly judged if
held insincere, are obviously far distant from the intense conviction,
the depth and inner fervour of his high-toned contemporaries.
It is among the great dramatists of this age that we find the only
English influences palpably operative on this singularly original
writer. The greatest, in truth, is wholly absent: and it is remarkable
that although Herrick may have joined in the wit-contests and
genialities of the literary clubs in London soon after Shakespeare's
death, and certainly lived in friendship with some who had known him,
yet his name is never mentioned in the poetical commemorations of the
HESPERIDES. In Herrick, echoes from Fletcher's idyllic pieces in the
FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS are faintly traceable; from his songs, 'Hear
what Love can do,' and 'The lusty Spring,' more distinctly. But to Ben
Jonson, whom Herrick addresses as his patron saint in song, and ranks
on the highest list of his friends, his obligations are much more
perceptible. In fact, Jonson's non-dramatic poetry,--the EPIGRAMS and
FOREST of 1616, the UNDERWOODS of 1641, (he died in 1637),--supply
models, generally admirable in point of art, though of very unequal
merit in their execution and contents, of the principal forms under
which we may range Herrick's HESPERIDES. The graceful love-song, the
celebration of feasts and wit, the encomia of friends, the epigram
as then understood, are all here represented: even Herrick's vein in
natural description is prefigured in the odes to Penshurst and Sir
Robert Wroth, of 1616. And it is in the religious pieces of the NOBLE
NUMBERS, for which Jonson afforded the least copious precedents, that,
as a rule, Herrick is least successful.
Even if we had not the verses on his own book, (the most noteworthy
of which are here printed as PREFATORY,) in proof that Herrick was no
careless singer, but a true artist, working with conscious knowledge of
his art, we might have inferred the fact from the choice of Jonson as
his model. That great poet, as Clarendon justly remarked, had 'judgment
to order and govern fancy, rather than excess of fancy: his productions
being slow and upon deliberation. ' No writer could be better fitted for
the guidance of one so fancy-free as Herrick; to whom the curb, in the
old phrase, was more needful than the spur, and whose invention, more
fertile and varied than Jonson's, was ready at once to fill up
the moulds of form provided. He does this with a lively facility,
contrasting much with the evidence of labour in his master's work.
Slowness and deliberation are the last qualities suggested by Herrick.
Yet it may be doubted whether the volatile ease, the effortless grace,
the wild bird-like fluency with which he
Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air
are not, in truth, the results of exquisite art working in cooperation
with the gifts of nature. The various readings which our few remaining
manuscripts or printed versions have supplied to Mr Grosart's
'Introduction,' attest the minute and curious care with which Herrick
polished and strengthened his own work: his airy facility, his seemingly
spontaneous melodies, as with Shelley--his counterpart in pure lyrical
art within this century--were earned by conscious labour; perfect
freedom was begotten of perfect art;--nor, indeed, have excellence and
permanence any other parent.
With the error that regards Herrick as a careless singer is closely
twined that which ranks him in the school of that master of elegant
pettiness who has usurped and abused the name Anacreon; as a mere
light-hearted writer of pastorals, a gay and frivolous Renaissance
amourist. He has indeed those elements: but with them is joined the
seriousness of an age which knew that the light mask of classicalism and
bucolic allegory could be worn only as an ornament, and that life held
much deeper and further-reaching issues than were visible to the narrow
horizons within which Horace or Martial circumscribed the range of their
art. Between the most intensely poetical, and so, greatest, among the
French poets of this century, and Herrick, are many points of likeness.
He too, with Alfred de Musset, might have said
Quoi que nous puissions faire,
Je souffre; il est trop tard; le monde s'est fait vieux.
Une immense esperance a traverse la terre;
Malgre nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux.
Indeed, Herrick's deepest debt to ancient literature lies not in the
models which he directly imitated, nor in the Anacreontic tone which
with singular felicity he has often taken. These are common to many
writers with him:--nor will he who cannot learn more from the great
ancient world ever rank among poets of high order, or enter the
innermost sanctuary of art. But, the power to describe men and things as
the poet sees them with simple sincerity, insight, and grace: to paint
scenes and imaginations as perfect organic wholes;--carrying with it the
gift to clothe each picture, as if by unerring instinct, in fit metrical
form, giving to each its own music; beginning without affectation,
and rounding off without effort;--the power, in a word, to leave
simplicity, sanity, and beauty as the last impressions lingering on our
minds, these gifts are at once the true bequest of classicalism, and the
reason why (until modern effort equals them) the study of that Hellenic
and Latin poetry in which these gifts are eminent above all other
literatures yet created, must be essential. And it is success in
precisely these excellences which is here claimed for Herrick. He is
classical in the great and eternal sense of the phrase: and much more
so, probably, than he was himself aware of. No poet in fact is so far
from dwelling in a past or foreign world: it is the England, if not of
1648, at least of his youth, in which he lives and moves and loves: his
Bucolics show no trace of Sicily: his Anthea and Julia wear no 'buckles
of the purest gold,' nor have anything about them foreign to Middlesex
or Devon. Herrick's imagination has no far horizons: like Burns and
Crabbe fifty years since, or Barnes (that exquisite and neglected
pastoralist of fair Dorset, perfect within his narrower range as
Herrick) to-day, it is his own native land only which he sees and
paints: even the fairy world in which, at whatever inevitable interval,
he is second to Shakespeare, is pure English; or rather, his elves live
in an elfin county of their own, and are all but severed from humanity.
Within that greater circle of Shakespeare, where Oberon and Ariel and
their fellows move, aiding or injuring mankind, and reflecting human
life in a kind of unconscious parody, Herrick cannot walk: and it may
have been due to his good sense and true feeling for art, that here,
where resemblance might have seemed probable, he borrows nothing from
MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM or TEMPEST. if we are moved by the wider range
of Byron's or Shelley's sympathies, there is a charm, also, in this
sweet insularity of Herrick; a narrowness perhaps, yet carrying with
it a healthful reality absent from the vapid and artificial
'cosmopolitanism' that did such wrong on Goethe's genius. If he has
not the exotic blooms and strange odours which poets who derive from
literature show in their conservatories, Herrick has the fresh breeze
and thyme-bed fragrance of open moorland, the grace and greenery of
English meadows: with Homer and Dante, he too shares the strength and
inspiration which come from touch of a man's native soil.
What has been here sketched is not planned so much as a criticism in
form on Herrick's poetry as an attempt to seize his relations to his
predecessors and contemporaries. If we now tentatively inquire what
place may be assigned to him in our literature at large, Herrick has no
single lyric to show equal, in pomp of music, brilliancy of diction, or
elevation of sentiment to some which Spenser before, Milton in his own
time, Dryden and Gray, Wordsworth and Shelley, since have given us.
Nor has he, as already noticed, the peculiar finish and reserve (if
the phrase may be allowed) traceable, though rarely, in Ben Jonson and
others of the seventeenth century. He does not want passion; yet
his passion wants concentration: it is too ready, also, to dwell on
externals: imagination with him generally appears clothed in forms
of fancy. Among his contemporaries, take Crashaw's 'Wishes': Sir J.
Beaumont's elegy on his child Gervase: take Bishop King's 'Surrender':
My once-dear Love! --hapless, that I no more
Must call thee so. . . . The rich affection's store
That fed our hopes, lies now exhaust and spent,
Like sums of treasure unto bankrupts lent:--
We that did nothing study but the way
To love each other, with which thoughts the day
Rose with delight to us, and with them set,
Must learn the hateful art, how to forget!
--Fold back our arms, take home our fruitless loves,
That must new fortunes try, like turtle doves
Dislodged from their haunts. We must in tears
Unwind a love knit up in many years.
In this one kiss I here surrender thee
Back to thyself: so thou again art free:--
take eight lines by some old unknown Northern singer:
When I think on the happy days
I spent wi' you, my dearie,
And now what lands between us lie,
How can I be but eerie!
How slow ye move, ye heavy hours,
As ye were wae and weary!
It was na sae ye glinted by
When I was wi' my dearie:--
--O! there is an intensity here, a note of passion beyond the deepest of
Herrick's. This tone (whether from temperament or circumstance or
scheme of art), is wanting to the HESPERIDES and NOBLE NUMBERS: nor does
Herrick's lyre, sweet and varied as it is, own that purple chord,
that more inwoven harmony, possessed by poets of greater depth and
splendour,--by Shakespeare and Milton often, by Spenser more rarely.
But if we put aside these 'greater gods' of song, with Sidney,--in the
Editor's judgment Herrick's mastery (to use a brief expression), both
over Nature and over Art, clearly assigns to him the first place as
lyrical poet, in the strict and pure sense of the phrase, among all
who flourished during the interval between Henry V and a hundred years
since. Single pieces of equal, a few of higher, quality, we have,
indeed, meanwhile received, not only from the master-singers who did not
confine themselves to the Lyric, but from many poets--some the unknown
contributors to our early anthologies, then Jonson, Marvell, Waller,
Collins, and others, with whom we reach the beginning of the wider sweep
which lyrical poetry has since taken. Yet, looking at the whole work,
not at the selected jewels, of this great and noble multitude, Herrick,
as lyrical poet strictly, offers us by far the most homogeneous,
attractive, and varied treasury. No one else among lyrists within the
period defined, has such unfailing freshness: so much variety within
the sphere prescribed to himself: such closeness to nature, whether
in description or in feeling: such easy fitness in language: melody so
unforced and delightful. His dull pages are much less frequent: he has
more lines, in his own phrase, 'born of the royal blood': the
Inflata rore non Achaico verba
are rarer with him: although superficially mannered, nature is so much
nearer to him, that far fewer of his pieces have lost vitality and
interest through adherence to forms of feeling or fashions of thought
now obsolete. A Roman contemporary is described by the younger Pliny in
words very appropriate to Herrick: who, in fact, if Greek in respect
of his method and style, in the contents of his poetry displays the
'frankness of nature and vivid sense of life' which criticism assigns
as marks of the great Roman poets. FACIT VERSUS, QUALES CATULLUS AUT
CALVUS. QUANTUM ILLIS LEPORIS, DULCEDINIS, AMARITUDINIS AMORIS! INSERIT
SANE, SED DATA OPERA, MOLLIBUS LENIBUSQUE DURIUSCULOS QUOSDAM; ET
HOC, QUASI CATULLUS AUT CALVUS. Many pieces have been, here refused
admittance, whether from coarseness of phrase or inferior value: yet
these are rarely defective in the lyrical art, which, throughout the
writer's work, is so simple and easy as almost to escape notice through
its very excellence. In one word, Herrick, in a rare and special sense,
is unique.
To these qualities we may, perhaps, ascribe the singular neglect which,
so far as we may infer, he met with in his own age, and certainly in
the century following. For the men of the Restoration period he was
too natural, too purely poetical: he had not the learned polish, the
political allusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn, which were
then and onwards demanded from poetry. In the next age, no tradition
consecrated his name; whilst writers of a hundred years before were then
too remote for familiarity, and not remote enough for reverence. Moving
on to our own time, when some justice has at length been conceded to
him, Herrick has to meet the great rivalry of the poets who, from Burns
and Cowper to Tennyson, have widened and deepened the lyrical sphere,
making it at once on the one hand more intensely personal, on the other,
more free and picturesque in the range of problems dealt with: whilst at
the same time new and richer lyrical forms, harmonies more intricate and
seven-fold, have been created by them, as in Hellas during her golden
age of song, to embody ideas and emotions unknown or unexpressed under
Tudors and Stuarts. To this latter superiority Herrick would, doubtless,
have bowed, as he bowed before Ben Jonson's genius. 'Rural ditties,' and
'oaten flute' cannot bear the competition of the full modern orchestra.
Yet this author need not fear! That exquisite: and lofty pleasure which
it is the first and the last aim of all true art to give, must, by its
own nature, be lasting also. As the eyesight fluctuates, and gives the
advantage to different colours in turn, so to the varying moods of the
mind the same beauty does not always seem equally beautiful. Thus from
the 'purple light' of our later poetry there are hours in which we
may look to the daffodil and rose-tints of Herrick's old Arcadia, for
refreshment and delight. And the pleasure which he gives is as eminently
wholesome as pleasurable. Like the holy river of Virgil, to the souls
who drink of him, Herrick offers 'securos latices. ' He is conspicuously
free from many of the maladies incident to his art. Here is no
overstrain, no spasmodic cry, so wire-drawn analysis or sensational
rhetoric, no music without sense, no mere second-hand literary
inspiration, no mannered archaism:--above all, no sickly sweetness, no
subtle, unhealthy affectation. Throughout his work, whether when it is
strong, or in the less worthy portions, sanity, sincerity, simplicity,
lucidity, are everywhere the characteristics of Herrick: in these, not
in his pretty Pagan masquerade, he shows the note,--the only genuine
note,--of Hellenic descent. Hence, through whatever changes and fashions
poetry may pass, her true lovers he is likely to 'please now, and please
for long. ' His verse, in the words of a poet greater than himself, is of
that quality which 'adds sunlight to daylight'; which is able to 'make
the happy happier. ' He will, it may be hoped, carry to the many Englands
across the seas, east and west, pictures of English life exquisite
in truth and grace:--to the more fortunate inhabitants (as they must
perforce hold themselves! ) of the old country, her image, as she was two
centuries since, will live in the 'golden apples' of the West, offered
to us by this sweet singer of Devonshire. We have greater poets, not a
few; none more faithful to nature as he saw her, none more perfect in
his art;--none, more companionable:--
F. T. P.
Dec. 1876
C H R Y S O M E L A
A SELECTION FROM THE LYRICAL POEMS OF ROBERT HERRICK
PREFATORY
1. THE ARGUMENT OF HIS BOOK
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, 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 bridal-cakes.
I write of Youth, of Love;--and have access
By these, to sing of cleanly wantonness;
I sing of dews, of rains, and, piece by piece,
Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris.
I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write
How roses first came red, and lilies white.
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The court of Mab, and of the Fairy King.
I write of Hell; I sing, and ever shall
Of Heaven,--and hope to have it after all.
2. TO HIS MUSE
Whither, mad maiden, wilt thou roam?
Far safer 'twere to stay at home;
Where thou mayst sit, and piping, please
The poor and private cottages.
Since cotes and hamlets best agree
With this thy meaner minstrelsy.
There with the reed thou mayst express
The shepherd's fleecy happiness;
And with thy Eclogues intermix:
Some smooth and harmless Bucolics.
There, on a hillock, thou mayst sing
Unto a handsome shepherdling;
Or to a girl, that keeps the neat,
With breath more sweet than violet.
There, there, perhaps such lines as these
May take the simple villages;
But for the court, the country wit
Is despicable unto it.
Stay then at home, and do not go
Or fly abroad to seek for woe;
Contempts in courts and cities dwell
No critic haunts the poor man's cell,
Where thou mayst hear thine own lines read
By no one tongue there censured.
That man's unwise will search for ill,
And may prevent it, sitting still.
3. WHEN HE WOULD HAVE HIS VERSES READ
In sober mornings, do not thou rehearse
The holy incantation of a verse;
But when that men have both well drunk, and fed,
Let my enchantments then be sung or read.
When laurel spirts i' th' fire, and when the hearth
Smiles to itself, and gilds the roof with mirth;
When up the Thyrse is raised, and when the sound
Of sacred orgies, flies A round, A round;
When the rose reigns, and locks with ointments shine,
Let rigid Cato read these lines of mine.
4. TO HIS BOOK
Make haste away, and let one be
A friendly patron unto thee;
Lest, rapt from hence, I see thee lie
Torn for the use of pastery;
Or see thy injured leaves serve well
To make loose gowns for mackarel;
Or see the grocers, in a trice,
Make hoods of thee to serve out spice.
5. TO HIS BOOK
Take mine advice, and go not near
Those faces, sour as vinegar;
For these, and nobler numbers, can
Ne'er please the supercilious man.
6. TO HIS BOOK
Be bold, my Book, nor be abash'd, or fear
The cutting thumb-nail, or the brow severe;
But by the Muses swear, all here is good,
If but well read, or ill read, understood.
7. TO MISTRESS KATHARINE BRADSHAW, THE LOVELY, THAT CROWNED HIM WITH LAUREL
My Muse in meads has spent her many hours
Sitting, and sorting several sorts of flowers,
To make for others garlands; and to set
On many a head here, many a coronet.
But amongst all encircled here, not one
Gave her a day of coronation;
Till you, sweet mistress, came and interwove
A laurel for her, ever young as Love.
You first of all crown'd her; she must, of due,
Render for that, a crown of life to you.
8. TO HIS VERSES
What will ye, my poor orphans, do,
When I must leave the world and you;
Who'll give ye then a sheltering shed,
Or credit ye, when I am dead?
Who'll let ye by their fire sit,
Although ye have a stock of wit,
Already coin'd to pay for it?
--I cannot tell: unless there be
Some race of old humanity
Left, of the large heart and long hand,
Alive, as noble Westmorland;
Or gallant Newark; which brave two
May fost'ring fathers be to you.
If not, expect to be no less
Ill used, than babes left fatherless.
9.
But with this our knowledge substantially ends. No private
letter of Shakespeare, no record of his conversation, no account of the
circumstances in which his writings were published, remains: hardly
any statement how his greatest contemporaries ranked him. A group of
Herrick's youthful letters on business has, indeed, been preserved;
of his life and studies, of his reputation during his own time, almost
nothing. For whatever facts affectionate diligence could now gather.
Readers are referred to Mr Grosart's 'Introduction. ' But if, to
supplement the picture, inevitably imperfect, which this gives, we turn
to Herrick's own book, we learn little, biographically, except the
names of a few friends,--that his general sympathies were with the
Royal cause,--and that he wearied in Devonshire for London. So far as is
known, he published but this one volume, and that, when not far from his
sixtieth year. Some pieces may be traced in earlier collections; some
few carry ascertainable dates; the rest lie over a period of near forty
years, during a great portion of which we have no distinct account where
Herrick lived, or what were his employments. We know that he shone with
Ben Jonson and the wits at the nights and suppers of those gods of our
glorious early literature: we may fancy him at Beaumanor, or Houghton,
with his uncle and cousins, keeping a Leicestershire Christmas in the
Manor-house: or, again, in some sweet southern county with Julia and
Anthea, Corinna and Dianeme by his side (familiar then by other names
now never to be remembered), sitting merry, but with just the sadness of
one who hears sweet music, in some meadow among his favourite flowers of
spring-time;--there, or 'where the rose lingers latest. ' . . . . But 'the
dream, the fancy,' is all that Time has spared us. And if it be curious
that his contemporaries should have left so little record of this
delightful poet and (as we should infer from the book) genial-hearted
man, it is not less so that the single first edition should have
satisfied the seventeenth century, and that, before the present, notices
of Herrick should be of the rarest occurrence.
The artist's 'claim to exist' is, however, always far less to be looked
for in his life, than in his art, upon the secret of which the fullest
biography can tell us little--as little, perhaps, as criticism can
analyse its charm. But there are few of our poets who stand less in need
than Herrick of commentaries of this description,--in which too often we
find little more than a dull or florid prose version of what the author
has given us admirably in verse. Apart from obsolete words or allusions,
Herrick is the best commentator upon Herrick. A few lines only need
therefore here be added, aiming rather to set forth his place in the
sequence of English poets, and especially in regard to those near his
own time, than to point out in detail beauties which he unveils in his
own way, and so most durably and delightfully.
When our Muses, silent or sick for a century and more after Chaucer's
death, during the years of war and revolution, reappeared, they brought
with them foreign modes of art, ancient and contemporary, in the forms
of which they began to set to music the new material which the age
supplied. At the very outset, indeed, the moralizing philosophy which
has characterized the English from the beginning of our national
history, appears in the writers of the troubled times lying between the
last regnal years of Henry VIII and the first of his great daughter. But
with the happier hopes of Elizabeth's accession, poetry was once more
distinctly followed, not only as a means of conveying thought, but as a
Fine Art. And hence something constrained and artificial blends with
the freshness of the Elizabethan literature. For its great underlying
elements it necessarily reverts to those embodied in our own earlier
poets, Chaucer above all, to whom, after barely one hundred and fifty
years, men looked up as a father of song: but in points of style
and treatment, the poets of the sixteenth century lie under a double
external influence--that of the poets of Greece and Rome (known
either in their own tongues or by translation), and that of the modern
literatures which had themselves undergone the same classical impulse.
Italy was the source most regarded during the more strictly Elizabethan
period; whence its lyrical poetry and the dramatic in a less degree, are
coloured much less by pure and severe classicalism with its closeness
to reality, than by the allegorical and elaborate style, fancy and fact
curiously blended, which had been generated in Italy under the peculiar
and local circumstances of her pilgrimage in literature and art from
the age of Dante onwards. Whilst that influence lasted, such brilliant
pictures of actual life, such directness, movement, and simplicity
in style, as Chaucer often shows, were not yet again attainable: and
although satire, narrative, the poetry of reflection, were meanwhile
not wholly unknown, yet they only appear in force at the close of this
period. And then also the pressure of political and religious strife,
veiled in poetry during the greater part of Elizabeth's actual reign
under the forms of pastoral and allegory, again imperiously breaks
in upon the gracious but somewhat slender and artificial fashions of
England's Helicon: the DIVOM NUMEN, SEDESQUE QUIETAE which, in some
degree the Elizabethan poets offer, disappear; until filling the
central years of the seventeenth century we reach an age as barren for
inspiration of new song as the Wars of the Roses; although the great
survivors from earlier years mask this sterility;--masking also the
revolution in poetical manner and matter which we can see secretly
preparing in the later 'Cavalier' poets, but which was not clearly
recognised before the time of Dryden's culmination.
In the period here briefly sketched, what is Herrick's portion? His
verse is eminent for sweet and gracious fluency; this is a real note of
the 'Elizabethan' poets. His subjects are frequently pastoral, with a
classical tinge, more or less slight, infused; his language, though not
free from exaggeration, is generally free from intellectual conceits
and distortion, and is eminent throughout for a youthful NAIVETE. Such,
also, are qualities of the latter sixteenth century literature. But if
these characteristics might lead us to call Herrick 'the last of the
Elizabethans,' born out of due time, the differences between him and
them are not less marked. Herrick's directness of speech is accompanied
by an equally clear and simple presentment of his thought; we have,
perhaps, no poet who writes more consistently and earnestly with his
eye upon his subject. An allegorical or mystical treatment is alien
from him: he handles awkwardly the few traditional fables which he
introduces. He is also wholly free from Italianizing tendencies: his
classicalism even is that of an English student,--of a schoolboy,
indeed, if he be compared with a Jonson or a Milton. Herrick's personal
eulogies on his friends and others, further, witness to the extension
of the field of poetry after Elizabeth's age;--in which his enthusiastic
geniality, his quick and easy transitions of subject, have also little
precedent.
If, again, we compare Herrick's book with those of his fellow-poets
for a hundred years before, very few are the traces which he gives of
imitation, or even of study. During the long interval between Herrick's
entrance on his Cambridge and his clerical careers (an interval all but
wholly obscure to us), it is natural to suppose that he read, at
any rate, his Elizabethan predecessors: yet (beyond those general
similarities already noticed) the Editor can find no positive proof of
familiarity. Compare Herrick with Marlowe, Greene, Breton, Drayton,
or other pretty pastoralists of the HELICON--his general and radical
unlikeness is what strikes us; whilst he is even more remote from the
passionate intensity of Sidney and Shakespeare, the Italian graces of
Spenser, the pensive beauty of PARTHENOPHIL, of DIELLA, of FIDESSA, of
the HECATOMPATHIA and the TEARS OF FANCY.
Nor is Herrick's resemblance nearer to many of the contemporaries who
have been often grouped with him. He has little in common with
the courtly elegance, the learned polish, which too rarely redeem
commonplace and conceits in Carew, Habington, Lovelace, Cowley, or
Waller. Herrick has his CONCETTI also: but they are in him generally
true plays of fancy; he writes throughout far more naturally than these
lyrists, who, on the other hand, in their unfrequent successes reach a
more complete and classical form of expression. Thus, when Carew speaks
of an aged fair one
When beauty, youth, and all sweets leave her,
Love may return, but lovers never!
Cowley, of his mistress--
Love in her sunny eyes does basking play,
Love walks the pleasant mazes of her hair:
or take Lovelace, 'To Lucasta,' Waller, in his 'Go, lovely rose,'--we
have a finish and condensation which Herrick hardly attains; a literary
quality alien from his 'woodnotes wild,' which may help us to understand
the very small appreciation he met from his age. He had 'a pretty
pastoral gale of fancy,' said Phillips, cursorily dismissing Herrick in
his THEATRUM: not suspecting how inevitably artifice and mannerism, if
fashionable for awhile, pass into forgetfulness, whilst the simple cry
of Nature partake in her permanence.
Donne and Marvell, stronger men, leave also no mark on our poet. The
elaborate thought, the metrical harshness of the first, could find no
counterpart in Herrick; whilst Marvell, beyond him in imaginative power,
though twisting it too often into contortion and excess, appears to have
been little known as a lyrist then:--as, indeed, his great merits have
never reached anything like due popular recognition. Yet Marvell's
natural description is nearer Herrick's in felicity and insight than any
of the poets named above. Nor, again, do we trace anything of Herbert
or Vaughan in Herrick's NOBLE NUMBERS, which, though unfairly judged if
held insincere, are obviously far distant from the intense conviction,
the depth and inner fervour of his high-toned contemporaries.
It is among the great dramatists of this age that we find the only
English influences palpably operative on this singularly original
writer. The greatest, in truth, is wholly absent: and it is remarkable
that although Herrick may have joined in the wit-contests and
genialities of the literary clubs in London soon after Shakespeare's
death, and certainly lived in friendship with some who had known him,
yet his name is never mentioned in the poetical commemorations of the
HESPERIDES. In Herrick, echoes from Fletcher's idyllic pieces in the
FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS are faintly traceable; from his songs, 'Hear
what Love can do,' and 'The lusty Spring,' more distinctly. But to Ben
Jonson, whom Herrick addresses as his patron saint in song, and ranks
on the highest list of his friends, his obligations are much more
perceptible. In fact, Jonson's non-dramatic poetry,--the EPIGRAMS and
FOREST of 1616, the UNDERWOODS of 1641, (he died in 1637),--supply
models, generally admirable in point of art, though of very unequal
merit in their execution and contents, of the principal forms under
which we may range Herrick's HESPERIDES. The graceful love-song, the
celebration of feasts and wit, the encomia of friends, the epigram
as then understood, are all here represented: even Herrick's vein in
natural description is prefigured in the odes to Penshurst and Sir
Robert Wroth, of 1616. And it is in the religious pieces of the NOBLE
NUMBERS, for which Jonson afforded the least copious precedents, that,
as a rule, Herrick is least successful.
Even if we had not the verses on his own book, (the most noteworthy
of which are here printed as PREFATORY,) in proof that Herrick was no
careless singer, but a true artist, working with conscious knowledge of
his art, we might have inferred the fact from the choice of Jonson as
his model. That great poet, as Clarendon justly remarked, had 'judgment
to order and govern fancy, rather than excess of fancy: his productions
being slow and upon deliberation. ' No writer could be better fitted for
the guidance of one so fancy-free as Herrick; to whom the curb, in the
old phrase, was more needful than the spur, and whose invention, more
fertile and varied than Jonson's, was ready at once to fill up
the moulds of form provided. He does this with a lively facility,
contrasting much with the evidence of labour in his master's work.
Slowness and deliberation are the last qualities suggested by Herrick.
Yet it may be doubted whether the volatile ease, the effortless grace,
the wild bird-like fluency with which he
Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air
are not, in truth, the results of exquisite art working in cooperation
with the gifts of nature. The various readings which our few remaining
manuscripts or printed versions have supplied to Mr Grosart's
'Introduction,' attest the minute and curious care with which Herrick
polished and strengthened his own work: his airy facility, his seemingly
spontaneous melodies, as with Shelley--his counterpart in pure lyrical
art within this century--were earned by conscious labour; perfect
freedom was begotten of perfect art;--nor, indeed, have excellence and
permanence any other parent.
With the error that regards Herrick as a careless singer is closely
twined that which ranks him in the school of that master of elegant
pettiness who has usurped and abused the name Anacreon; as a mere
light-hearted writer of pastorals, a gay and frivolous Renaissance
amourist. He has indeed those elements: but with them is joined the
seriousness of an age which knew that the light mask of classicalism and
bucolic allegory could be worn only as an ornament, and that life held
much deeper and further-reaching issues than were visible to the narrow
horizons within which Horace or Martial circumscribed the range of their
art. Between the most intensely poetical, and so, greatest, among the
French poets of this century, and Herrick, are many points of likeness.
He too, with Alfred de Musset, might have said
Quoi que nous puissions faire,
Je souffre; il est trop tard; le monde s'est fait vieux.
Une immense esperance a traverse la terre;
Malgre nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux.
Indeed, Herrick's deepest debt to ancient literature lies not in the
models which he directly imitated, nor in the Anacreontic tone which
with singular felicity he has often taken. These are common to many
writers with him:--nor will he who cannot learn more from the great
ancient world ever rank among poets of high order, or enter the
innermost sanctuary of art. But, the power to describe men and things as
the poet sees them with simple sincerity, insight, and grace: to paint
scenes and imaginations as perfect organic wholes;--carrying with it the
gift to clothe each picture, as if by unerring instinct, in fit metrical
form, giving to each its own music; beginning without affectation,
and rounding off without effort;--the power, in a word, to leave
simplicity, sanity, and beauty as the last impressions lingering on our
minds, these gifts are at once the true bequest of classicalism, and the
reason why (until modern effort equals them) the study of that Hellenic
and Latin poetry in which these gifts are eminent above all other
literatures yet created, must be essential. And it is success in
precisely these excellences which is here claimed for Herrick. He is
classical in the great and eternal sense of the phrase: and much more
so, probably, than he was himself aware of. No poet in fact is so far
from dwelling in a past or foreign world: it is the England, if not of
1648, at least of his youth, in which he lives and moves and loves: his
Bucolics show no trace of Sicily: his Anthea and Julia wear no 'buckles
of the purest gold,' nor have anything about them foreign to Middlesex
or Devon. Herrick's imagination has no far horizons: like Burns and
Crabbe fifty years since, or Barnes (that exquisite and neglected
pastoralist of fair Dorset, perfect within his narrower range as
Herrick) to-day, it is his own native land only which he sees and
paints: even the fairy world in which, at whatever inevitable interval,
he is second to Shakespeare, is pure English; or rather, his elves live
in an elfin county of their own, and are all but severed from humanity.
Within that greater circle of Shakespeare, where Oberon and Ariel and
their fellows move, aiding or injuring mankind, and reflecting human
life in a kind of unconscious parody, Herrick cannot walk: and it may
have been due to his good sense and true feeling for art, that here,
where resemblance might have seemed probable, he borrows nothing from
MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM or TEMPEST. if we are moved by the wider range
of Byron's or Shelley's sympathies, there is a charm, also, in this
sweet insularity of Herrick; a narrowness perhaps, yet carrying with
it a healthful reality absent from the vapid and artificial
'cosmopolitanism' that did such wrong on Goethe's genius. If he has
not the exotic blooms and strange odours which poets who derive from
literature show in their conservatories, Herrick has the fresh breeze
and thyme-bed fragrance of open moorland, the grace and greenery of
English meadows: with Homer and Dante, he too shares the strength and
inspiration which come from touch of a man's native soil.
What has been here sketched is not planned so much as a criticism in
form on Herrick's poetry as an attempt to seize his relations to his
predecessors and contemporaries. If we now tentatively inquire what
place may be assigned to him in our literature at large, Herrick has no
single lyric to show equal, in pomp of music, brilliancy of diction, or
elevation of sentiment to some which Spenser before, Milton in his own
time, Dryden and Gray, Wordsworth and Shelley, since have given us.
Nor has he, as already noticed, the peculiar finish and reserve (if
the phrase may be allowed) traceable, though rarely, in Ben Jonson and
others of the seventeenth century. He does not want passion; yet
his passion wants concentration: it is too ready, also, to dwell on
externals: imagination with him generally appears clothed in forms
of fancy. Among his contemporaries, take Crashaw's 'Wishes': Sir J.
Beaumont's elegy on his child Gervase: take Bishop King's 'Surrender':
My once-dear Love! --hapless, that I no more
Must call thee so. . . . The rich affection's store
That fed our hopes, lies now exhaust and spent,
Like sums of treasure unto bankrupts lent:--
We that did nothing study but the way
To love each other, with which thoughts the day
Rose with delight to us, and with them set,
Must learn the hateful art, how to forget!
--Fold back our arms, take home our fruitless loves,
That must new fortunes try, like turtle doves
Dislodged from their haunts. We must in tears
Unwind a love knit up in many years.
In this one kiss I here surrender thee
Back to thyself: so thou again art free:--
take eight lines by some old unknown Northern singer:
When I think on the happy days
I spent wi' you, my dearie,
And now what lands between us lie,
How can I be but eerie!
How slow ye move, ye heavy hours,
As ye were wae and weary!
It was na sae ye glinted by
When I was wi' my dearie:--
--O! there is an intensity here, a note of passion beyond the deepest of
Herrick's. This tone (whether from temperament or circumstance or
scheme of art), is wanting to the HESPERIDES and NOBLE NUMBERS: nor does
Herrick's lyre, sweet and varied as it is, own that purple chord,
that more inwoven harmony, possessed by poets of greater depth and
splendour,--by Shakespeare and Milton often, by Spenser more rarely.
But if we put aside these 'greater gods' of song, with Sidney,--in the
Editor's judgment Herrick's mastery (to use a brief expression), both
over Nature and over Art, clearly assigns to him the first place as
lyrical poet, in the strict and pure sense of the phrase, among all
who flourished during the interval between Henry V and a hundred years
since. Single pieces of equal, a few of higher, quality, we have,
indeed, meanwhile received, not only from the master-singers who did not
confine themselves to the Lyric, but from many poets--some the unknown
contributors to our early anthologies, then Jonson, Marvell, Waller,
Collins, and others, with whom we reach the beginning of the wider sweep
which lyrical poetry has since taken. Yet, looking at the whole work,
not at the selected jewels, of this great and noble multitude, Herrick,
as lyrical poet strictly, offers us by far the most homogeneous,
attractive, and varied treasury. No one else among lyrists within the
period defined, has such unfailing freshness: so much variety within
the sphere prescribed to himself: such closeness to nature, whether
in description or in feeling: such easy fitness in language: melody so
unforced and delightful. His dull pages are much less frequent: he has
more lines, in his own phrase, 'born of the royal blood': the
Inflata rore non Achaico verba
are rarer with him: although superficially mannered, nature is so much
nearer to him, that far fewer of his pieces have lost vitality and
interest through adherence to forms of feeling or fashions of thought
now obsolete. A Roman contemporary is described by the younger Pliny in
words very appropriate to Herrick: who, in fact, if Greek in respect
of his method and style, in the contents of his poetry displays the
'frankness of nature and vivid sense of life' which criticism assigns
as marks of the great Roman poets. FACIT VERSUS, QUALES CATULLUS AUT
CALVUS. QUANTUM ILLIS LEPORIS, DULCEDINIS, AMARITUDINIS AMORIS! INSERIT
SANE, SED DATA OPERA, MOLLIBUS LENIBUSQUE DURIUSCULOS QUOSDAM; ET
HOC, QUASI CATULLUS AUT CALVUS. Many pieces have been, here refused
admittance, whether from coarseness of phrase or inferior value: yet
these are rarely defective in the lyrical art, which, throughout the
writer's work, is so simple and easy as almost to escape notice through
its very excellence. In one word, Herrick, in a rare and special sense,
is unique.
To these qualities we may, perhaps, ascribe the singular neglect which,
so far as we may infer, he met with in his own age, and certainly in
the century following. For the men of the Restoration period he was
too natural, too purely poetical: he had not the learned polish, the
political allusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn, which were
then and onwards demanded from poetry. In the next age, no tradition
consecrated his name; whilst writers of a hundred years before were then
too remote for familiarity, and not remote enough for reverence. Moving
on to our own time, when some justice has at length been conceded to
him, Herrick has to meet the great rivalry of the poets who, from Burns
and Cowper to Tennyson, have widened and deepened the lyrical sphere,
making it at once on the one hand more intensely personal, on the other,
more free and picturesque in the range of problems dealt with: whilst at
the same time new and richer lyrical forms, harmonies more intricate and
seven-fold, have been created by them, as in Hellas during her golden
age of song, to embody ideas and emotions unknown or unexpressed under
Tudors and Stuarts. To this latter superiority Herrick would, doubtless,
have bowed, as he bowed before Ben Jonson's genius. 'Rural ditties,' and
'oaten flute' cannot bear the competition of the full modern orchestra.
Yet this author need not fear! That exquisite: and lofty pleasure which
it is the first and the last aim of all true art to give, must, by its
own nature, be lasting also. As the eyesight fluctuates, and gives the
advantage to different colours in turn, so to the varying moods of the
mind the same beauty does not always seem equally beautiful. Thus from
the 'purple light' of our later poetry there are hours in which we
may look to the daffodil and rose-tints of Herrick's old Arcadia, for
refreshment and delight. And the pleasure which he gives is as eminently
wholesome as pleasurable. Like the holy river of Virgil, to the souls
who drink of him, Herrick offers 'securos latices. ' He is conspicuously
free from many of the maladies incident to his art. Here is no
overstrain, no spasmodic cry, so wire-drawn analysis or sensational
rhetoric, no music without sense, no mere second-hand literary
inspiration, no mannered archaism:--above all, no sickly sweetness, no
subtle, unhealthy affectation. Throughout his work, whether when it is
strong, or in the less worthy portions, sanity, sincerity, simplicity,
lucidity, are everywhere the characteristics of Herrick: in these, not
in his pretty Pagan masquerade, he shows the note,--the only genuine
note,--of Hellenic descent. Hence, through whatever changes and fashions
poetry may pass, her true lovers he is likely to 'please now, and please
for long. ' His verse, in the words of a poet greater than himself, is of
that quality which 'adds sunlight to daylight'; which is able to 'make
the happy happier. ' He will, it may be hoped, carry to the many Englands
across the seas, east and west, pictures of English life exquisite
in truth and grace:--to the more fortunate inhabitants (as they must
perforce hold themselves! ) of the old country, her image, as she was two
centuries since, will live in the 'golden apples' of the West, offered
to us by this sweet singer of Devonshire. We have greater poets, not a
few; none more faithful to nature as he saw her, none more perfect in
his art;--none, more companionable:--
F. T. P.
Dec. 1876
C H R Y S O M E L A
A SELECTION FROM THE LYRICAL POEMS OF ROBERT HERRICK
PREFATORY
1. THE ARGUMENT OF HIS BOOK
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, 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 bridal-cakes.
I write of Youth, of Love;--and have access
By these, to sing of cleanly wantonness;
I sing of dews, of rains, and, piece by piece,
Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris.
I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write
How roses first came red, and lilies white.
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The court of Mab, and of the Fairy King.
I write of Hell; I sing, and ever shall
Of Heaven,--and hope to have it after all.
2. TO HIS MUSE
Whither, mad maiden, wilt thou roam?
Far safer 'twere to stay at home;
Where thou mayst sit, and piping, please
The poor and private cottages.
Since cotes and hamlets best agree
With this thy meaner minstrelsy.
There with the reed thou mayst express
The shepherd's fleecy happiness;
And with thy Eclogues intermix:
Some smooth and harmless Bucolics.
There, on a hillock, thou mayst sing
Unto a handsome shepherdling;
Or to a girl, that keeps the neat,
With breath more sweet than violet.
There, there, perhaps such lines as these
May take the simple villages;
But for the court, the country wit
Is despicable unto it.
Stay then at home, and do not go
Or fly abroad to seek for woe;
Contempts in courts and cities dwell
No critic haunts the poor man's cell,
Where thou mayst hear thine own lines read
By no one tongue there censured.
That man's unwise will search for ill,
And may prevent it, sitting still.
3. WHEN HE WOULD HAVE HIS VERSES READ
In sober mornings, do not thou rehearse
The holy incantation of a verse;
But when that men have both well drunk, and fed,
Let my enchantments then be sung or read.
When laurel spirts i' th' fire, and when the hearth
Smiles to itself, and gilds the roof with mirth;
When up the Thyrse is raised, and when the sound
Of sacred orgies, flies A round, A round;
When the rose reigns, and locks with ointments shine,
Let rigid Cato read these lines of mine.
4. TO HIS BOOK
Make haste away, and let one be
A friendly patron unto thee;
Lest, rapt from hence, I see thee lie
Torn for the use of pastery;
Or see thy injured leaves serve well
To make loose gowns for mackarel;
Or see the grocers, in a trice,
Make hoods of thee to serve out spice.
5. TO HIS BOOK
Take mine advice, and go not near
Those faces, sour as vinegar;
For these, and nobler numbers, can
Ne'er please the supercilious man.
6. TO HIS BOOK
Be bold, my Book, nor be abash'd, or fear
The cutting thumb-nail, or the brow severe;
But by the Muses swear, all here is good,
If but well read, or ill read, understood.
7. TO MISTRESS KATHARINE BRADSHAW, THE LOVELY, THAT CROWNED HIM WITH LAUREL
My Muse in meads has spent her many hours
Sitting, and sorting several sorts of flowers,
To make for others garlands; and to set
On many a head here, many a coronet.
But amongst all encircled here, not one
Gave her a day of coronation;
Till you, sweet mistress, came and interwove
A laurel for her, ever young as Love.
You first of all crown'd her; she must, of due,
Render for that, a crown of life to you.
8. TO HIS VERSES
What will ye, my poor orphans, do,
When I must leave the world and you;
Who'll give ye then a sheltering shed,
Or credit ye, when I am dead?
Who'll let ye by their fire sit,
Although ye have a stock of wit,
Already coin'd to pay for it?
--I cannot tell: unless there be
Some race of old humanity
Left, of the large heart and long hand,
Alive, as noble Westmorland;
Or gallant Newark; which brave two
May fost'ring fathers be to you.
If not, expect to be no less
Ill used, than babes left fatherless.
9. NOT EVERY DAY FIT FOR VERSE
'Tis not ev'ry day that I
Fitted am to prophesy:
No, but when the spirit fills
The fantastic pannicles,
Full of fire, then I write
As the Godhead doth indite.
Thus enraged, my lines are hurl'd,
Like the Sibyl's, through the world:
Look how next the holy fire
Either slakes, or doth retire;
So the fancy cools:--till when
That brave spirit comes again.
10. HIS PRAYER TO BEN JONSON
When I a verse shall make,
Know I have pray'd thee,
For old religion's sake,
Saint Ben, to aid me
Make the way smooth for me,
When, I, thy Herrick,
Honouring thee on my knee
Offer my Lyric.
Candles I'll give to thee,
And a new altar;
And thou, Saint Ben, shalt be
Writ in my psalter.
11. HIS REQUEST TO JULIA
Julia, if I chance to die
Ere I print my poetry,
I most humbly thee desire
To commit it to the fire:
Better 'twere my book were dead,
Than to live not perfected.
12. TO HIS BOOK
Go thou forth, my book, though late,
Yet be timely fortunate.
It may chance good luck may send
Thee a kinsman or a friend,
That may harbour thee, when I
With my fates neglected lie.
If thou know'st not where to dwell,
See, the fire's by. --Farewell!
13. HIS POETRY HIS PILLAR
Only a little more
I have to write:
Then I'll give o'er,
And bid the world good-night.
'Tis but a flying minute,
That I must stay,
Or linger in it:
And then I must away.
O Time, that cut'st down all,
And scarce leav'st here
Memorial
Of any men that were;
--How many lie forgot
In vaults beneath,
And piece-meal rot
Without a fame in death?
Behold this living stone
I rear for me,
Ne'er to be thrown
Down, envious Time, by thee.
Pillars let some set up
If so they please;
Here is my hope,
And my Pyramides.
14. TO HIS BOOK
If hap it must, that I must see thee lie
Absyrtus-like, all torn confusedly;
With solemn tears, and with much grief of heart,
I'll recollect thee, weeping, part by part;
And having wash'd thee, close thee in a chest
With spice; that done, I'll leave thee to thy rest.
15. UPON HIMSELF
Thou shalt not all die; for while Love's fire shines
Upon his altar, men shall read thy lines;
And learn'd musicians shall, to honour Herrick's
Fame, and his name, both set and sing his lyrics.
To his book's end this last line he'd have placed:--
Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste.
IDYLLICA
16. THE COUNTRY LIFE:
TO THE HONOURED MR ENDYMION PORTER,
GROOM OF THE BED-CHAMBER TO HIS MAJESTY
Sweet country life, to such unknown,
Whose lives are others', not their own!
But serving courts and cities, be
Less happy, less enjoying thee.
Thou never plough'st the ocean's foam
To seek and bring rough pepper home:
Nor to the Eastern Ind dost rove
To bring from thence the scorched clove:
Nor, with the loss of thy loved rest,
Bring'st home the ingot from the West.
No, thy ambition's master-piece
Flies no thought higher than a fleece:
Or how to pay thy hinds, and clear
All scores: and so to end the year:
But walk'st about thine own dear bounds,
Not envying others' larger grounds:
For well thou know'st, 'tis not th' extent
Of land makes life, but sweet content.
When now the cock (the ploughman's horn)
Calls forth the lily-wristed morn;
Then to thy corn-fields thou dost go,
Which though well soil'd, yet thou dost know
That the best compost for the lands
Is the wise master's feet, and hands.
There at the plough thou find'st thy team,
With a hind whistling there to them:
And cheer'st them up, by singing how
The kingdom's portion is the plough.
This done, then to th' enamell'd meads
Thou go'st; and as thy foot there treads,
Thou seest a present God-like power
Imprinted in each herb and flower:
And smell'st the breath of great-eyed kine,
Sweet as the blossoms of the vine.
Here thou behold'st thy large sleek neat
Unto the dew-laps up in meat:
And, as thou look'st, the wanton steer,
The heifer, cow, and ox draw near,
To make a pleasing pastime there.
These seen, thou go'st to view thy flocks
Of sheep, safe from the wolf and fox,
And find'st their bellies there as full
Of short sweet grass, as backs with wool:
And leav'st them, as they feed and fill,
A shepherd piping on a hill.
For sports, for pageantry, and plays,
Thou hast thy eves, and holydays:
On which the young men and maids meet,
To exercise their dancing feet:
Tripping the comely country Round,
With daffadils and daisies crown'd.
Thy wakes, thy quintels, here thou hast,
Thy May-poles too with garlands graced;
Thy Morris-dance; thy Whitsun-ale;
Thy shearing-feast, which never fail.
Thy harvest home; thy wassail bowl,
That's toss'd up after Fox i' th' hole:
Thy mummeries; thy Twelve-tide kings
And queens; thy Christmas revellings:
Thy nut-brown mirth, thy russet wit,
And no man pays too dear for it. --
To these, thou hast thy times to go
And trace the hare i' th' treacherous snow:
Thy witty wiles to draw, and get
The lark into the trammel net:
Thou hast thy cockrood, and thy glade
To take the precious pheasant made:
Thy lime-twigs, snares, and pit-falls then
To catch the pilfering birds, not men.
