Ceremony and Art: Robert Herrick's Poetry 9783111344478, 9783110992229

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DE PROPRIETATIBUS LITTERARUM edenda curat C. H. VAN SCHOONEVELD Indiana University Series Practica, 64

CEREMONY AND ART Robert Herrick 's Poetry

by

ROBERT H. DEMING

State University College Fredonia, New York

1974 MOUTON THE HAGUE · PARIS

©Copyright 1974 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 73-86325

Printed in The Netherlands

To Anne

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In a note of this kind which attempts to thank everyone possible while not implicating anyone in what follows, there is usually a tendency to build rhetorical orders of distant and immediate gratitude. My division may violate this decorum, but the intention is of the purest sort. To my wife Anne I express my deep relief that her substantial love has endured over half a decade in the nurturing of this work. That she and it have prevailed is only partially evident in the dedication. To D. C. Allen I express the warmest thanks of a young critic who has had the great good fortune to be granted the indulgence and the kindness of a great scholar. To Britton Harwood and Frank Jordan I express the thanks of an anxious colleague who has had the gentleness and understanding and perceptivity of friends. To the late Helen C. White who first guided this study my thanks are too late, but she will know them nonetheless. And finally to those whose scholarship and criticism is contained in the notes or is imbedded irretrievably in my thoughts I express my appreciation for making the writing of this book easier with the fear that my enthusiasm for some of their findings may have led me to overlook the exact letter of their truths. I also wish to acknowledge the permission of the editors of the following journals who have allowed earlier versions of some of the chapters to be reprinted from their journals: "Robert Herrick's Classical Ceremony", English Literary History, 34 (1967), 327-348, .©The Johns Hopkins University Press, in revised and expanded form here; the Editor of SEL for permission to reprint the essay "Herrick's Funereal Poems" as part of chapter three; and the Editor of The Journal of Popular Culture for permission to reprint the essay "Some Uses of the Past: Herrick and Hawthorne" as part of the Postcript. All quotations from Herrick's poetry are from The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, edited by J. Max Patrick, by permission of the editor and Doubleday & Company, Inc.

PREFACE

In our modern critical preoccupation with the poetry of the earlier seventeenth century, Robert Herrick has finally begun to receive his due share of attention. In the past decade two separate editions, and at least one selection, of his poems have appeared. Roger Rollin's comprehensive and sensitive study of Herrick (in the Twayne Series, 1966) is the only important critical work of book length on Herrick in fifty years. Yet that work is flawed by bad 'readings' and by an overemphasis upon architectonic modes and a thematic organizing principle. Another, comprehensive study of Herrick's poetry is needed. It should be a book which is not just a source study of Herrick's poetry, not just a collection of annotations and explications, not just a new perspective on the standard critical questions such as Herrick's paganism versus his Christianity, his triviality versus his seriousness. It should be a book which is all of these but more: it should place Herrick's poetry in its own milieu, literary and historical, social and artistic. Such a book I hope this book to be. In this book I intend to place Herrick where he belongs, but not elevated to a place alongside the major poets of the seventeenth century. That has too frequently been the mistake of past criticism. For, unlike those major poets he epitomizes his century's focus upon the resemblance between the infinitely large and the infinitely small, the metaphoric and dialectical tensions of expansion and contraction. The telescope, Herrick says poetically, is inverted so as to reveal the reduced size, the minuteness, of the minute spheres. His small world is the very world of Hesperides, the book of his poems with their learned and playful elements of ritual and ceremony and of Nature and Art. His world becomes, as no major poet's does, the mimetically faithful image of the greater world. Therefore, this book highlights certain new elements of Herrick's poetic achievement: the self-conscious and the ironic, the playful and the miniature, the paradoxical and the Baroque, and, most importantly, the ritualistic and ceremonial elements. I hope to extend the conceptual bases for judgment of Herrick's poetry by focusing upon these new concerns. Related to these concerns is the attempt to understand how the poet's

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PREFACE

historical awareness of the continuum of the classical past in the present affects the poetic strategies he creates. For truly in Herrick's poetry the vision of his poetic contexts merges with his view of the historical and cultural scene to such an extent that ultimately he comes to see the denigration of his world and of his poetry as an assault of more than personal and poetic significance. Herrick's imaginative fictions reveal his attitudes toward ceremony, ritual, art and culture. And all are threatened by the advancing tide of restrictive and restraining Puritanism. Herrick's avoidance of the dichotomizing tendencies of his age might, in fact, speak to our own times as well as anything else seems to. Through his art, even though art is only a symbolic form of real life, Herrick the poet and the man creates a possible but idealistic situation, another world in which a poet's and a man's 'second self might reside. Nonethless, this second world is linked to reality because the poet's function is to allow his experience and his vision to mediate in and through reality. The function of ceremony, in particular, in Herrick's poetry is to establish just such an artistic and humanistic means of relating art to reality, man to his cosmos, and man to his God. Because the relationship between art and reality is complex for Herrick, it is more complex for us poor readers who discover it at two or three removes from its 'truth' for Herrick. Fortunately, his art mediates for us the relationships he discovers, and he images these forth in his poetic fictions. By examining the relationships between ceremonies of classicism and those of Christianity, and between ceremony and art, we can discover the relationship of ceremony to Herrick's 'world view'. His cosmos includes the gods, God, worship, sacrifice, and love. It includes his artistic notion of the afterlife, in life and in art. It includes his notion of his own and art's place in culture and in history. Only the cumulative effects of ceremony's relatedness to all of Herrick's little worlds will reveal how in evading the world 'through art' he made himself one with these worlds 'through art'. Because Herrick is usually placed as a 'neo-classical' poet, we might expect to find in his poetry some distrust of the powers of the imagination. We find instead that he probably wished to trust it as much as possible. He seems to fulfill every criteria of the "lover, the madman, and the poet" as Shakespeare has his normative character Theseus set out these criteria in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the frenzy of his Dionysian and Apollonian poems, Herrick is the blessed madman. Still, his blessedness and madness are not reasons enough to justify a supposed 'paganism'. In the fantasy and place of his love poems, he is compact with the lover. Still, his graceful craftsmanship and light touch are not reasons enough to justify a supposed 'triviality'. And in the great bulk of his ceremonial poetry, he looks upon things not as they are but as he would have them

PREFACE

11

be, giving "to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name". Surely, this seriousness cannot be condemned for this. Yet his poetry is perhaps the last breath of an elemental Renaissance romantic tendency, playfully breathing forth shadows and dreams for us and before the age of regulation and 'cool reason' dehumanizes all causes to all effects. To the notion of the poet as homo ludens, we can also add the vital elements of festivity (homo festivus) and fantasy (homo fantasia) which Professor Harvey Cox has recently discovered (in his The Feast of Fools, 1969) as absolutely necessary when a culture becomes overwhelmed by secularism and technology (the latter, of course, does not apply to Herrick's culture). Herrick's poetry contains heavy doses of the revelry, celebration, and fantasy which Professor Cox deems necessary for modern culture. And Herrick's use of ceremony, along with his vision of the absolute importance of maintaining the ceremonies of art and life, would seem to be for his time what Cox finds wanting in our own time. Herrick's ceremonies relate life and art to the past, to the present, and to the future. Ceremony's importance to life and to art is assured by Herrick because it is his best playful and imaginative means of celebrating life through art. Having set out the subject, the 'why' of the book, I should now like to set out briefly the method or 'how' of this book. (This section can be ignored by those who do not much care about how a critic chooses his schematic, or who are offended by technical terminology, self-consciousness, and critical justification.) The leading critical ideas of this book are derivative and hopefully applied with some sense of their potential application for enlarging and deepening my lyrical subject matter. Herrick himself is certainly a critic and an artist of life, but he is not a poet who uses only a pastoral style or a conception of life from a pastoral point of view. Nor is all of the world of his poetry an idyllic and an ideal world. He self-consciously bodies forth his conception of himself and his world in poetry which is historically and linguistically dependent upon 'his' meaning rather than some modern, normative principle of interpretation. His meaning, which is an "affair of consciousness not of words" (as E. D. Hirsch demonstrates meaning to be in the first chapter of his Validity in Interpretation, 1967), has very little to do with what a critic might choose to impose by way of meaning upon Herrick's poetry. The critic attempts to discover, in Kenneth Burke's phrase, the "various strategies for the encompassing of situations", discoverable only in Herrick's poetic contexts where they are named.1 Because his poetry 1

Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York: Vintage reprint edition, 1961), 3.

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presents a strategy for the continual encompassing of historical and cultural realities, that is history and cultural values are contained with the poetry, it is possible to identify the relationship between history and culture (what Murray Krieger would call the "unique existential context of cultural forces") and literature (what Krieger would call the "unique poetic context of the literary work"). 2 The poetry presents individual conscious 'acts' attesting to the presence of this relationship, and the critic must attempt to get into the 'act' so as to discover the nature and limits of a relationship which is, potentially at least, unitive. To do this, the critic must move (Earl Wasserman would perhaps say "oscillate") back and forth between the realms of historical concern and aesthetic concern. By getting into the play element or the imitative element in Herrick's poetry, for example, the critic moves from history to literature where he discovers that the poetry does in fact (as Krieger suggests) bear a reflection of history's (or culture's) reality for the poet. The critic then shows how the poetry, or the individual poem, directs the play spirit or the imitation, creating a new poetic context which is the reverse movement from literature to history. These historical and poetic relationships will, in turn, give rise to certain principles which approach the "thematic". 3 Such principles as selfconsciousness, irony, play, the fantasy of the miniature, the paradoxical, the ritualistic and the ceremonial operate on the form of the poetry as well as on the aesthetic attitudes which the poetry represents. In a poem the thematic is created by an expression of a higher set of laws, almost a paradigmatic mind-set, which must then be fathomed. These laws approach the mysterious and the visionary, but they are prevented from slipping over into a phenomenological overview (or a 'spiritual biography') by the contextual boundaries of the poetry itself. These laws are the mysterious principles which, in Herrick, operate paradigmatically in terms of Order, Art, and Experience. The statement of these principles in Herrick's metaphor of "wilde civility" is paradoxically incarnational. The 'acts' of the poetic mind must be separated, since 'acts' are relationships posited on a union, by the acts of the critical mind so that they can be known and then stated. They are discoverable in the tensional juxtaposition of the classical and the Christian, the ceremonial and ritual, Nature and Art. 2 Murray Krieger, "Critical Historicism: The Poetic Context and the Existential Context", Orbis Litterarum, XXI (1966), 55. 3 Murray Krieger, Hie Tragic Vision (Chicago: Phoenix Edition, 1966), 242; the study of thematics is "the study of the experiential tensions which, dramatically entangled in the literary work, become an existential reflection of that work's esthetic complexity".

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In spite of our best efforts, the thematic, the principles, the paradigms, the laws, the moments of Herrick's poetry can only be focused upon at their level of conscious manifestation. They can never be conclusively proven. The sum of the writer's 'acts' can only be the sum of individual 'acts'. 4 By attempting to discover the understanding consciousness of Robert Herrick's aesthetic vision, we can learn about his creative strategies and about the history of his culture itself as seen through that poetic consciousness. We are never given a complete or even a neutral history of his culture. But in the variety of poems in Hesperides certain conscious principles emerge with such miraculous forcibilness that they must be Herrick's vision.

4

cf. Harry Berger, "Ecology of the Medieval Imagination", Centennial (Summer, 1968), 281.

Review,

XII

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

7

Preface

9

1. Ceremony and Art

17

2. Ceremony and Cosmos

58

3. Ceremony and Death

99

4. Ceremony as Cultural & Historical Vision

127

5. Postscript

158

Select Bibliography

168

Index

172

1. CEREMONY AND ART

At the beginning of the twentieth century, critics rediscovered Robert Herrick largely in terms of his 'indebtedness' to various Greek and Latin poets. They found that Herrick undoubtedly discovered in abundance from the poets of the Greek Anthology and from poetry of the late Silver Latin age much which appealed to him: the country life, the rural religious festivals, the praise of a patron or for hospitality, the love of a priestess, the lament of a poignant elegy, the joy of an epithalamium. These are as much Herrick's subjects as they were Horace's, Tibullus's, or Ovid's. And the Latin poets are more often his inspirations than his models - though this was not often mentioned by earlier critics. He uses the inspiration of earlier poetry to celebrate the English scene, for it reinforces his sense of history, his 'historical awareness' of the past as a continuing present, and it provides poetic pleasure in the plenitude and order of creation in a way that is Christian without being ascetic. He often found a quaintness in the country rites of his own scene, but rarely does that quaintness lead to urbane sophistication and irony. For, aside from the general indebtedness which Herrick certainly shared with the classical devotees ofhisage,he is more complexly and deeply indebted to a great wealth of classical material which has yet to be focused into his poetry. This matter is the classical Roman ceremony and ritual as it is related to his own contemporary Christian ceremony and ritual as both of these are related to his conception of poetry and life. Some modern studies of Herrick's poetry do approach the poetry in terms of "ceremony" or "ceremonial" in speaking of the ritualistic and liturgical flavor and cast of many of Herrick's poems. Yet too often ceremonial is labeled "pastoralism" or "idyllic lyricism", "paganism" or "regenerative artistic escapism", or "Frazerian myth-making". One recent study, typical in the sense that its normative values are so directly stated, may provide us with a partial grammar of motives for what is to follow here. Without its attribution of a "pagan spirit" or of a "neo-pagan hedonism", it may also pave the way for the right view of the Christian and classical elements in Herrick's use of ceremony and art.

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Herrick's use of Christian terms and terminology in apparently sensuous or erotic settings leads, in the view of Professor H. R. Swardson, to the labeling of Herrick's attitude as that of a "pagan spirit" when (and only when) the religious terms are seen as competing with the non-Christian. Religious overtones in a poem supposedly alert us to the issue of "paganism" in all of Herrick's poetry. A poem as conventional in its usage of classical allusion and echo as His returne to London supposedly reminds us of Herrick's devotion to a "pagan counter religion" because London has a local deity, a "Genius", "in a fully pagan conception". What that "pagan conception" is, is not specified. When Herrick claims in that same poem Ο Place! Ο People! Manners! fram'd to please All Nations, Customes, Kindreds, Languages! I am a free-bom Roman; suffer then, That I amongst you live a Citizen. London my home is. Professor Swardson, in his chapter "Herrick and the Ceremony of Mirth", declares: "The symbolic return to a lost religion is further associated with classical paganism in the identification of London with Rome and Herrick's claim to be a Roman." Cicero, Rome as center of both Christianity and paganism, London as, for Herrick, the civilized epitome of the world, and praise of place in the ceremonious language of conventional celebration are submerged beneath too restrictive a comment. Ironically, the "coherent order of experience" which Professor Swardson says Herrick imagines in his poetry appears "fragmented and disordered" to the critic's "moral judgment in plain Christian daylight".1 This much supplies us with one of the terms, "paganism", which is related to ceremony. Another term, "ceremonial", can be drawn from the same critic's analysis of the unnaturalness of the ceremony in a short lyric, Meat without Mirth: Eaten I have; and though I had good cheere, I did not sup, because no friends were there. Where Mirth and Friends are absent when we Dine Or Sup, there wants the Incense and the Wine. The words "Incense" and "Wine" may suggest a religious service (as they do for Professor Swardson) though it is far more likely, and also more grammatically correct, to suggest that they are the symbolic equivalents of "Mirth" and "Friends". "Incense" like "Mirth" is ephemeral, ethereal, and 1 H. R. Swardson, Poetry and the Fountain of Light (London, 1962), 40-63. Swardson devotes an entire chapter to "Herrick and the Ceremony of Mirth". His readings of specific poems, while frequently enlightening when details are examined, are just as frequently marred by his necessity to discover competition whenever Christian and 'pagan' elements are discovered in the poetry.

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mutable. "Wine" like "Friends" is certainly less ephemeral, ethereal, but no less mutable. Wine is to be savored and breathed (perhaps like "Incense" and "Mirth" when the pairs are identified). When it is vintage and special, from the poet's experiential point of view, it is like "Friends". When combined, the "Mirth/Incense" and the "Friends/Wine" unite the mutable in immutability; and a ceremonial order, which is lacking because parts of the order are "wanting", is restored in the poem via art. If, then, there is a "polarity of the natural and the spiritual" in the poem, as the critic would have us believe there is, it is most unlikely that that polarity is "detrimental to the natural" even by "customary Christian belief'. There is nothing remotely "pagan" or even "naturalistic" competing with a spiritual or religious attitude in this little poem. It asks only that it be allowed to claim that ceremony does have the power, as artifice, to make the natural more artful, more orderly, more lasting, and more humanly desirable. No doubt Herrick uses ceremony in the poem to heighten and transform his experience, and I hope that it is not too unmannerly of me to suggest, with Sidney, that we must attempt to learn "aright why and how" the poet did so. The short lyric also suggests that ceremony, for Herrick, is the artistic means of discovering the order of the 'real' in the 'unreal'. Ceremony can be the poet's mediating perspective into the real and the unreal worlds. As an artistic medium, it can be the vehicle of artistic oneness and wholeness. For Herrick, ceremony is all of these as well as the means of arriving at the ground of being, for it allows him his fullest play, his fullest art, and his fullest freedom, as an artist and, we assume, as a man. On this matter, Goethe says, "There is no surer way of evading the world than through art, and there is no surer way of binding oneself to it than through art." 2 We might expect the exiled London poet to evade the world of "loathed Devonshire". He certainly provides us with illustrations of his psychic exile; yet even in poems like Dean-bourne, a rude River in Devon, Discontents in Devon and His returne to London, we recognize the irony of his escape through satiric art, an irony he himself reveals in a poem like His content in the Country. At the same time he finds retreat into the world of country festivals, rural celebrations, and the fairy world to be the same retreat through art that he makes in his sophisticated London world. The ceremonies of country and fairy, of ritual and romance, of appearance and play, become the ceremonies of his 'second world', the imaginative real/unreal world of his art. But, as Goethe so wisely knows, the unreal 2

Quoted by Ernst Cassirer in his essay " 'Spirit' and 'Life' in Contemporary Philosophy", translated by Robert W. Bretall and Paul A. Schilpp in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, edited by Paul A. Schilpp (Evanston, Illinois: Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. VI, 1949), p. 870.

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world of art is a complex and frequently tenuous means of becoming one with the world through art. Herrick's use of artistic and natural ceremony is, furthermore, a poetic usage, an agonistic fiction chosen to carry his evaluations of experience. His evaluations of the ceremony in his poems reflect their validity for him as performance of and as preservative of his own experience. Meat without Mirth carries the evaluation of friendship and of the ceremonious experience of friendship in terms of the concept of negation. Other ceremonial poems evaluate life in its relationship to death, to love, to worship, to nature. His ceremonial poems reflect his vision that ceremony itself reflects the order of life and of art. If the ceremonial details of these experiential matters are derived from classical or Christian ceremonies, there are two important observations that need to be made. First, what were those ceremonies? This point I shall return to later. Second, what is Herrick's poetic awareness of ceremony's historical value? To avoid aesthetic or moral (or any other value) judgments which represent only a dichotomy of the Christian-pagan, we had best delimit the notion of historical distance which seems to apply to Herrick. In any of Herrick's poems involving, for instance, the experience of sacrifice, where details from classical or Christian sacrifice are used to represent that experience, there should be an awareness that the classical way of life, worship, and ceremony belong to the classical past, a world not the poet's own, which has an existence that, nevertheless, bears upon and modifies and re-creates his own world. We must be as absolute as we can in our judgments about the authenticity of the classical ceremony and the Christian ceremony that Herrick uses in his poetry. We must attempt to plumb the extent of archaeological permeation in the fabric and texture of the verse. We must diligently search out Herrick's "awareness" of the historical distance that separates his new creation from the classical past, for, as D. J. Gordon has so cogently argued any conscious recreation of the classical past draws what life it has, and what interest, apart from the purely archaeological, from the life of the creator... Its life will come from the creator's awareness, conscious or unconscious, of a relationship, direct or indirect, implicit or explicit, between this past and his own present. This is the new element that realization of 'historical distance' brings in ...3 This awareness distinguishes Herrick's best work in the ceremonial mode from that of Ben Jonson in his Hymenaei and in Sejanus. It also reinforces 3 This statement of "historical distance" is taken from D. J. Gordon's "Hymenaei: Ben Jonson's Masque of Union", Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes, VIII (1945), 128-132.

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T. S. Eliot's notion of the temporal and of the timeless and temporal together ..."4 Once we are clear about Herrick's awareness and use of ceremonial materials, once we have grasped his sense of "historical distance" rather than some normative judgment which lacks an historical sense, we shall be free to see him achieving a representation of the universal in his evaluations of ceremonial materials, giving them new form and meaning. A general theory of ceremony may have existed in the Renaissance. According to D. J. Gordon, this theory is hidden perhaps beneath the more important issues of social and cosmic order.s Gordon suggests, and I quite agree, that a theoretical and liturgical basis for a general theory of ceremony is provided in Richard Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity : The end which is aimed at in setting down the outward form of all religious actions is the edification of the Church ... We must not think but that there is some ground of reason even in nature, whereby it cometh to pass that no nation under heaven either doth or ever did suffer public actions which are of weight, whether they be civil and temporal or else spiritual and sacred, to pass without some visible solemnity: the very strangeness whereof and difference from that which is common, doth cause popular eyes to observe and to mark the same. Words, both because they are common, and do not so strongly move the fancy of man, are for the most part but slightly heard: and therefore with singular wisdom it hath been provided, that the deeds of men which are made in the presence of witnesses should pass not only with words, but also with certain sensible actions, the memory whereof is far more easy and durable than the memory of speech can be.6 The performance of ceremonies (Hooker's "sensible actions") is the proper and just enactment of the divine principle of order, a principle worthy of being imitated in poetry. It is a principle which, for Herrick, is found even in the minutest of things as well as in the greatest of things. Even in those poems which have an explicitly Anglican or a Roman Catholic flavor, the classical is very neatly accommodated to the more modern ceremony in precisely the same way that Anglican ceremony was, during Herrick's own lifetime, accommodating certain devotional practices that the Puritans considered 'Romish'. It seems only natural than an Anglican priest who was also a poet should write poems using ceremony to achieve poetic ends. 4

T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", in his Selected Essays (New York, 1950), 4. 5 D. J. Gordon, "Chapman's 'Hero and Leander'", English Miscellany, V (1954), 41-94. I am very indebted to Gordon's discussion of (he figure Ceremony in Chapman and Jonson (55-62), and for providing me with the quotation from Hooker which has proved so useful in defining Herrick's use of ceremony. 6 Richard Hooker, The Works, edited by J. Keble, R. W. Church, and F. Paget (Oxford, 1888), Vol. 1,418-19.

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Herrick, well informed on classieal and Christian practices in ceremonial enactment, well aware of the historical relations between ceremonies, recreates the classical ceremonies in his poetry. Private and individual actions pass with "some visible solemnity". "The very strangeness" and "difference from that which is common" about Herrick's poetry indicates not only his desire to please the "curious" (a word he uses in What kind of Mistresse he would have and Oberons Feast) with his careful craftsmanship but also to use not just "common" words but "certain sensible actions". To please God in one's offering of poetry and to uphold the order of the Divinity in the plenitude of Creation: these are the new conceptions he presents in his ceremonial mode. We might go so far as to suggest that in the Roman offerings of wine, salt-cakes, and meal, and in the bloody sacrifice of the proper and just victim, Herrick recognized the foreshadowing and prefiguring of the Christian ritual, the wine and the blood on the "carpeted" altar. In the performance of the proper ceremony to achieve the hoped for effects, Herrick discovers an identity in past and present. Herrick's poetic and historical concern with ceremonial is, finally, a vital concern for an appealing approach to life itself, exclusive of sacred law's requirements in matters of ritual. In poetry this concern can result in a certain point of view, a special kind of evaluation of experience that does not recommend rigid duality of judgment. If this point of view need be called "pagan" for want of a better label or for the need of a modern effort to dehumanize art, then Herrick would undoubtedly accept the label. If a modern point of view wishes to substitute an unimaginative, though 'reasonable', label such as "pagan" for the actual human perspective involved, there is little, as we all know too well, that can be done about it. "A pagan is a pagan is a pagan." So be it. Yet nothing is less surprising than that a classics loving poet should adopt a current convention. I dare say Herrick was no dour Puritan in his religious life. There is considerable 'joy' in his religious awareness. He has a sly proclivity for candles and incense and vestments because they were esthetically pleasing, ethically satisfying, and symbolically suggestive. He certainly would not have objected to giving God's altar a little polish. But let us at least be accurate about the identity of those ceremonies he used before we come to judge the 'erotic' effectiveness of his historical sense. What, then, are the sources of Herrick's information about the classical past and its ceremonies? For Herrick and for many of his contemporaries, the term "pagan" rarely meant 'erotic' or 'wanton'. The term did mean 'classical', and it is this generalized sense of the term that is used here primarily because the word "pagan" is a common word (which men should not pay attention to) and because it is frequently used in attitudinal and

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textural senses. Classical in the sense of classical literature refers to that ever-increasing body of ancient material that the Renaissance students knew as the basic course in their education. Up until the middle of the seventeenth century classical literature was studied in the schools. Earlier, sixteenth century emphases upon textual, allegorical and pedagogical matters became increasingly less popular when the stylistic analysis of the classics was supplanted by copious note taking in commonplace books. Where Erasmus had earlier instructed students to take notes under appropriate headings so as to increase their knowledge of the ancient classical world and thereby enhance their humanistic biases, by the time Herrick would have attended grammar school, around 1600, much of the older humanistic program in the classics was dissipated. 7 With the loss of the humanistic bias, classical literature became a 'study' rather than a source of ethical and religious knowledge about past and present. An extensive classical learning became the province of the few, like Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick. Many in the early seventeenth century indeed had small Latin and less Greek. Herrick's own knowledge of classical matters may, therefore, have been taken directly from Latin poetry. 8 Or, he may have found his classical materials second-hand, in Ben Jonson or in the handbooks listed by Jonson in the marginalia and notes to his masques — particularly Hymenaei — and the play Sejanus. Herrick certainly had the opportunity to read much about Roman ceremonial, either at grammar school, if he attended one, or at Cambridge where he was enrolled as a fellowcommoner at St. John's College from 1613 to 1617. 9 The same year that Herrick entered Cambridge, Master Richard Holdsworth was elected to a fellowship at St. John's. From Holdsworth's manuscript "Directions for Students", written down about 1645, we learn that Master Holdsworth recommended that his students spend their afternoons mastering Justinus, Cicero, Erasmus, Terence and Plautus, Sallust, Virgil, Horace, Martial, Much of this information is now common knowledge, but two sources have been particularly useful: T. W. Baldwin, Shakespeare's Small Latine and Lesse Greek (Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, 1948), and R. R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, 1954). 8 There have been manv studies of the influence of the Latin poets upon Herrick; the following are very useful: Elizabeth H. Haight, "Robert Herrick: The English Horace", Classical Weekly, LV (1911), 178-181; Τ. K. Whipple, Martial and the English Epigram (Berkeley, 1925); John B. Emperor, Catullan Influence in EngliA Lyric Poetry (Columbia, Missouri, 1928); Pauline Aiken, Influence of the Latin Elegists on English Lyric Poetry (Orono, Maine, 1932); Kathryn A. McEuen, Classical Influence upon the Tribe of Ben (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1939); James A. A. McPeek, Catullus in Strange and Distant Britain (Cambridge, 1939). 9 L. C. Martin, e.d., The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick (Oxford, 1956), xiii. References to Herrick's poetry are to this edition.

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Hesiod, Strada, Quintilian, etc. Also included in Holdsworth's list are classical works rarely given prominence in accounts of Renaissance classical education: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Virgil's Eclogues, Georgics, and the Aeneid, Florus's Epitome bellorum omnium annorum DCC, Macrobius's Saturnalia, Aulus Gellius's Attic Nights, and one English handbook, Thomas Godwin's Roman Antiquities.10 Florus, Gellius, and Marcrobius are also mentioned among the studies of Sir Simonds D'Ewes who entered St. John's College in 1618 and studied under Master Holdsworth. 11 Even though Herrick's biographer, F. W. Moorman, mentions the classical references in the latter, he only suggests that they "may have furnished him [Herrick] with that acquaintance with Roman social life and ceremonial which is so often at his service as a poet, and gives to his verses their classical and pagan flavour". 12 Just as earlier scholarship has established so well Herrick's debt to Latin poetry, so also has it demonstrated the general Renaissance indebtedness to the great handbooks of antiquities. Foster Watson notes the popularity of Thomas Godwin's An English Exposition of the Roman Antiquities (1614) as a grammar school textbook along with Vincenzo Cartari's Le imagini con la spositione de i dei de gli antichi (1581) and Natale Conti's Mythologiae sive explicationis fabularum libri decern (1551). 13 Whether or not any one of these, or any of the other handbooks or dictionaries, is the source of any given poem of Herrick's can, at best, be only tentatively suggested. For Herrick is probably less learned than Ben Jonson and, unlike him, less obvious with his glosses on particulars taken from the classical compendia. As Frank Kermode has observed, Herrick's learning was "less recherche than it looks". 14 The problem of Herrick's exact classical background is further complicated by the fact that the wellknown classical materials and the less-well-known school texts became sources for the handbooks. For this reason, it diould be worthwhile to know in detail, at the outset, about the central event of Roman religion, the sacrifice, a ceremony which Herrick might have known in a dictionary account. 10

Emmanuel College Library, Cambridge MS. L2.27 (James 48), quoted in William Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth Century Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958), 42-3. 1 The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D'Ewes, Bart., James O. Halliwell, ed. (London, 1845), Vol. I, 121. 12 F. W. Moorman, Robert Herrick (London, 1910), 40. 13 Foster Watson, The Engfish Grammar Schools to 1660 (Cambridge, 1908), 388-400. Herrick is not mentioned in the best modern account of the dictionaries, i.e., D. T. Starnes and E. W. Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries (Chapel Hill, 1955). 1 Frank Kermode in a review of the L. C. Martin edition in RES, n.s., IX (1958), 82.

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Only once in Herrick's poetry, in The Sacrifice, by way of Discourse betwixt himself and Julia, is an entire Roman sacrifice presented in such detail that we can draw full parallels. Johannis Rosinus, one of Thomas Godwin's sources, provides a typical description of a sacrifice: The sacrifice was performed in this manner. The victim was led to the altar with the priest, who stood with his hands on the altar and poured out praise to the gods. He prayed initially to Janus and Vesta ... Another person ordered all to be silent (favere Unguis) and the pipes played so that no ill-omened sound might be heard ... and so that attentions might not be diverted by unexpected and strange noises. The victim, having been consecrated for sacrificing, and driven thither, stood next to the altar, and the priest began. As a first offering the priest sprinkled salt grits (molam salsam) on its head, adding incense (thure masculo)... Then he sprinkled it with wine ... Having made this gesture of pouring the wine between the horns of the victim, he spread his hands out over the fire in a first offering (prima libamina) ... and drew the knife from the tail of the animal forward toward the front... He then ordered the ministers to cut its throat... After the entrails had been thoroughly cleansed, the priest examined them with an iron knife and ... announced the omens for the sacrifice ... At length ... certain parts from all the viscera and limbs were cut off, rolled up with spelt {farina farris), and offered in wicker baskets to the priest. The priest placed the rolled-up entrails on the altar, and then placed them on the brazier where they were entirely consumed so that they restored and brought about an acceptable offering ... During this feast (epulas) the praises of the gods were sung.1 5 Godwin's account agrees substantially with that of Rosinus, except that the former takes additional note of the extreme purity that the priest observed before sacrificing, of the fact that the victim was adorned with ribbons and garlands and often had gilded horns, and that after the pouring of the wine the priest plucked some of the beast's hairs between the horns and cast them into the fire.16 Herrick's poem makes ample use of these details from the classical sacrifice: ls Iohannis Rosinus, Antiquitatum Romanarum corpus absolutissium, Book III, cap. xxxiii, "De Veterum Sacrificiis", 231-2; originally published at Basle, 1583; I have used the 1743 Amsterdam edition with notes by Thomas Dempster. Rosinus is cited by Ben Jonson in Sefanus, V. 171-7 in Works, IV ed. C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford, 1932), 443-4, 482-3. Jonson also cites Lilio Gregori Giraldi, De deis Gentium (Basle, 1548), cap. xvii; I have used the Opera Omnia, ed. Joannes Jensius (Lugduni, 1696). I have also used in the preparation of this and subsequent chapters the following editions of dictionaries: Thomas Godwin, Romanae historiae anthologia, An Exposition of the Roman Antiquities (1614); Natale Conti, Mythologiae sive explicationis fabularum libri decern (originally published Venice, 1551; Geneva, 1620 edition used); Vincenzo Cartari, Le imagini colla sposizione degli dei degiiantichi (Venice, 1556; Lyon, 1581 edition used). 1 Thomas Godwin, Book II, section 2, cap. xix, "De veterum sacrificiis et rita sacrificandia", 58-61.

26 Herr.

Jul.

Herr.

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Come and let's in solemn wise Both addresse to sacrifice: Old Religion first commands That we wash our hearts, and hands. Is the beast exempt from staine, Altar cleane, no fire prophane? Are the Garlands, Is the Nard Ready here? All well prepar'd With the Wine that must be shed (Twixt the homes) upon the head Of the holy Beast we bring For our Trespasse-offering. All is well; now next to these Put we on pure Surplices; And with Chaplets crown'd, we'l rost With perfumes the Holocaust: And (while we the gods invoke) Reade acceptance by the smoake.

Herrick's knowledge of the details of Roman sacrifice is obviously quite extensive. While the handbook account is the fullest exposition of the sacrifice, Herrick might also have gathered together a less detailed account from his reading of Plutarch, Gellius, Propertius, Ovid, Vergil or Horace. Certainly the exact source of Herrick's classical information is not as important as what he has done with that information. The notion that both the priest and Julia participate in the sacrifice is certainly an extraordinary one, but not out of line if the poem is a love sacrifice seeking forgiveness for their 'sin' as it were, presented in line twelve. Both "Old Religion" and 'new' religion dictate that purity before sacrifice is essential, an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reality. The sacramental purity extends to both "hands" and "hearts". There is even the slight ambiguity of the "beast exempt from staine" referring either to the actual beast of sacrifice, the victim, or to 'beast' in man that must be purified before forgiveness can descend. We realize suddenly, avoiding the easy "pagan" route suggested by "Old Religion", that the poem is a propitiatory sacrifice to appease Love's gods. It certainly has the emotional aura of the classical, but it is not far removed from John Donne's religious saints of love. The poem is also the interesting parallel to the spirit, though not perhaps the letter, of the early Holy Communion. It analyzes the love relationship through the vehicle of ceremony, for the significancy of the classical and Christian details manifests a greater spiritual awareness in the lovers. There is the tone of assurance that the proper offering made in the appropriate manner will insure forgiveness for their trespass. That is, perhaps, the only hope for any one engaging in "sensible actions". Whatever is the suitable ceremony

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for the occasion, let it lake place; order and harmony will then be restored and art will have served reality and life. Doubtless there are at least some hints of neo-pagan eroticism in Herrick's poetry though these 'hints' are minimized in The Sacrifice. It might be suggested that at this point I have chosen a poem to illustrate Herrick's knowledge of classical details but have not chosen a poem which is really "pagan". Another poem, The Willow Garland, will not only illustrate Herrick's particular awareness of the value of ceremony but will also show that poetic indulgence in the classics does not necessarily amount to indulgence in neo-paganism: A Willow Garland thou did'st send Perfum'd (last day) to me: Which did but only this portend, I was forsooke by thee. Since so it is; De tell thee what, To morrow thou shalt see Me weare the Willow; after that, To dye upon the Tree. As Beasts unto the Altars go With Garlands drest, so I Will, with my Willow-wreath also, Come forth and sweetly dye. The 'hints' of neo-paganism seem quite obvious in the poem: perfumed garlands are traditional pagan artifacts worn by victims at sacrifice. Yet there is also a very non-pagan 'crown', the garland worn by the forsaken lover who will quite playfully and wittely "dye" upon a subtly invoked "Tree"/cross like the archetypal lover, Lover/God. The wittiness of the double, and assimilating, reference seems to evoke less a pagan sacrifice than a sacred 'religion of love' poem in the typically Renaissance conventional manner. The hints are further enhanced by the identification of this 'poetic' sacrifice with both the classical sacrifice ("Willow Garland") and the Christian sacrifice ("To dye upon the Tree"). The tension created by this juxtaposition of classical and Christian, as well as by the depth of punning on "dye" in classical, Christian, and poetic 'love-sacrifice', is fairly typical of Herrick's historical awareness of the sacrificial act itself being remotely classical, nearly Christian, and poetically efficacious. The element of death, now heightened by the tension of reference, is wroughi with wit and with art. The "Willow Garland" is a highly conceited poem both in its treatment of unrequited love and in its language. Hints of both pagan (that is, classical) and Christian experience exist simultaneously together, joined by the ceremony and the art. But we must avoid any idea

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that the concern of this poem is with ethical "paganism". Christianity, even Herrick's rather unique brand, is not seriously challenged by this kind of classicism. No more so than is any other seventeenth-century man's Christianity challenged by what appears to be non-Christian and nonreligious. Indeed, Christianity seems actually reinforced by Herrick's classicism. So much has been written already about Herrick's supposed paganism that it may be pointless to iterate Sydney Musgrove's statement that "no man living in the heart of the seventeenth-century could be a 'pagan' in any real sense of the term". 1 7 Some critics are unwilling to accept Herrick's general view of life, or they accept it only as a possible view. Given the classicism that is assuredly there, the 'hints' as it were, there is very little chance of this general view being accepted at all. 18 Yet modern criticism should have cast off the misnomer of Herrick the "Pagan Priest" before now. The whole "pagan" confusion concerning Herrick exists, it seems, because so often those few studies which sought to show Herrick's Christian orthodoxy have proved as bland as those by the proponents of his "paganism". Faced with the abundant evidence of his indebtedness to the classical poets, the Christianizing critic attempts to explain Herrick's poetry in exclusively Christian terms while at the same time taking the classicism into account. The task is apparently a great one because Herrick's classicism is as much a part of his inheritance from the Renaissance as is his unified and orderly vision of the world. And the classical tone that provides the surface of his poetry usually conceals this inherited vision. For some, once you have suggested the quality of a "mind on a holiday", you are suggesting something pagan. Into this category they place Herrick. Yet under the perspective of the ceremonial and liturgical aspects of Herrick's poetry, much of the pagan spirit can be exposed for what it is and what it is not. For Herrick"s commitment to classical manners and moral, to classical ideals in life and in art, leads to neoclassicism, to deism in religion and to decorum in poetry. It is perplexing that Herrick has not been included in the line of poets from Dante to Milton who mingled the classical and the Christian with 17 Sydney Musgrove, The Universe of Robert Herrick (.Auckland University College Bulletin, No. 38, English Series, No. 4, 1950), 3. Two nineteenth century studies which are quite adamant about Herrick's "paganism" are Edmund Gosse's Seventeenth Century Studies (London, 1883), 111-139, and A. B. Grosart's "Memorial Introduction" to the Complete Poems of Robert Herrick (London, 1876). Even Floris Delattre's 1912 study , Robert Herrick (Paris, 1912) is guilty of this misnomer. See for an interesting discussion of this point Nathan A. Scott, Jr., "The Collaboration of Vision in the Poetic Act: The Religious Dimension", in Literature and Belief: English Institute Essays, 1957, edited by Μ. H. Abrams (New York, 1958), 106-138.

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untroubled ease. Was Herrick alone in his receptiveness to the sensuous paganism and erotic realism which usually resulted from perusal of the plethora of classical compendia? His poetry evokes a unique ethos and contains a very personal vision. As such, it cannot be validly judged a "plea for paganism". To pursue this narrow course is to make very difficult the acceptance of Herrick's palinode, Jocond his Muse was; but his Life was chast as an ironic statement in paradoxical form. Indeed, the neo-pagan impulses of the Renaissance may have found their last voice in Herrick. If so, then the immediate problem for the critic rests in adequately defining the union of what Douglas Bush has called "Renaissance neo-pagan and belated Christian". 20 For Herrick's use of the pagan and classical material is not mere artistic escapism. His attitude offers the almost emblematic union of the priest of Cupid and Bacchus with the Renaissance artist and the Anglican and anti-Puritan clergyman. And this attitude takes its poetic force from Herrick's fondness for ceremonial and liturgy, for when ceremonial merges with the classical Herrick's poetry attains its maximum complexity and depth. Yet this very complexity and depth of poetic statement can be misleading if the statement is taken too seriously and in too real a sense. Herrick's poetry is surely the embodiment of the spirit of play which, as we know so well from Johan Huizinga's study Homo Ludens, is marked by the underlying consciousness of things "not being real". Herrick's ceremonial perspective contains all of the inherent elements of the play spirit: order, tension, movement, change, solemnity, rhythm, rapture. Each element of play provides a structural principle by which the human spirit gives form to reality while self-consciously recognizing that each element is not real and not form in itself. Herrick's own artistic program seems to contain the elements of play subsumed under more paradigmatic principles of ceremony, order, and art. But play and the spirit of play are, I suggest, the means by which the tensional oppositions within time (the temporal and the eternal), space (the past and present), and reality (flux and immutability) are forever stilled in Herrick's art. By manipulating classical elements into playful juxtapositions with Christian elements, Herrick heightens not his sense of their competition, but his sense of the necessity for allowing oppositions to be played and to act themselves out. More to the point, Huizinga suggests that in the later phases of a society play becomes associated with "the idea of something to be expressed in 19

Herrick is not, for instance, included in the English poets mentioned by Douglas Bush in his Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in Engii&i Poetry, revised edition (New York, 1963);he is given only two comparative allusions. 20 Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Eariier Seventeenth Century, second edition (Oxford, 1962), 115.

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and by it, namely ... 'life' or 'nature' ", 2 1 Ceremonial and ritualistic play are characteristics of this later kind of play. "In this sphere of sacred play the child and the poet are at home with the savage", Huizinga writes in a reference that could easily apply to Herrick's sacred play and to Herrick's poetry. 22 As previously mentioned, Herrick's poetry serves an aesthetic as well as a "social and liturgical" function. Both the liturgical and socialhistorical functions of his poetry arise from the play spirit of poems like Corinna's going a-Maying, or the fairy poems, or the poems on rural festivals and rituals. Herrick's invoking of carpe diem statements and his grotesque parodies of the "vast deserts of Eternity" are also playful idealizations which move toward expected resolutions but do not so resolve themselves. His humanistic juxtapositions of classical and Christian, of pastoral and urban, of scurrilous epigram and elegant ode, are illustrations par excellence of his play spirit. Certainly his attitude toward the conflict of opposites is not an extraordinary position for him to hold. Sidney playfully entertains both sides of a debate about love versus honor, the active versus the contemplative lives in the Old Arcadia, and a carefully controlled wit allows oppositions to be poetically placed with a good deal of humor and aesthetic distancing.2 3 Sidney's speaker in Astrophel and Stella plays with Stella, and with his own role as poet-lover, in much the same way that Herrick plays with his poetized mistresses and with his own role as priest and lover. Herrick's balance, and at times his very ambivalence, is maintained by what Huizinga would call a "certain artifice, a certain artificiality even, something not altogether serious". 24 He uses the verbal expression of a sophisticated society and its art and, like Sidney and somewhat later like Marvell, entertains oppositions with an occasional lack of resolution. He is very much the playfully serious poet, and he frequently maintains Marvell's tone which, as Frank Warnke has recently shown, is a combination of levity and transport, a way of creating tension

21

Johan Huizinga, HomoLudens (New York, Beacon edition, 1955), 17. Huizinga, 25. 23 Neil L. Rudenstine in his recent Sidney's Poetic Development (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), illustrates the play element in Sidney veiy well though he does not specifically identify it as play. 2 Huizinga, 181. Considerable support for Huizinga's suggestions about play is found in Harry Beiger's discussion of the importance of the serio ludere attitude as "the impulse behind much that is new and historically significant in renaissance thought: the reorganization of relations between understanding and doing, contemplation and action, theory and practice ... the development of the heterocosm as the play- or questing-ground which the individual mind circumscribes both to pursue its inquiries and to manifest in formal and structural terms its experience of pursuit". Harry Berger, "Pico and Neoplatonist Idealism: Philosphy as Escape", Centennial Review, XIII (Winter, 1969), 74. 22

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between oppositions. In a recent book-length study of Marvell, Harold E. Toliver describes the canon of MarvelPs poetry in terms of the PuritanPlatonist motive, a "grammar of opposites" (borrowing the term from Kenneth Burke). His view might be further strengthened by demonstrating, as did Warnke, that Marvell's ironic vision (which is the title of his book) is very often serious playfulness. For Professor Warnke the playfulness of much late Renaissance poetry which so characteristically involves nature and the natural, myth and metamorphosis, has significant connections with the later Baroque style characterized by "intellectual play, dramatic projection, and mythic embodiment" — the very qualities of Herrick's poetry that I shall demonstrate. 26 When Marvell holds the mirror up to nature, the resulting reflection is various (not the One Platonic Light), and the natural and pastoral shimmer in change and contrariety. Herrick's reflections are also multifaceted, differing from those of Marvell's only in their intensity. The playful and the irresolute yet serious tone and point of view in Marvell, in Shakespeare, and in Sidney can be found in Herrick as well. For his poetry also displays an agonistic structure, elements of ritual and incantation, and attention to minuteness. His poems are also performances of implication rather than demonstrations of statement. His confrontations of reality, like those of Marvell, also present the playfully serious and the mythic. There is, further, a complementary element of the comic in Herrick's play because levity and comic play are very much a part of the Renaissance inheritance. Like Midsummer Night's Dream, Herrick's poetry has its ceremonial "comedy as ritual" which posits another reality that does not belong to the world of reality. 27 The comic ritual introduces another time, another place. Art played transcends time and place, and it frequently appears to transcend nature. Still, the play element must function within the higher order of Herrick's own conception of Nature and Art. Oppositions in Art, because they are played as "not being real", must in some way resolve oppositions in life. It is the function of a culture to entertain such oppositons about life not being real, or oppositions which are not of the everyday variety. And it is the function of a culture's artists to entertain such oppositions in art, as the earlier statement from Goethe reminds us. Herrick's fictions are 25

Frank Warnke, "Play and Metamorphosis in Marvell's Poetry", Studies in English Literature, V (1965), 23-30; see also his "Sacred Play: Baroque Poetic Style", Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism, XXII (Summer, 1964), 455-65; see also the article by Harry Berger mentioned in note 24, particularly 72-81. 26 Warnke, "Sacred Play", 455. For an interesting discussion of the relationship between rhetoric and the comic see James E. Robinson, "The Ritual and Rhetoric of Ά Midsummer Night's Dream' ", PMLA LXXXIII (May, 1968), 380-91.

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not of the everyday variety because they seek to resolve oppositions in life through art. The primitive or folk mind, the mind that at times Herrick approaches more closely than the sophisticated London mind, is, as Claude Levi-Strauss has demonstrated, unable to cope with the sort of irresolution which is so often found in sophisticated verbal expression. It, therefore, resorts to a binary principle which mediates opposition. 28 I think Herrick's opposition of Nature and Art also presents a binary, principle which mediates oppositions which might otherwise be ambivalently maintained. This mediating principle underlies the text of many poems and operates on the language and form in a paradigmatic fashion. Play elements, ceremony, the play spirit and the ceremonial perspective are instruments of this principle. And the principle itself is apparently without ontology — though I shall try to suggest one possible ontology. We know that it exists, however, because we know what it does and causes Herrick to do in his poetry. It causes him to use play elements and structures and the play spirit. It causes him to use classical and Christian ceremonies and ceremonial structures and the ceremonial perspective. It causes him to use everyday 'real' elements and structures and 'naturalistic' attitudes. All of these stand in antithetical and oppositional and tensional relationship to idealistic and artistic elements and structures and 'civilized' attitudes. The words used most persuasively by Professor Richard Ross to describe this mediating principle between Nature and Art — "paradoxical yet proper interplay in human affairs of Art and Nature", "[Nature and Art] together", "antithetical Nature and Art combined as a necessary 'wild civility' " — lead us toward this principle of mediation which Herrick himself announces in the phrase "wild civility". But his terms do not lead us to the nature of the "new synthesis" of Nature and Art which includes play, ceremony, classicism, and Nature, and Art themselves.2 9 Herrick's poetic world is composed of both the artistic and the natural orders of experience. The two frequently interpenetrate each other. He seems to be concerned to define man's place in what has been called the "order of nature", defining it in terms of the harmonious divisions in the order of nature between Nature and Art. He says in one of his epigrams that Man is compos'd here of a two-fold part; The first of Nature, and the next of Art: 28

Claude Levi-Strauss, Mythologiques: Le Cru et Le Cuit (Paris, 1964) and Edmund Leach, ed., The Structural Study of Myth and Totemism (London, 1967). 29 Richard J. Ross, " Ά Wilde Civility': Robert Herrick's Poetic Solution of the Paradox of Art and Nature", Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, University of Michigan (1958), 93, 132-3; and his article "Herrick's Julia in Silks", Essays in Criticism, XV (April, 1965), 171-180.

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Art presupposes Nature: Nature shee Prepares the way to mans docility. (Upon

Man)

Man's place in the order of nature is determined first by Nature and next by Art. Like his predecessors, Herrick affirms the necessity for Art to nurture Nature, for Art improves upon the norm established by Nature and gives man "docility". But Herrick's view of Nature is not clearly either that of earlier writers like Spenser and Shakespeare (who viewed Nature as a universal norm) or of later writers like Bacon and Hobbes (who viewed Nature as external reality). Herrick's view of Nature lies somewhere between these two not completely opposed views but within the three generalized senses of Nature that were current in his own time. Nature was a term used to refer to the details of the physical universe, the everabundant flowers, blossoms, lawns, dews, diapers of his poetic world. This sense usually included the symbolic notion of nature as containing, though hidden, the universal essence of things. The second general sense of the term refers to the sublunary world which, after the Fall, brought flux and death into the world. (Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" shows that "sublunary" is exactly synonymous with "natural".) Finally, the third sense of the term refers to the whole universe, all of God's orderly creation.30 Decay in the sense of mutability and degeneration may enter the first two senses of Nature, for Nature means change and decay. Herrick's contemporaries were less concerned with the effect of change upon the first two of these senses of Nature than with its effect upon the third. Herrick, on the other hand, was more interested in dynamic change in the first two senses. The means he discovered of overcoming change in the first two senses of Nature was a devotion to a principle of art and ceremony in Nature which transcended Nature's decay. His epigrams, which are more nearly 'natural' than anything else he wrote, are the first of my illustrations of Herrick's mediating principle of an art within both Nature and Art which resolves the oppostion and disjunction between Nature and Art. A recent critic, Richard J. Ross, suggests that the epigrams illustrate the poet's principle of "Art above Nature". 31 It seems, however, that the resolution of the paradox of Art and Nature is dependent upon Herrick's viewing the epigrams as raw nature or 'naturalistic' matter. Indeed, some of the epigrams are certainly 'raw', but they are also humorous, witty, 30

I do not mean to suggest in my three general senses of the term "Nature" that these are all the possible senses of the term. Cf. Arthur O. Lovejoy, " 'Nature' as Aesthetic Norm", MLN XLII (1927), 444-50 and Harold S. Wilson, "Some Meanings of 'Nature' in Renaissance Literary Theory", JHI, II (1941), 430448. 31 Ross, "Herrick's Julia in Silks".

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satiric, and playful. They illustrate Herrick's skill as a versifier in the epigrammatic style and his mastery of his classical reading — many of the epigrams have immediate ancestry in Martial, Juvenal, and especially, Anacreon. They are conventional and rather set pieces which use as subjects the first and second senses of the term Nature, physical objects, and the sublunary world. There are, perhaps, no more than a dozen really naturalistic epigrams. They are sharply blunt. For example, there is Upon Shark: Shark, when he goes to any publick feast, Eates to ones thinking, of all there, the least. What saves the master of the House thereby? When if the servants search, they may descry In his wide Codpeece, (dinner being done) Two Napkins cram'd up, and a silver Spoone. The ludicrousness of the theft and the lightness of the satiric touch are far more humorous than the apparently bawdy hiding place. Other epigrams are weaker in the sententiousness of their statements: Doll she so soone began the wanton trade; She ne'r remembers that she was a maide. (Upon Doll. Εpig.) Skrew lives by shifts; yet sweares by no small oathes; For all his shifts, he cannot shift his clothes. \ (Upon Skrew. Epig.) Linnit playes rarely on the Lute, we know; And sweetly sings, but yet his breath sayes no. (Upon Linnit. Epig.) There are literally hundreds more of the same with their terse brevity and simple plain statement. The point of each is that "civility" is needed. They illustrate that their naturalistic and realistic subjects exist simply because Art, as "docility" or "civility", is lacking. Herrick highlights the artificial by demonstrating variety in the natural. The very subject of one epigram, Painting sometimes permitted, presents an Art which is essentially artificial (the painted face, not the real one) and covers an ugly Nature. The epigram further clarifies the title: If Nature do deny Colours, let Art supply The epigram's claim is not adverse to Nature if she provides "colours", but the epigram also provides a statement of Herrick's preference for the "wilde civility" and for the disordered orderliness of Delight in Disorder.

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The epigram surely does not illustrate an "ambivalence toward nature", for Nature is a 'real' necessity because it is empirical reality itself. But, Nature has an "art", an art of "Colours". Nature has an artistic and artificial principle, or "art". If Nature's art is lacking, then Art (the poet's Art) makes up for Nature's deficiency. When, as in this epigram, Herrick finds "art" (which for the sake of clarity I use as a lower-case term) lacking in Nature, he supplies the other Art. This is not an "ambivalent" attitude toward Nature; it is an active poetic principle, a principle which Herrick elevates to the level of the "thematic". 3 3 And this principle operates in the more generalized epigrams as well as in those epigrams concerned with Nature and Art in man's experience. "Docility" and "civility", the two artistic principles in Nature, hold the mirror up to Nature, to expose for reform, satire, irony and humor, all those aspects of Nature which are in need of Nature's art or of Art itself. This thematic and mediating principle — that there is an art in Nature and that, if necessary, Herrick will supply Art (his own) wherever a deficiency is found in Nature's art — is most prevalent in the ceremonial poems. Even in the fairy poems, Herrick suggests that the 'natural' world of fairy (which encompasses the first two senses of Nature) has its own art which is nurtured by his Art in composing poetry. He finds art within Nature everywhere, and he illuminates that art with his own Art. Manmade, conventional, and traditional, the poet's Art is the fundamental and mediating means by which art in the natural and the physical world is served. By affirming the art of ceremony, of nature, of Art and of play, the poet affirms an inner order of Nature. By affirming the inner order of Nature, the poet affirms an inner art within Nature. Thus, in many of Herrick's poems there is an artistic movement from the natural to the artificial and a concomitant movement back to the natural or real. A similar movement from natural to artificial is evident in the use of the harmony between Art and Nature in MarveU's "Mower Poems" and in "The Garden". Marvell explores oppositions between Art and Nature and, in "The Garden" after becoming all Mind, or all Art, fails in the effort to transcend Nature and falls back upon a symbol of Nature transcended, the sundial as Time stilled. But Herrick rarely goes as far as Marvell does in establishing Art as a norm, even a limited one. Art itself rarely controls the 32

Ross, " Ά Wilde Civility' 93. Roger B. Rollin, Robert Herrick (Twayne's Ertgii&i Authors Series, No. 34) (New York, 1966), 81 quotes John Press's obviously incorrect statement [in his Herrick (Writers and Their Work, No. 132) (London, 1961), 9] that Herrick's naturalistic epigrams lack "the very art about which he is so concerned". The thematic principle that I am pursuing at this point owes something to Ross though I disagree with him that Herrick is ambivalent in his conception of the relationship between Nature and Art. 33

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flux of nature. Art rarely heightens the vision of universal truths which a negligent or post-lapsarian Nature conceals. Herrick still considers Nature as a symbolic order, in the older medieval view. He does not view Nature in a rational and orderly but deistic universe. His view of nature is still 'integrative' and 'associational'. Never viewing Nature as a punishment upon man, nor even as an idealistic Edenic state, Herrick finds the very principle of change itself in the continuity of the traditions and rituals of the past and in the artful versions of fairy and ceremonial reality. The natural artifacts symbolizing change, ordinarily, are always metaphors for Herrick. Their recurrent pattern is man's metaphoric recurrent pattern as well. The reality within Nature that Herrick discovers as an "art" is not temporal or chronological time. It is natural, artistic, transcendent time. It is 'played' time. Nowhere is the paradox of an art within Nature and Art better exemplified than in the poem Delight in Disorder. The poem relies on a host of classical precedents, summarized in the notes to the L. C. Martin edition; the most significant allusions are to Ben Jonson's song in Epicoene, I.i. 91-102 ("StiM to be neat") and line twenty-nine in the Masque of Blacknesse: "imitating that orderly disorder, which is common in nature". Another poem of Jonson's seems even more indicative of Herrick's possible debt to Jonson for the artistic principle in Nature which appears to transcend Nature's decay. I refer to Jonson's "On Lucy Countess of Bedford" where Jonson discovers an "art" in Nature, an artistic composition of Lady Bedford herself, which is already added to Nature and which his poetic Art heightens in writing the poem. When Jonson's poetic Art seeks to "faine" the "kind of creature" he wishes to "honor, serve, and love", his Muse bids him observe Lucy, for in her Nature has been perfected by art already, and the poet need only nurture with his Art what the art in Nature has provided. In Herrick's poem, the artistic perfection of Nature is expressed in very serious psychological and artistic terms, but the poem itself is 'played' precisely because it is both serious and light: A sweet disorder in the dresse Kindles in cloathes a wantonnesse: A Lawne about the shoulders thrown Into a fine distraction: An erring Lace, which here and there Enthralls the Crimson Stomacher: A Cuffe neglectfull, and thereby Ribbands to flow confusedly: A winning wave (deserving Note) In the tempestuous petticote: A carelesse shooe-string, in whose tye

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I see a wilde civility: Doe more bewitch me, then when Art Is too precise in every part. F. W. Bateson, who is quoted approvingly by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in their Understanding Poetry (New York, 1957), reads the poem in terms of two subjects: the surface subject — delight in the disorder of costume - and a second subject - delight in the disorder of "manners and morals". 34 The poem is "essentially a plea for paganism" Bateson argues, and it has three themes: untidiness is becoming, the clothes are the woman, and anti-Puritanism. A contrary opinion is offered by Leo Spitzer who points out that the second theme is the well-known Renaissance theme of disorder in art, illustrated best in Jonson's "Song" where the plea is for "natural simplicity". 35 Spitzer (as I) disbelieves in the poem's paganism, but I would add the qualification that Herrick is very conscious of the sensuous experience that he can evaluate poetically though not in any pagan-erotic sense. Whether this experience has pagan or Christian, or even anti-Puritan, overtones is not, explicitly, the point. The tone of the poem is controlled by the restrictive epithets of the dress. The paradoxical "sweet disorder" exactly parallels the paradoxical "wilde civility" (this is Spitzer's point). The disorder in the dress is a careful disorder and does not appear to produce an erotic impression in the clothes or through the clothes in the speaker: note that the speaker is "bewitched" but not, necessarily, aroused. And the "wantonness" is also playful. Like the ambiguity of "bewitched", it is in witty opposition to the less playful "kindles". The speaker's approval of the "sweet disorder" in the dress lies in his attitude toward its movement. The dress's movement is artful but not natural. Rather than praising the art concealed by neglectfulness, Herrick praises the art of the natural through his own Art. The natural implies change. In this sense the dress remains non-natural in its qualities of stillness and order. And the stillness and order come about because the poet's Art 'stills' movement. Note also that the "Lawne" is a movement from natural to artificial, the natural fiber nurtured by its own art thereby becoming a new Art when Herrick casts it into a paradoxical "fine distraction". The "Lawne" is in a distracted arrangement just as the distracted Lace "enthralls" the "Crimson Stomacher". Furthermore, the "sweet disorder" continues down to the cuffs of the dress, from which ribbons "flow" (note they do not hang) "confusedly". The ribbons like the dress are motion itself, and they too are stilled in the 34

F. W. Bateson, English Poetry and the English Language (Oxford, 1934), 42-3. Leo Spitzer, "Herrick's 'Delight in Disorder' ", Modern Language Notes, LXXVI (1961), 209-214. 35

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poem. And the wave created by the moving petticoat completes the "wilde" moving creation. The poem is the actual creation of the image of a woman who has tied her shoe-string without civility, in broken figures or false circles, rather than in proper bows. But the poem is also Herrick's creation of Art creating Nature in terms of the art within Nature. The motion of the poem exists temporally, it is flux itself. Herrick is bewitched by this art which is civil and at the same time uncivil. By recreating the movements through rhetorical description and by confining them to a "wilde civility" which is neither completely "wilde" nor completely "civil" but only is, Herrick has 'stilled' movement forever. The poem circles back upon itself and partakes of what Murray Krieger has called the "ecphrastic principle" wherein the artist attempts to imitate the plastic arts by freezing language and time. 36 It is a principle of art which creates "still" elements which transcend temporality and make, in Herrick's case at least, the poem fully spatial. As a principle it also operates paradigmatically in controlling the poetic which in turn controls structure, tone, imagery and subject. Delight in Disorder captures the dynamism of the woman and her dress and, like Keats's "still unravish'd bride of quietness", holds them eternally and paradoxically stilled in Art. The perpetuity which Herrick confers in the poem is dynamic. It is full of activity and a fullness of time. It is opposed to either the stasis of Art as an escape from flux or the flux of Nature as an escape from Art. The dynamic perpetuity is a statement of an immutable essence in both Art and Nature, an art discoverable within both, and an art which is eternal within Nature and is natural within Art. And since I am sure most readers are asking why I do not introduce Earl Wasserman's brilliant essay on Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (in his The Finer Tone), I will do so. For Herrick like Keats discovers, in Professor Wasserman's words, "a region of a stasis that at the same time is dynamic" and in his principle of an art within Art and Nature creates something very like Keats's "mystic oxymoron", but Herrick does not need the "mystic" and does not need to imaginatively participate in a "sphery session" on a Grecian Urn to discover that that "mystic oxymoron" is Truth which is also Beauty. 37 Herrick's discovery is the inverse of Keats's, though the means of discovery are remarkably similar, because the truth of Nature was immediately available to Herrick. It was not necessary for Herrick, as it was for Keats, to penetrate the essence of the symbolic order of Nature to find imaginative presence. Herrick does not require the leap to the •a «τ

Murray Krieger, "The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited", in his The Play and Place of Criticism (Baltimore, 1967), 105-128. 37 Earl Wasserman, The Finer Tone (Baltimore, 1953), 32-3 and passim.

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"very bourne of heaven" for his expression of a "paradoxical collocation of contraries" because Heaven's symbolic presence is constituted in his very Nature and Art. Herrick works the oppositional terms stasis (Art) and flux (Nature) toward a fusion in his notion of "wilde civility", but his resolution is an artistic principle from both terms. Herrick also uses the "wilde civility" paradox in the last six lines of Art above Nature, to Julia: Next, when those Lawnie Filmes I see Play with a wild civility: And all those airie silks to flow, Alluring me, and tempting so: I must confesse, mine eyes and heart Dotes less on Nature, then on Art. The elements of art are obviously artificial here; the "Filmes" play with a "wild civility". Retaining this poem as a gloss, we may move on to Upon Julia's Clothes. While recalling Ε. M. W. Tillyard's now very old suggestion of the "hint of the body beneath" the silk, and the more recent reading of the poem by Richard J. Ross, I would like to suggest that the poem uses "wilde civility" in much the same manner as in Delight in Disorder38 Ross, for instance, is quite correct in seeing "liquefaction" as an artificial word suggesting insinuating movement or liquid rhythm in the first stanza: When as in silks my Julia goes, Then, then (me thinks) how sweetly flowes That liquefaction of her clothes. The dress that "sweetly flowes" is in "sweet disorder". Herrick's Art is again stilling movement, but the dress itself here is Art covering Nature, which is the subject of the second stanza: Next, when I cast mine eyes and see That brave Vibration each way free; Ο how that glittering taketh me! Only because the natural, the woman, almost as an epitome of Nature, moves does the dress move. Because the dress "flowes", that is, is made liquid by the woman's movement, does the free "Vibration" attract the speaker's eye and "takes" him. This "Vibration" takes the speaker quite literally as Art, or as poem experienced, and it "takes" the reader as well because the speaker has stilled the "glittering" movement in Art. The dress itself is stilled movement, always static and yet always and eternally transcending flux and change. The poet's incarnating Art stills the art of 38

Ε. M. W. Tillyard and C. S. Lewis, The Personal Heresy (Oxford, 1939), 4-6, 44-8, 59-60, and Richard Ross, "Herrick's Julia in Silks", 171-180.

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movement forever. Ross's excellent analysis of the impressionistic musical rhythms of the poem substantiates this judgment. The rhythms do indeed enhance the "glittering" silk musically.39 Herrick sees art as a libidinous and unchanging impulse in the design of Nature as opposed to the art which gives order and eternality but also static death. The poet's Art must recover the art in Nature and at the same time avoid the stasis of Art. This is the source of the considerable ironic tension in Herrick's poetry, for he knows as must we, that death in Nature and in Art is inevitable. They are, however, apparently reconcilable in a poet's artistic fictions when those fictions are stirred imaginatively and what was dynamic perpetuity becomes 'alive' again. Ceremony, "paganism" or "classicism", play and art can be focused in a group of poems which are usually used to demonstrate Herrick's Dionysian spirit. His "cleanly wantonnesse", announced in the first poem in Hesperides, "The Argument of his Book", is usually taken as a statement of Herrick's commitment to the principle of carpe diem. And I would agree that as one of Herrick's thematic principles (but not a 'theme') there is a good deal in the carpe diem spirit in Hesperides. Yet those poems used so often in the past to illustrate this spirit are very often ones in which Herrick playfully, ironically, and ceremoniously qualifies the conventional carpe diem statement as we have come to recognize it in Marlowe, Ralegh, and others during the Renaissance. Ceremony is Herrick's usual mediating device between classical and Christian, between play and seriousness, between Nature and Art. It is also a major assimilating device whereby Herrick's vision of his 'sensuous life' poems becomes something other than a "plea for paganism" or carpe diem sensuousness. The very brief epigram To live Freely, is based totally upon Martial: Let's live in hast; use pleasures while we may: Co'd life return, 'twod never lose a day. In Martial's epoch, a statement such as this of Herrick's would probably be the epitome of Epicurean philosophy, as was the more famous statement of carpe diem by Horace: ...Strain clear the wine; and since life is brief, cut short farreaching hopes! Even while we speak, envious Time has sped. Reap the harvest of to-day, putting as little trust as may be in the morrow. {Odes, Book I, xi. 6-8) 40 39

Ross, "Herrick's Julia in Silks", 174-6. Horace, Odes and Epodes, trans. C. E. Bennett (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1927), 32-3.

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But in Herrick's first line there is the curious ambiguity of the word "use", implying in almost an Augustinian sense that "pleasures" are to be for a further purpose, are to be enjoyed for their own good or to be used for someone else's good. There is also the possibility of the Christianizing sense of "use" referring to the proper and improper use of one's talents (Matthew 25:14-30) as Shakespeare employs the distinction in the final couplets of two of his Sonnets: For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds. (Sonnet 94) Take heed, dear heart, of t - i i i S large privilege: The hardest knife ill us'd doth lose his edge. (Sonnet 95) Shakespeare's lines employ "use" in the same sense that Herrick does, but with the difference that Herrick adds a very Christianizing statement that life cannot return after one is dead ("Co'd life return"). Death is finality but that finality is balanced by the statement that if reincarnation could occur, "life" would never lose a day. This is a simple, almost simplistic restatement of the first part of the first line: let us live life in haste. Living by pleasures is, for Herrick, wantonness in any one of three senses: the playful, the frivolous, the lecherous. But a full neo-Epicurean resolution in terms of Dionysian libertinism is lacking, a clue to the ambiguity and ambivalence which characterises most of Herrick's so-called carpe diem poems. Other epigrams in this same carpe diem vein illustrate that any assertion of Herrick's neo-paganism and Cavalier licentiousness should be abandoned. To conclusively demonstrate the lack of validity in such assertions, we might ultimately consider To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time and Corinna's going a Maying. But let us begin by building a strategy of evidence against the carpe diem sympathizers before approaching those two poems. For even in Herrick's most apparently carpe diem poems there is either a certain sombreness and sobriety or a certain playfulness and frivolity which argue against the conventional carpe diem statement. In the poem To Youth, for instance, the first line of the epigram is blithely Dionysian: "Drink Wine, and live here blithefull, while ye may", but the second line shifts the image from the material to the spiritual: "The morrowes life too late is, Live to day." Note that "tomorrow's life" is not denied; it will simply be too late for today's life. In another poem, To be merry, there is a similar emphasis upon seizing the "Prime" time of life for happiness, playfulness, and frivolity:

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Lets now take our time; While w'are in our Prime; And old, old Age is a farre off: For the evill evill dayes Will come on apace; Before we can be aware of. The statement of this poem would be a typical carpe diem one were it not for the echo (supplied by L. C. Martin's note) of Ecclesiastes XII.1: Do not forget thy Maker, now, while youth lasts; now while the evil days are still far off, the years that pass unwelcomed. And there is that "certain lunacy in the brain of youth", a characteristic of the carpe diem theme, in the cautionary To all young men that love: I could wish you all, who love, That ye could your thoughts remove From your Mistresses, and be, Wisely wanton (like to me.) But if flames best like ye, then Much good do't ye Gentlemen. I a merry heart will keep, While you wring your hands and weep. (11. 1-4, 11-14)

The "merry" in the thirteenth line is precisely like the "merry" in Best to be merry : Fooles are they, who never know How the times away doe goe: But for us, who wisely see Where the bounds of black Death be: Let's live merrily, and thus Gratifie the Genius. The "merry" which might be considered erotic and part of a carpe diem statement is, in the two poems, a "wisely" wanton and "wisely" seen merriment.. It seems that love is a comic and disturbing thing. The element of "civility" enters the carpe diem poems when Herrick writes them. "Civility" successfully counters the more erotic classical implications and becomes rather a matter of artful living. There is a classical insistence upon youth and seizing youth at a time of playfulness, of frivolity, and of lechery — to attempt to seize these later (at a time like the speaker's, for instance, when one can "wisely see") is a civilized futility. It is far, far preferable the speaker says to be "wisely wanton" like he is than an erotic and wanton fool. There is a similar kind of statement, by way of parallel, about love as a

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comic and disturbing malaise which the "wisely wanton" knows better than youth in Theseus's speech to Hermia describing the penalties consequent upon not obeying her father: Either to die the death, or to abjure For ever the society of men. Therefore, fair Hermia, question your desires, Know of your youth, examine well your blood, Whether, if you yield not to your father's choice, You can endure the livery of a nun, For aye to be in shady cloister mewed, To live a barren sister all your life, Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon. (MND, I.i.65-73) Theseus believes Hermia's youth to be like his own youthful "desires". He also chastizes her for the unnaturalness in her "blood" which is certainly far worse, so he believes, than the moon that "lingers" his "desires" in Act One. After these lines, he continues in what amounts to a typical carpe diem statement: Thrice blessed they that master so their blood To undergo such maiden pilgrimage: But earthlier happy is the rose distilled Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn, Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness. (11. 74-8) Theseus's statement exactly parallels Herrick's "cleanly wantonness" and his "wisely wanton" attitude toward youth. Shakespeare is aware of the contrast between "earthlier" and "blessed" happiness; he chooses for Hermia through the mouthpiece Theseus an "earthlier" happiness. Fortunately she rejects his advice. Yet "seize the day" and "enjoy youth while you are in your prime" are part and parcel of Shakespeare's lines, as they are of Herrick's lines. To judge either poet as a neo-Stoic or neoEpicurean sensualist seems quite off the mark. In Shakespeare and in Herrick there is the awareness that those who achieve the "maiden pilgrimage" are truly blessed. There is also the awareness that "earthlier" happiness, "wise" merriment, and a "wilde civility" are in many ways more enjoyable when youth, "blood", and "desires" are properly 'used'. The conventional carpe diem urging is, in other words, assimilated, and turned from sensual or erotic 'use' to more legitimate enjoyment. One further poem should be introduced before going on To the Virgins. The first three stanzas of To live merrily are usually labeled Dionysian (as Dionysian as When he would have his verses read):

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Now is the time for mirth, Nor cheeck, or tongue be dum be: For with the flowrie earth, The golden pomp is come. The golden Pomp is come; For now each tree do's weare (Made of her Pap and Gum) Rich beads of A m ber here. Now raignes the Rose, and now The Arabian Dew besmears My uncontrolled brow, And my retorted haires. The poem sets a dramatic time for toasts after these lines; toasts to Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Catullus, Bacchus, Propertius, Tibullus follow in order. The poem is very ceremonial, a time for the Rose to "raigne" or to "rain" and for "Arabian Dew" or 'perfume' to be smeared on the speaker's brow. In the midst of the toasts to the classical poets, the speaker admits his own frenzy: Wild I am now with heat; Ο Bacchus', coole thy Raies! Or frantick I shall eate Thy Thyrse, and bite the Bay es This is, of course, a reference to the furor poeticus that Plato so deprecated in the Republic and to Apollonian (Bacchian) inspiration. An Apollonian sensuousness distinguishes this poem, the previous carpe diem poems and the poems that follow, from the Dionysian erotic invitations to love which are usually associated with the English carpe diem tradition. Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to his Love" and Ralegh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd" are far more Dionysian than are the Apollonian statements in Shakespeare's Sonnets, in Herrick's poem, or in Marvell's "To his Coy Mistress". Marlowe's and Ralegh's poems are dark, orgiastic, amoral and more dramatic than are Shakespeare's, Herrick's, and Marvell's. These latter are, rather, individualistic, visionary, moralistic, ideal and poetical. Herrick, in the poem above, asks that his "heat" be cooled, and in the midst of the intensity of his ravishment he sees "a Text" (1. 39). The text is from Ovid's Amores (III.9.39-40), and it is translated in the last two stanzas of Herrick's poem along with Martial's concluding verse to Epigram 2 (Book X, 1. 12): Trust to good Verses then; They onely will aspire, When Pyramids, as men, Are lost, i'th'funerall fire.

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And when all Bodies meet In Lethe to be drown'd; Then onely Numbers sweet With endless life are crown'd. Herrick is allowing for poetic frenzy and for poetic heat, even that which is induced by wine, if the result is "good Verses". Only sweet "Numbers" will achieve eternality, and only they will receive the crown of eternality. This element of the eternality of Art is directly involved with the "cleanly wantonness" of the rest of the poem. As Shelley was later to observe in "Ozymandias" only poetry achieves the crown of "endless life", so live life to its fullest, in poetry written when the "Rose" reigns. There is no conflict between the classical carpe diem principle and its Christian counterpart in that famous statement of natural process, To the Virgins, to make much of Time : Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a flying; And this same flower that smiles to day, , To morrow will be dying. The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun, The higher he's a getting; The sooner will his Race be run, And neerer he's to Setting. That Age is best, which is the first, When youth and Blood are warmer; But being spent, the worse, and worst Times, still succeed the former. Then be not coy, but use your time; And while ye may, goe marry: For having lost but once your prime, You may for ever tarry. Two recent critical appraisals of the poem by Victor P. Staudt and Richard J. Ross offer the judicious and balanced commentary necessary to outweigh the too rigid carpe diem statements of earlier critics. Staudt notes the ironic tensions in the poem's own context which work against the 'seize the day' attitude. The falling feminine rhymes of "flying" and "dying" are in playful juxtaposition to the rhymes of the first and third lines. The entire poem virtually bristles with antithetical elements: "still" and "flying",»"best", "worse, and worst", "spent" and "used". 41 The 41

Victor P. Staudt, "Horace and Herrick on Carpe Diem ", Classical Bulletin, XXXIII (March, 1957), 55-6.

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advice of "goe marry" in the last stanza is also in opposition to the surface meaning. By supplying 'pious' advice rather than 'pagan' advice, Herrick provides a Christian palinode to countervail the seemingly forward-moving classical statement it appears he is making. 42 He may, in fact, have in mind the scriptural episode of the wise and foolish virgins (Matthew XXV. 1-13), which is the nearest Christian counterpart of the classical carpe diem principle. The wise virgins (Christians) prepare to meet the bridegroom (Christ) by providing themselves with sufficient oil (good works and good lives). The foolish virgins do not so provide themselves and must go to merchants to buy oil. While they are gone, the bridegroom comes (at the day of Judgment) and shuts the door to them. The last verse in Matthew is a significant parallel: "Be on the watch, then; the day of it and the hour of it are unknown to you." (This passage should be supplemented with the allusion to Ecclesiastes supplied earlier.) There are even verbal echoes in Herrick's poem of this episode: Staudt points out the similar use of "spent" and "lamp" and "prime", as well as the fact that the wise virgins had carefully "husbanded their oil" and were prepared for the coming of the bridegroom. Professor Ross comments upon the "pronounced lilt of gay country games or dances" stressed by the "flippant nonce syllables of 'a flying' and 'a getting'". 4 3 It is this sense of ritualized experience, along with the elements of the comic, the humorous, the ironic, the flippant, and the playful which keep the poem from becoming a typical classical statement of erotic wantonness. There are also the flippant rhythms so excellently analyzed by Ross: the humor of "Old Time" flying, the humorous pomposity of the hyperbolic Sun, the nonce effect of "The higher he's a getting" and the fact that Time will sit ( "Setting down") after his Race. Besides the ironic oppositions which Staudt has observed, and which Ross's comment supports in detailed manner, there is also the playfulness of Time 'stilled' in the second line and the spatial metaphor of temporal time used up (the same metaphor as Marvell's at the end of "To his Coy Mistress"). But by the last stanza Herrick has moved from the humorous, playful, and mockingly ironic statements of the first three stanzas to a weighty seriousness. Because the first "Age" is a time of warm "Youth and Blood" it is the "best"; but unless this "Age" is "used" it becomes worse and worse. The appropriate passage from St. Augustine reads on the difference between "use" and "enjoy": For to enjoy a thing is to rest with satisfaction in it for its own sake. To use, on the other hand, is to employ whatever means are at one's disposal 42 43

As is suggested by the Editors, Explicator, I (1943), item 2. Ross, "Herrick's Julia in Silks", 177-9.

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to obtain what one desires, if it is a proper object of desire; f o r an unlawful use ought rather to be called an abuse.

(De doctrina Christiana, I.iv.4) It is a certain lunacy not to use that time of "prime". It is an abuse not to use one's talents and not to "goe marry". The ceremony of marriage prevents warm youth from giving in to an improper "object of desire" and sanctions the proper "use" from which, one supposes, the proper enjoyment of "prime" will result. Ceremony acts as mediator between polar oppositions. It is another statement of "wilde civility", the paradox of Nature and Art, and the paradigmatic middle way between "oppositional contraries". Because time is overcome in the poem, fornication is certainly prohibited at the same time that it is 'stilled'. But so is the 'wilde' folly of gathering rosebuds or maintaining perpetual virginity. The movement of the poem has been from the natural to the artificial (to the completely Art) and then still further into stillness itself. It thereby provides a complete harmony of "natural and artful" (as Ross suggests) as well as a completely ironic statement because the final 'moment' of the poem is supremely and spatially paradoxical. Whatever advice the speaker may give to "Youth and Blood", even to the ceremonial sanction of "goe marry", the poet Robert Herrick is self-consciously aware that Time is overcome, transcended, and spatialized, only by paradoxically stilling Time in the poem. This is the goal he has set for himself in To live merrily, and to trust to Good Verses. This is the moment of eternality. This is his "Pillar" as he himself called it in His poetrie his Pillar. Only the dynamic perpetuity of this art is eternal because it avoids the stasis of Art, the cold and unchanging artifact for someone who no longer participates in it. We, on the other hand, are asked to participate in the presentational dynamism of the actual experience of the poem. We are asked to do much the same sort of thing in Corinna's going a Maying. Herrick's sources in Corinna are not easily identifiable, in spite of efforts of a relapsed Frazerian approach.44 The Mayday customs and ceremonials of his own age certainly influenced his composition. Behind these ceremonies, cultural anthropologists have now shown that there stood a long tradition of "survivals" of such ceremonies from the pagan cults of Northern Europe and from early Greek and Roman festivals and rituals. Herrick was surely unaware of the connection between his rural customs and the pagan cults, but he had read the accounts of the Roman and Greek rituals in the Renaissance dictionaries of antiquities and in the sources of the dictionaries themselves. Lately, however, critics have begun Cf. Mark L. Reed, "Herrick Among the Maypoles: Dean Prior and the Hesperides", Studies in English Literature, V (1965), 133-150. 44

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to try to explain that Herrick was aware of the existence of the pagan cults as well. The identification of Corinna as Persephone or of the Hock-Cart as phallic worship of the Corn-Maiden or of Dionysius results from opening the pandora's box of myth to critics without historical awareness.45 Unfortunately such identifications are given critical importance without inquiring into the poetic intention that chose the identifications for a peculiarly seventeenth-century function. It was far easier for Herrick in the seventeenth century to accommodate the older classical rituals he had read about, in the Latin poets and in the dictionaries, with Christian devotions and rituals of his own time, than it was for Frazer to so accommodate them two hundred years later. Critics of Herrick's poem have not perceived the historical conception of paganism at work there (an oversight perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in Cleanth Brooks's discussion of Corinna's going a Maying).46 Herrick seems to go out of his way to juxtapose images associated with country May-time festivals and images of a devotional nature. Yet his concern is not with the reconciliation or resolution of these, for there seems to be no ethical, no didactic purpose — as there would have to be if Herrick saw his juxtaposition as in any way a competition or a confrontation. In fact, the tension so very characteristic of this poem arises at least partly from the fact that Christianity and classical "paganism" are not reconciled philosophically or theologically or even linguistically. Herrick's imaginative world is not totally one of Christian consciousness or of Christian ceremonial. Nor is it totally one of Dionysian ceremony or of neo-pagan hedonism. His imaginative world, like we assume his 'real' world, is a blend of both. History does not prevent the blend that Herrick probably wanted. Only Puritanism, which loomed so large in Herrick's historical awareness and which still looms so large in critical lack of historical awareness, would prevent Herrick from achieving his blend. Herrick chooses not to turn history into a myth of, or criticism of, the past; he asks only to be allowed to participate in his experience. That is all he asks of us as well. We enter his joyous, exploding ceremonial of spring in the first stanza of 45

J. Rea, "Persephone in 'Corinna's Going Α-Maying'", CE, XXVI (April, 1965), 544-6 and Richard E. Hughes, "Herrick's 'Hock Cart': Companion Piece to 'Corinna's Going Α-Maying' ", CE, XXVII (February, 1966), 420-2. Hughes's sole effort toward establishing an historical awareness in Corinna is contained in this statement: 'In the curious but inevitable confusion of contradictory worships by the peasantry, a Christian devotion is transferred to this [the 'Hock Cart'] most un-Christian rite: as Herrick brought Christianity and paganism into conflict in 'Corinna's Going Α-Maying', with the older pagan ritual eventually suffocating the Christian, so too here." Mr. Hughes apparently lacks Herrick's historical awareness and Herrick's ability to accommodate. 46 The Well Wrought Urn (New York, 1947), 67-79.

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Corinna through Nature's gate. Had Herrick lingered there he might well have remained a nature poet, or as some would have him be, a pastoral poet. But, recalling Puttenham's admonition to the poet that he must "include more of meaning than nature 'could due without mans help and arte' ", he moves by epithet and image through the physical world while, at many levels, he seeks to transcend that world. 4 7 We discover, initially, a Christian seriousness alongside the delight in physical nature: Get up, get up for shame, the Blooming morne Upon her wings presents the god unshorne. See how Aurora throwes her faire Fresh-quilted colours through the aire: Get up, sweet-Slug-a-bed, and see The Dew-bespangling Herbe and Tree. Each Flower has wept, and bow'd toward the East, Above an hour since; yet you not drest, Nay! not so much as out of bed? When all the Birds have Mattens seyd, And sung their thankfull Hymnes: 'tis sin, Nay, profanation to keep in, When as a thousand Virgins on this day, Spring, sooner then the Lark, to fetch in May. The first stanza is a blend of ceremonials, Christian, classical, natural, and rural: the weeping flowers, the presentation of the "god unshorne", the flowers bowed in Christian devotion to the East, the birds who have said their Matins, the "Herbe and Tree" dressed in dew-finery, and the thousand "Virgins" performing the proper rituals of the springtime. The poem is also highly formal in its ceremonial structure (five 14-line stanzas of seven couplets) and rhythm (the first, fourth, and seventh lines of each stanza are in iambic pentameters; the second, third, fifth, and sixth lines are in iambic tetrameters). As both Huizinga and Frank Warnke have shown, this very dramatic and agonistic structure is characteristic of all play rituals and also characteristic of mythic confrontations of reality. 4 8 It also provides the typical structure of incantation. There is a tension, even at the beginning of the poem, of apparently conflicting claims, a tension resolved, metaphorically at least, in the complete fusion of Christian and pagan elements. That is, the religious terminology is used with its historical and symbolic richness emptied; the strict liturgical meaning is evacuated. The tension is created by the divinity of the young sun, in his dual role as Apollo and as Christian bringer of 47

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys D. Wilcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936), 303-4. 48 Frank Warnke, "Play and Metamorphosis", 28.

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light, who requires obeisance from nature as well as from the "sweet-Sluga-bed", whose sluggishness is "sin, / Nay, profanation" against her god/God. This is "sin" in a very real (natural) and a very Christian sense, for Corinna sins against the natural world — God's second book — by not arising to meet its springtime arrival. She sins in terms of nature, whose members (the herb, tree, flowers, birds) have already performed their morning and their Mayday rites. On a human level, this is a ceremonial rite that she should be performing. On a natural level, all nature is performing the ceremony for her and in her name. But the narrator's injunction to her is that she "sins" because she has not performed her proper rites. This conceptualized sin renders significant and meaningful the image evoked in the "god unshorne", in line 2, for the "sin" is not only an "ominous, unpagan word" in a narrow Christian sense (as Cleanth Brooks would have us believe), it is also a natural sin against the ceremony of Mayday. The use of the word "sin" is, therefore, neither pagan nor Christian. For Herrick, it is as much a "sin" not to attend to the rites of May as it is a "sin" not to have "Mattens seyd" or to say only a few beads (1. 28). The word "sin" becomes that key image which makes Herrick's physical vision of Corinna's May morning signify an archetypal and universal vision of God and Apollo calling forth the glorious delights of spring. And Corinna has sinned because she has failed to add her art (ceremony) to Nature's art (spring ritual). Later in the poem Herrick specifically calls for both "thankfull Hymnes" and "harmlesse follie" (1. 58). Herrick's supposed paganism is merely an exposition of his artistic and ceremonial attitude toward this and all rural festivals. There is yet anpther ambiguity in the first stanza, the suggestions of which manifest themselves throughout the poem. Corinna is reminded that it is a "sin" to stay inside "When as a thousand Virgins on this day, / Spring, sooner then the Lark, to fetch in May". She is reminded that she is shirking her duties as one of the "Virgins" who come to meet the "god unshorne". It is tempting to suppose that while the "god unshorne" is Apollo, or a "type of him" as Christ, Corinna is also a type of all Virgins (perhaps even of. the Blessed Virgin) who has come to welcome, on the one hand, the "prepotent bridegroom" and, on the other hand, the Son Himself. Both of these suppositions have some validity in terms of the identification with nature that we have observed Corinna undergo in the earlier portion of the stanza and with the parable of the wise and foolish virgins cited above from Matthew. It is also surprising that the ambiguity of the word "spring" has not been made more of. William Empson notes the suggested pun on "spring" in "The Funerall Rites of the Rose", and T. R. Whitaker notes the word's characteristic usage in connection with tears and dew in many other poems — though he believes that Herrick uses it in

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a pagan sense, as an element in the sanctification of the Rose's death. I see "spring" as the vehicle of Corinna's sin, for she has failed to perform her proper function as one of God's creatures. She should "spring" forth to welcome the May day. She should welcome the new spring (the season) as one of the Virgins, as one of the flowers, and one of the birds — in other words, as all Nature. It is the order of the universe that she stays as sweet-Slug-a-bed. But the total nature of Corrina's sin is not completely resolved in the first stanza, nor, for that matter, is Corinna's proper 'role'. In the second stanza, the identification of the natural, the human, and perhaps even the divine worlds is elaborated upon: Rise; and put on your Foliage, and be seene To come forth, like the Spring-time, fresh and greene; And sweet as Flora. Take no care For Jewels for your Gowne, or Haire: Feare not; the leaves will strew Gemms in abundance upon you: Besides, the childhood of the Day has kept, Against you come, some Orient Pearls unwept: Come, and receive them while the light Hangs on the Dew-locks of the night: And Titan on the Eastern hill Retires himselfe, or else stands still Till you come forth. Wash, dresse, be briefe in praying: Few Beads are best, when once we goe a Maying Corinna, like the "Spring-time, fresh and greene", must put on her "Foliage", but she must not dally to choose jewels, for the dew of the day will serve her wants. She must not, in other words, seek to cover Nature with Art, for Nature herself supplies all the art that she will need, a natural art. Indeed, all nature and all the physical world, from night with his "dew-locks" (stars) to day with his "Orient Pearls unwept" (dew), await her coming. And if she delays in fulfilling her role of Primavera, she keeps even the universe and the heavenly bodies from their appointed paths: the titan Sun knows not whether to rise, retire, or stand still until she tells him what to do. Corinna stops time itself. Nor is there any clash of Christianity and paganism in the last couplet of the stanza, for (as noted above) the "few beads" realistically notes that normal prayers can be abbreviated on this particular morning. Prayers are not completely forgotten, they are merely somewhat curtailed. Prayer-time, if so playful an expression can be permitted, is foreshortened so that the transcendence 49

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, 1947), 162-3; T. R. Whitaker, "Henick and the Fruits of the Garden", ELH, XXII (1955), 16-33.

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of time through the vision of Natiire and Art can take place. Time (Herrick calls him Titan) becomes the dominant spatial metaphor of the stilled moment of reality extending through the last stanza of the poem. By this point in the poem, Corinna has become not a symbol of Nature and Art, but an emblem. Herrick's appeal, like that of Marvell's observed by Frank Warnke in "The Gallery", is to the "myth-oriented sensibility of the Renaissance". 50 Corinna has been transformed, like Clora in "The Gallery", by mythological similies (Flora, Aurora, Virgin, Flower) which function emblematically rather than conventionally, as compliment or ornament. And like Clora and little T.C., Corinna is identified with recurrent Nature, emblematically functioning as a "female principle of generation". These identifications are mythic and excessively hyperbolic, as are all of Herrick's identifications in the first two stanzas. Such identifications are almost parodic, and it is this tension of the parodistic hyperbole and the ceremonial incantation (confined and constrained by the highly dramatic and formal structure and rhythm) which makes the poem virtually a Baroque performance. All of Herrick's tension and hyperbole is controlled, as Crashaw's and Marvell's poetic effects are controlled, by the speaker's tone. It is a playful tone suitable to a play-ritual which Corinna very definitely is. The next two stanzas complete the human-natural identifications suggested in the first two stanzas: Come, my Corinna, come; and comming, marke How each field turns a street; each street a Parke Made green, and trimm'd with trees: see how Devotion gives each House a Bough, Or Branch: Each Porch, each doore, ere this, An Arke a Tabernacle is Made up of white-thorn neatly enterwove; As if here were those cooler shades of love. Can such delights be in the street, And open fields, and we not see't? Come, we'll abroad; and let's obay The Proclamation made for May: And sin no more, as we have done, by staying; But my Corinna, come, let's goe a Maying. There's not a budding Boy, or Girle, this day, But is got up, and gone to bring in May. A deale of Youth, ere this, is come Back, and with White-thorn laden home. Some have dispatcht their Cakes and Creame, Before that we have left to dreame: 50

Warnke, 24.

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And some have wept, and woo'd, and plighted Troth, And chose their Priest, ere we can cast off sloth: Many a green-gown has been given; Many akisse, both odde and even: Many a glance too has been sent From out the eye, Loves Firmament: Many a jest told of the Keyes betraying This night, and Locks pickt, yet w'are not a Maying. The physical world described in the third and fourth (as well as the second) stanzas has succumbed to the praise of the May-morning. The rites of the day are of a religious nature, to be sure, but of a nature not wholly Christian and not entirely pagan. These rites are, however, the proper and historically accurate ceremonies for the day: the houses and churches covered with boughs, the Proclamation (made by Charles I) made for the preservation of the rural festivities, the boys and girls gathering garlands in the woods, the white-thorne, and the betrothals and marriages before a Priest. 51 An assertion of the triumph of paganism here overlooks the central syntactical position of the word "devotion" in the fourth line of the third stanza ("... see how/Devotion gives each House a Bough"). Denial of either the "delights... in the street, / And open fields" or the "love" that is within each "house" (including the house in which the poet and Corinna are delaying their expected participation in the ceremonies) is denial of the same thing, from two different points of view. And denial for Herrick is "sin". The "cleanly wantonnesse" that Herrick tells us he will sing when he writes of Youth and Love is, also, found here. But the presence of a priest to sanctify the "plighted" troths and even to give ecclesiastical sanctions to the natural processes of "Many a green-gown... given", removes any conflict between the classical carpe diem motif and Christianity. The "Priest", Robert Herrick the poet, participates in the ceremony of Corinna. He is not just dragged in to give Christian sanction to the erotic ceremonies. The movement of the two stanzas, the third and fourth, is rapid, the statements are not as complex and as ambiguous as earlier ones. Consequently, many have overlooked the "Priest" and the function he is to perform after this May day ceremony. Yet the resolution of the poem, the full delineation of the theme of transiency is upon us. It is resolved in the final stanza: 51

In his note to 11. 29-34, J. Max Patrick in his edition of Herrick (1963), 100, cites Leviticus XXIII 40-42, which I think strengthens my case: "ye shall take you on the first day the boughs of goodly trees, branches of palm trees ... and ye shall rejoice before the Lord ... Ye shall dwell in booths seven days".

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Come, let us goe, while we are in our prime; And take the haimlesse follie of the time. We shall grow old apace, and die Before we know our liberty. Our life is short; and our days run As fast away as do's the Sunne: And as a vapour, or a drop of raine Once lost, can ne'r be found againe: So when or you or I are made A fable, song, or fleeting shade; All love, all liking, all delight Lies drown'd with us in endlesse night. Then while time serves, and we are but decaying; Come, my Corinna, come, let's goe a Maying. Though this stanza is, admittedly, not completely devoid of the spirit of the classical carpe diem statement, to consider the stanza as simply that statement is invalid and incomplete, for here as throughout Herrick's poetry, there is a commingling of both the classical and the Christian traditions. Strangely enough, the critics who have sought to resolve the apparent clash of Christianity and paganism in the poem have come closer to a full interpretation of the last stanza than the chief Christian arguer, Sydney Musgrove who is unable to justify Herrick's Christian orthodoxy in a stanza whose "dominant note ... is pagan — at least, Propertian - rather than confessedly Christian". 52 (He means, of course, explicitly Christian.) Musgrove fails to see that the "sin" of the first four stanzas, conceptualized and often ambiguously expressed, is implicitly resolved in the first line of the last stanza: "Come, let us goe, while we are in our prime". For it is a "sin" to delay when we should go out "And take the harmlesse follie of the time". The epithet "harmlesse" forces us to accept the poem's "cleanly wantonesse" as nothing more nor less than the poet intended it. In other words, do go out and do take the "harmlesse follie" of the May-day ceremonies. Do sanctify those ceremonies by having a Priest perform the proper ritual act. The next four lines seem to further support this exhortation: We shall grow old apace, and die Before we know our liberty. Our life is short; and our dayes run As fast away as do's the Sunne. Quite literally, "liberty" may imply growing old before we can seize the opportunity to be happy in youth: that is, to marry and, thereby, not "sin". On other levels the word may mean release from life itself at death 52

Sydney Musgrove, The Universe of Robert Herrick, 13.

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and the freedom which one wishes to know about oneself. In any case, the three meanings coalesce in the exhortation to youth. The next two lines conclude the earlier identifications of the human and natural worlds and force the conclusion that like the drop of rain (a symbol of spring and dawn as dew) Corinna must seize the brief beauty of youth and the uniqueness and propriety of time of youth "while time serves, and we are but decaying". There is, however, no promise of human regeneration (in the spring or because of the intercession of a fertility god), nor of a return to life as it can only be known on this May-morning. There is only a promise of "liberty" and "endlesse night" for Corinna, while for the physical world there is the promise that on another day the "Blooming Morne" will again present "the god unshome". An examination of the complexity involved in "a drop of raine" may make Herrick's vision clearer. In the physical world, the drop blends with all drops, returns to the heavens (as do all elemental things in the Renaissance system of contraries), only to fall again as dew or rain. It is recurrent, even a symbol of the recurrence of nature, not subject to decay, immutable and unchangeable (as Herrick explicitly says man is subject to decay). The drop, as it were, figures forth the youth of man who must "gather ye rose buds" and partake of all ceremonials and festivals while the drop falls from heaven (that is, while it is in our midst as he says in the poem Evensong) and before it (and man) blends into that pool which is "endlesse night". The last stanza also links the ecphrastic principle (as discussed earlier) with Herrick's own attitude toward "cleanly Wantonnesse", "wilde civility", and the reality of an art within Nature which, by being nurtured by the poet's Art, is able to overcome the flux and temporal mutability of Nature and withstand the static death of Art as well. When Herrick says "So when or you or I are made / A fable, song, or fleeting shade", he is referring ironically and selfconsciously to his own poem. He and Corinna have been "made" immortal in a song, the poem - and we note the use of the poet as vates and God. Hence they are both not subject to the "endlesse night" because the "endlesse night" never comes in the poem. At the same time they are so subject. Their love, their "liking", and their delight are actually and virtually drowned in "endlesse night" while they themselves are not so drowned. "Time" serves to make all mutable, yet by stilling all in the poem, and by stilling "Titan" or Time itself, all are served by Time because they transcend Time and become eternal. Such a statement is highly ironic, it is also the incarnational resolution of flux versus permanence. The poem is played, and played seriously and with a great deal of irony. The art within Nature, the play-ritual of a May-morning, is nurtured

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by Herrick's Art (in writing the poem), and the art-Nature-Art performance is stilled beyond time. It is so stilled because it is a play ritual and a performance which while stopped is always susceptible to being played again. Corinna's going a Maying is Herrick's most famous poem precisely because it is the fullest statement of his ceremonial vision of the relation between Nature and Art, between external and poetic contexts, and between Time and Space. When Corinna is seen as a statement of an accommodated Christian carpe diem statement, the tension of the conflicting claims is resolved, resolved in a vital and totally significant and 'real' way. This resolution is resisted by some critics who suggest that there is a special awareness of paganism in the poem. They do not seem to recognize the nature of the historical awareness in Herrick's use of the classical and Christian ceremony, of devotional and ritualistic imagery and of the classical carpe diem, functioning in new terms. Literature, particularly that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, must be viewed in its social milieu; all the historical and social forces must be taken into account as well as Cleanth Brooks's excellent discussion of the juxtaposition of two types of images in Corinna. The special function of imagery in the tone and ideas of the poem, the normative ideological structure of it, and its historical concreteness must not be overlooked. 53 Herrick's concern is with the confrontation of the dominant "Christian-naturalistic motifs" in the poem, and our concern is with his historical awareness of and recreation of this confrontation. Corinna is also a statement of the Christian and poetic lament for the passing of an age, and for the ceremonies of May-day, which in Herrick's time were not narrowly mythic or pagan. Herrick does not attempt to escape "times trans-shifting" or death through his art, for he recognizes that there is no escape from the flux of human life, no great urgency to carpe diem. He uses his art, the ceremony of May-day as he would have Corinna experience it, to sanctify the old ways of living, ways which will continue to remain unchanged, like the natural world of dew and rain, even when Corinna and ihe poet have passed away. In the realm of Nature Corinna stays to wonder about putting on her "foliage" and her "beads" and, if she does not "sin", she takes the "harmlesse follie" of the time.

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Cleanth Brooks is taken severely to task for his failure to observe the historical and normative framework of the poem by Roy Harvey Pearce, " 'Pure' Criticism and the History of Ideas", JAAC, VII (1948), 126-9; Brooks is quoted, with complete approval, by H. R. Swardson, Poetry and the Fountain of Light, 58-60, who while delineating the theme of the "ceremony of mirth" makes many interesting though not always knowledgeable, comments about the ceremony of Corinna.

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Herrick's view of Nature is, as Hopkins's was to be, a sacramental or a ceremonious one. Furthermore, Corinna is being reproached for the "sin" of not participating in the country pieties and rituals. The urgency and the expectation in the tone of the poem reflect the feelings Herrick must have had as he saw the Puritans encroaching on the rural festivals and ceremonies seeing these Mayday rites as those of a pagan religion. They are not any more pagan than the ceremonies the Christian churches have instituted for Candlemas, or Mothering-Sunday, or Christmas, or Harvest home. The vitality of these country rites of May is essential to the world picture as Herrick sees it. Their survival is even more essential to that world picture. Their loss if we "sin" or if they are destroyed would be a grievous loss. If we remove the stigma of "pagan" from these ceremonies, as Herrick's contemporaries, with notable exceptions, did, the clash of traditions and beliefs is not between "pagan" and "Christian", but between a narrowly Christian devotion and a more catholic Christianity which is able to accommodate and make poetically significant any human or natural activity which is for God's greater glory.

2. CEREMONY AND COSMOS

When Herrick constructs his 'unreal' world out of the images, symbols, and ceremonies of his 'real' world, he seeks a poet's imaginative solution to the troublesome disjunction of art and reality. The 'cosmos' of his unreal world, his artistic world, is not the 'cosmos' of his real world. It is, rather, an image, even a symbol, of the cosmos. The cosmos as it really is becames the cosmos as the poet imagines it to be. Not the cosmos as it is but the cosmos as the poet would have it be — that is the poet's function. As Theseus's "cool reason" tells him, this sort of imagination is potentially dangerous, for ... as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. (MND, V.i. 14-17) Unafraid of this power of the imagination, the poet's artistic image of the cosmos gathers to itself forms from the real world. These imagined forms reflect (as in a mirror image) real forms because for the poet forms of order exist in both the real and in his imagined cosmos. The poetic image of the cosmos is, as Ernst Cassirer has so aptly phrased it, "a retreat into the world of 'unreality' ", 1 The poetic image of the cosmos gathers to itself artistic ceremony and all of ceremony's associated forms so as to become an emblem of the order of the real in the unreal. Since the order of the real cosmos is so various, so also is the order of the imagined cosmos. In Herrick's case, it contains ceremonies to the gods, to God, to fairies, and to beloved girls. Later I shall show that Herrick's artistic 1

Ernst Cassirer, " 'Spirit* and 'Life' in Contemporary Philosophy", in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, 870-1: "Man must retreat into the world of 'unreality', into the world of appearance and of play, in order therein and thereby to conquer the world of reality." Cf. Harry Berger's comment on the "second world" of Renaissance art and literature in his article "The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World", Centennial Review, IX (Winter, 1965), 36-78, and Meyer Abrams's notion of the heterocosm in his The Mirror and the Lamp.

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cosmos also contains ceremonies to death and to life. Yet in Herrick's entire cosmos, he sees his role perfectly. He slows and stills the real cosmos, just as he asks Titan to do in Corinna, so that art and reality can become one. Through his own creative formations, Herrick makes himself one with the cosmos through art. The limits of his poetic cosmos are set forth in the first poem in Hespend.es, The Argument of his Book. The poem catalogues the subjects of Herrick's volume: the order of the 'real' and the order of the 'unreal' worlds of his poetry. The poem is thus a microcosm of Nature and Art. It is also a Baroque tapestry. As such it reveals the minuteness of experience and the expansiveness of experience. The first couplet suggests that Nature is his subject: I sing of Brooks, of Blossomes, Birds, and Bowers: Of April, May, of June, and /w/y-Flowers. But Hesperides does not treat the whole realm of Nature or even nature. Not every situation is the "Sacred Grove" of the poem To the Queene, where the daughters of Hesperus dwell in pastoral idyllicism, picking the golden apples (his 'poems') in a mythical garden. Only when the playful identifications of man (usually woman in Herrick) and nature enter into the texture of his poems, ^s they do in Corinna, do his poems represent the mythic extension of his experience. Yet these identifications occur during the so-called 'regenerative' months of April, May, June, and July. At these times, the playful and mythic use of nature is related to the natural life-events, the 'festivities', suggested in the second couplet: I sing of May-poles, Hock-carts, Wassails, Wakes, Of Bride-grooms, Brides, and of their Bridall-cakes. These ceremonies and rural festivals and rituals (the subject of a later chapter) have both the historical or external reality as actual English ceremonies and the poetic ('unreal') reality of being play. They also have the power as play of transcending the limits of time and space, the orderliness of rules and rapture and enthusiasm. They are the "certain artifices" mentioned by Huizinga which, whether serious or not, are better then the natural because they allow man to envelop his past, his present, and his future into one vital whole. The natural and the play-spirit continue into the paradoxical third couplet: I write of Youth, of Love, and have Accesse By these, to sing of cleanly-Wantonnesse. The change in the poet's function from one of singing to one of writing and then back again to one of singing is a significant change. The art of

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loving is written; it is visile. The art of "cleanly-Wantonnesse" is sung; it is audile. The paradoxical "cleanly-Wantonnesse", like the paradoxical "wilde Civility" in the poem Delight in Disorder, functions, as a form of metaphor, in a static state of Art outside of time and space. Art tends toward the reality of song. Herrick's paradox also is playfully serious in holding its oppositions in unresolved tension. The ear, listening to repetitions and antitheses, more often demands resolution at the end. The eye is not so confined because it 'sees' the paradox where the ear more commonly misses it. The paradoxical "cleanly-Wantonnesse" is, then, heavily ironic. In the fourth couplet Herrick moves from tue natural into the more minute description of the poetic artifacts of his ceremonies of art and love: I sing of Dewes, of Raines, and piece by piece Of Balme, of Oyle, of Spice and Amber-Greece. These are Herrick's Renaissance and Baroque elements, all shimmery and round and richly odoriferous, all o f them, like "the ooze of oil / Crushed", circles of eternity. And in the fifth couplet, decay and metamorphosis enter the catalogue, extending the Baroque significance through the dominant colors often found in that kind of poetry: I sing of Times trans-shifting·, and I write How Roses first came Red, and Lillies White. The sixth couplet moves to spheres even more minute, through nature darkened and shadowed and without 'true' light, to the sub-spheres within the world of fairy: I write of Groves, of Twilights, and I sing The Court of Mab, and of the Fairie-King. Then, as in a typical Baroque poem, after still other infinitely smaller spheres are suggested, there is a movement toward infinite expansion. From microcosm within microcosm, the temporal progression moves outward, giving the whole poetic catalogue universal dimension, proceeding through life processes to the spatial circle of Heaven which encompasses all: I write of Hell, I sing (and ever shall) Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all. These tendencies to invert the telescope so as to focus on the microcosm within the microcosm and to infinitely diminish and to then infinitely inflate materials, are typically Baroque tendencies. So too are Herrick's multiplicity of detail, his mythic transformations and metamorphoses, and

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his circle images and art covering art. The direction of these tendencies is characteristically from the natural to the artificial, from concrete reality toward a new artistic reality. Herrick's ceremonials, play elements, and minute categories of the natural (and the non-natural) are controlled by his attitude toward Nature and Art, in other words by his literary awareness and his self-consciousness which find expression in his poetic contexts and are, essentially, a reflection of his historical, cultural, and artistic vision. It is this vision which is the real argument of his book. It is this vision which controls the poetic cosmos of Hesperides, and which gives meaning and significance to the poems to the gods, to God, to the fairies, and to the beloved girls. This order of the cosmos is Herrick's order in his poetic cosmos. I

In those poems which comprise Herrick's ceremonies to the gods, the references and allusions to the Roman gods are something more than "surface play on Christian terms" - the "hymns", "vows", and "canticles" of the Christian religions.2 Though the gods play a very small role in Herrick's classical and poetic worlds, he has taken his classical images and machinery from the Latin poets and from the great handbooks of mythology and antiquity: from Giraldi, Conti, Cartari, Rosinus, and from the later commentators Dempster and Godwin. Here it is necessary to determine what function the references and allusions perform in the poetiy and what application and evaluation seems to be called for. In Herrick's versions of propriety with relation to the gods, we are in the festival atmosphere of the older, more animistic spirit of the early Romans rather than in the later formalized religion of the state. This strain of the primitivistic simplicity of propriety and decorum, of order in addressing one's god ( and later one's God), is of a piece with Herrick's attitude toward all ceremonious occasions. In both A Short Hymne to Venus and A Vow to Venus, the lover promises to offer to the goddess an appropriate gift, "mirtles" and "roses". These are the suitable flora among the trees and flowers sacred to Venus, as recorded in Rosinus, Giraldi, and Cartari. Herrick may also have found in Conti that female victims and thighs of beef were also acceptable offerings to Venus at a sacrifice.3 And if Apollo tunes Herrick's verses, a 2

As H. R. Swardson would have them be in his Poetry and the Fountain of Light (London, 1962), p. 49. Iohannis Rosinus, Antiquitatum Romanarum corpus absolutissium, Book II, cap. x, 130; originally published at Basle, 1583, I have used the 1743, Amsterdam edition with notes by Thomas Dempster, particularly Book III, cap. xxxiii, "De Veterum

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swan will be sacrificed to him in Ta Apollo. A Short Hymne. The swan is not mentioned by Conti or Giraldi, but is noted as a suitable sacrifice in Cartari (p. 37). The traditional offering of a cock to Aesculapius will be offered to that serpent-like god if he allows Herrick's cook to recover from her sickness (in Upon Prudence Baldwin her sickness). No mention is made of the she-goat (capra) which might also be sacrificed to Aesculapius. Similarly, if Juno will "dresse the Bridall-Bed" in An hymne to Juno, a peacock (pava) will be offered up to her. Again there is no mention of her proper and appropriate victim, a sow ("sus" in Servius on Aeneid, VIII. 43). If courage is granted (in A Vow to Mars), a wolf will be offered up to Mars, as is appropriate. Bacchus or Liber Pater is invoked for the conventional biting of the "bayes" and the raising of the "thyrse" or staff around which the vine is entwined (in To live merrily, and to trust to good verses, A Hymne to Bacchus I, A Lyrick to Mirth, and A Hymne to Bacchus II). Now in all of these poems the proper sacrifice is offered to achieve a paricular 'end'. Or else, Herrick is very eclectic in not offering the proper sacrificial victim as the dictionaries would have informed him. But the allusions and references to the gods are incidental to the petitions which frame them. The effect is always one of humble supplication, rarely more than the expected offering is given, even more rarely is more than one favor asked. There is, then, a certain propriety to the use of these allusions and references which amounts almost to a principle of ceremonial decorum. Decorum was also a principle in the Roman religion (as it still is a principle in most religions) and, under the law governing the divine and human relationships, the ius divinum, the Roman religion developed from the primitive animism of Numa to the highly formalized state religion of the Republic.4 A reverent and a seemly attitude toward specific places, and for material objects, was as important to the Romans as it was to some Anglicans of the seventeenth century. Herrick is certainly a member of this Anglican group. Indeed, much of the Puritan over-sensitivity about Sacrificiis", 231-2. Rosinus is cited by Ben Jonson in Sefanus, V. 171-7 in Works, IV, ed. C. H. Herford & Percy Simpson (Oxford, 1932), 443-4, 482-3. Jonson also cites Lilio Gregori Giraldi, De deis Gentium (Basle, 1548), cap. xvii; I have used the Opera omnia, ed. Joannes Jensius (Lugduni, 1696). I have used the following dictionaries in the preparation of this book (and will refer to these editions hereafter): Thomas Godwin, Romanae historiae anthologia, An Exposition of the Roman Antiquities (1614); Vincenzo Cartari, Le imagini colla sposizione degii deidegli antichi (Venice, 1556; Lyon, 1581 edition used); Natale Conti, Mythologiae sive explications fabularum libri decern (originally published Venice, 1551; Geneva, 1620 edition used). Hence, the reference for this note are: Rosinus, Book II, cap. x, 130; Giraldi, 388a; Cartari, translated by Richard Linche, The Fountain of Ancient Fiction (London, 1599), 201; Conti, Book IV. cap. xiii, 391. 4 W. Warde Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman People (London, 1911), 77-8.

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Laudian ritualism stems from this dislike of what Hooker had called the "beauty of holiness". This same primitivistic spirit, with its corollary concern for decorum and propriety, informs the offerings to the 'closet-gods' and the 'household gods', but not, strangely enough, the Larr and the Genius. Herrick envisions the closet-gods in His Sailing from Julia as "Deities which circum-walk the Seas" and who will "re-deliver" him from his voyage if Julia will but offer "one (Jrink offering" to them. He does not, however, distinguish between the 'house-hold gods' and the Penates and the Lares, as the dictionary writers do. All are, generically, household gods, but the Penates represented the material 'vitality' of the family and its stores, while the Lares guarded the good state of the family, usually from its traditional place of abode, the hearth. Herrick's mixture probably results from the description of the Lares in Giraldi where the Lar, the Penates and the Lar familiaris seem synonymous: Lares sunt dei domestici: unde & Lares pro aedibus ipsis, ut etiam Penates dicti: hinc & Lar familiaris, qui ab antiquis, reste Plauto, in canis figura efformabatur. 5 Certainly he recalls the morning sacrifice to the Lares in ThePrimitiae to Parents'. Our Household-gods our Parents be; And manners good requires, that we The first Fruits give to them, who gave Us hands to get what here we have. He intends here the Manes, the spirits of the departed relatives or parents, not the Penates or the Lares. But, he has gathered all the household deities, the spirits of the hearth (Vesta), stores (Penates), familial welfare (Lares) and the individual man (Genius) and woman (Juno), together in a kind of chthonic aggregate. Whenever he addresses a hymn, or offers a sacrifice or fails to offer a sacrifice to the Lares,6 he is addressing an omnipresent guardian spirit which he does not distinguish from the Genius, except that the Lares is offered poppy, or crowned with wreaths of garlic and poppy. Nowhere have I discovered that the Lares were crowned with parsley (as in To Larr and Α Hymne to the Lares), but since both instances when parsley crowns are mentioned "chives of garlic" are also mentioned, I assume that Herrick had confused parsley (apium) with garlic (alium). Fulfilment of, or failure to observe the proper sacrifices to the Lares, seems to be the sole motivation for the use of the ® Giraldi, edition cited, De deis Gentium, 440C. See also A Short Hymne to Larr, To Larr, Larr's portion, and the Poets part, A Hymne to the Lares.

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Lares·, this is in keeping with that regularity of devotion, and the emphasis on the proper ceremonies at all times, that we have observed elsewhere. Herrick's use of the figure of the Genius seems to include all the functions assigned to it by the classical authors and the lexicographers: as the power which generates all things (in the sense of a birth-spirit) and thereafter belongs to that person has (Genius in the man, Juno in the woman); as the god of nature, which incites human beings to pleasure or lust; and as the protecting spirit of a plaee.7 The Genius is always described wearing a crown of leaves of the plane tree (platani foliis) and the usual sacrifice is unmixed wine (mero) and flowers. This much is a commonplace by Herrick's time, for the figure Genius, often an allegorical figure, received widespread usage during the Renaissance, in Spenser's 'Bower of Bliss' and the 'Garden of Adonis' (Fairie Queene, II. xxi. 47-48; III. vi. 30-31) and in the Epithalamion (398ff.), in Jonson's King James' Entertainment, and later, in Milton's Nativity, II Penseroso, Lycidas, and Arcades.8 One stanza — stanza 16 — of Herrick's His Age combines the conceptions of the Lares and Vesta with that of the Genius as spirit of place: Then next lie cause my hopefull Lad (If a wild Apple can be had) To crown the Hearth, (Larr thus conspiring with our mirth) Then to infuse Our browner Ale into the cruse: Which sweetly spic't, we'l first carouse Unto the Genius of the house. When Herrick returns from loathed Devonshire (in His returne to London), he greets the spirit of the city: " 0 fruitfull Genius". This is the more traditional conception of Genius of place, not the guardian spirit of the house (the Lares'?) as in His Age or in To the Genius of his house, where the Genius is petitioned to take over protection of the entire house, from foundation to roof. The characteristic function of the Genius, as the 7

Giraldi, 435E-438F; Conti, Book IV, cap. iii, 291-2; Cartari, (1581 edition), 299-300. This information on the Genius can be found in the following sources: E. C. Kn owl ton, "The Allegorical Figure Genius", Classical Philology XV (1920), 380-4; Knowlton, "Genius as an Allegorical Figure", Modern Language Notes, XXXIX (1924), 89-95; Knowlton, "The Genii of Spenser", Studies in Philology, XXV (1928), 439-456; D. T. Starnes, "The Figure Genius in the Renaissance", Studies in the Renaissance, XI (1964), 234-244; classical sources in Servius (on Georgics, I. 302) for the conceptions of the spirit of place and for the good and evil Genii; Propertius (II. x) and Tibullus (I.iii.33;I.vii.49f.) for the conception of the god of generation, of birth, and of protector of life. Cartari (p. 300) informs us that the Romans also held the Genius of a prince in especial esteem.

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nature divinity attached to a locality, has been fused with the functions of all the household deities. We may not feel this is a sufficiently effective new creation of the classical past, but it is at least a new and more animistic feeling for the Genius than that invoked by Spenser, Jonson, or Milton. The Genius is also found in the individual man, controlling his good and his bad actions. In To his worthy Friend, M. Tho. Falconbirge the usual epithet for Genius is exchanged with the usual epithet for star: "Thy lucky Genius, and thy guiding starre, / Have made Thee prosperous in thy wayes, thus farre". In To Sir John Berkley the Genius does not beget good qualities; good qualities of "Faith, and Affection" please the Genius instead. Here is the kind of new reversal of the commonplace that makes Herrick's use of classical antiquity so pervasive an achievement. But, the Genius as an evil power in man is also functionally conceived: in Best to be merry, since wise men see that Death will out, it is best to ... live merrily, and thus Gratifie the Genius. A combination of the evil Genius in the individual man and the conception of Genius as a wicked force influencing one toward lust is found in Leprosie in houses: When to a House I come, and see The Genius wastefull, more then free: The servants thumblesse yet to eat, With lawlesse tooth the floure of wheate: The Sonnes to suck the milke of Kine, More then the teats of Discipline: The Daughters wild and loose in dresse; Their cheekes unstain'd with shamefac'tnesse: The Husband drunke, the Wife to be A Baud to incivility: I must confesse, I there descrie, A House spred through with Leprosie. How much greater significance the qualities and conceptions of the Genius are given in this poem - the seed, the blossom, and the withered reversal of composition as it were — than in Herrick's greeting To the King as "Our Fate, our Fortune, and our Genius", or as the hovering spirit of generation per se in To Anthea: "And Genius waits to have us both to bed". Surely, these poems in the liturgy of the gods have shown Herrick's intimate acquaintance with the dictionaries of antiquities (as though this could be doubted), and, virtual absence of overt ceremony and ritual. In one sense, however, the proper descriptions of the gods, the proper offerings to them, and the appropriate features thereof are part of the

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ceremony of the gods, for the Genius is described with a crown of plane leaves only because that is the description the ancients gave to the world in their accounts of the sacrifices to the gods. Devotion to the gods was accomplished by sacrifice, appropriately and properly performed. The observance of the sacra — favored leaves, trees, animals, etc. of the gods — was as important as the sacrifice itself. Herrick seems always to be aware of this devotion and this sacra and to have employed them, not always felicitously, we admit, in his poetic devotions. II Only Miriam Starkman has seen that Herrick's poems to God, his Noble Numbers, differ from major seventeenth-century devotional poetry not so much in "form, theme, and subject", but in mode. Herrick's mode is determined in part by his "particular functioning" within the genre of devotional poetry. 9 This difference is determined by his emotional and poetic attitude toward his subject matter, God, and by his characteristic preference for ceremony and for order. The first few poems of Noble Numbers are the devotional poet's conventional apology for his "unbaptized Rhimes". In the first poem,His Confession, he apologizes for "those Lines, pen'd by my wanton Wit", and we recognize the playfully ironic seriousness of the conventional stance in the devotional mode. The second poem, His Prayer for Absolution, is more of the same: For Those my unbaptized Rhimes, Writ in my wild unhallowed Times; For every sentence, clause and word, That's not inlaid with Thee, (my lord) Forgive me God, and blot each Line Out of my Book, that is not Thine. But if, 'mongst all, thou find'st here one Worthy thy Benediction; That One of all the rest, shall be The Glory of my Work, and Me. Herrick's apology is like that of Marvell's in "The Coronet", the irony of both resulting from making God a critic of poems. This smacks of a playfully serious poetic pride and quite a bit of devotional pride as well. For in both poets, the extent of God's actual blotting of lines or of letting lines 'wither' will be, both poets say implicitly, very slight indeed because there will be no need for either activity. The request to God to act as critic 9

Miriam Starkman, " 'Noble Numbers' and the Poetry of Devotion", in Reason and the Imagination, edited by Joseph A. Mazzeo (New York, 1962), 19.

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is far more than simply metaphorifc. The force of the initial "But" in the seventh line of Herrick's poem is not to deny the "unbaptized Rhimes" but to ask God to look elsewhere for the kind of "Glory" which He finds worthy. Over half the poems in Noble Numbers are couplets. Their function is clearly and immediately didactic; they teach and they delight. Their sources can easily be identified: they are based on Scripture and Scriptural commentaries, on the early Church Fathers, on the moral wisdom of classical literature, on Horace and the Dicta Catonis and on Rabbinical lore, epigrams, proverbs, sententiae, apophthegms, gnomic poems, and emblem tags. And their statements are purely simple and direct: God is undefinable and beyond eternity; He is Mercy and Love; He is imperturbable, hard to 'finde', the balm and the rod. Some fifty or so other couplets treat a variety of Christian thoughts and beliefs, with simple emphasis on the sinner 'estranged from God'; together, these two groups turn on the subjects of Sin and Redemption. But Herrick's simplicity is a plain-statement mode of discourse which achieves a simplicity without strain or sentimentality. It is a simplicity not unlike that ideal Christian simplicity of Herbert's which results in a poetic style that is peculiar to the man who uses it to convey his innermost devotion to his God. Herrick's simple and direct statements, both of what he has actually felt and of what he believes others ought to feel, are sincere even in the midst of their didacticism. They are never pietistic. Recognition of this simplicity in his devotional mode contributes to a fuller appreciation of Herrick's insistence, even in his devotional poems upon propriety, order, and decorum in the Cosmos. Of the remaining 'prayers and praises', some forty are of what has been called the "affective" type, affective in the sense that they stem from a simple affection for God and that they might have been prayed by any Christian. 10 But, they are peculiarly Herrick's, as our former analyses of the ceremony in his secular verse prepare us to see. Their sources are the same as those of the larger group of couplets. They are often built on the tetrameter and pentameter couplet, though they are usually multiples of the single couplet. Such a poem is The Parasceve, or Preparation: To a Love-Feast we both invited are: The figur'd Damask, or pure Diaper, Over the golden Altar now is spread, With Bread, and Wine, and Vessells furnished; The sacred Towell, and the holy Eure Are ready by, to make the Guests all pure: 10

Starkman, 3.

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Let's go (my A Ima) yet e're we receive, Fit, fit it is, we have our Parasceve. Who to that sweet Bread, unprepar'd doth come Better he starv'd, then but to tast one crumme. The poem reveals a fondness for ceremony, for artifact, and for ornament. Indeed, the combination of details from classical and Christian sacrificial ceremonies is entirely lacking here. Only the Christian and specifically seventeenth-century Anglican liturgical articles are found in the poem: the "Damask, or pure Diaper" used as an altar cloth or "carpet", the hardly appropriate "golden Altar", the sweet Breador unleavened bread consecrated for use in the service (comparable to the "shew Bread" in The Fairie Temple), and the designation of the Holy Communion as a "LoveFeast", a meal eaten by the early Christians. The poem also displays merely a visual, metaphoric sense of the Eucharist, for Herrick is not rendering concrete an individual religious experience as Herbert is in "The Banquet", after a taste of the wine, or as in Herbert's "The Holy Communion", where the bread and the wine carry only Christ's grace, his "name" throughout the body. 11 And just as Christ is not present in Herbert's Eucharistie banquet, though his grace comes in the "sweetnesse" of the bread, so, too, in Herrick's poem the "Bread and Wine" and the "sweet Bread" demonstrate how significantly the movement from symbolic to metaphoric usage accompanied the "distortion and eventual destruction of central Eucharistie dogma". 12 Herrick's images are a means of conveying his religious experience except that he has, often, gone beyond Herbert to explicit and nonsymbolic statements of conceptualized psychological and religious experiences. His view of the Eucharist, even less so than Herbert's only reminds us of it by using the visible objects, the vestigial rhetorical signs, which stand for it. We see the "Damask", the "golden Altar", the "Bread" and "Wine", and we discern their purpose: "To make the Guests all pure". The emphasis of more Catholic Anglicans than Herrick is on the very person of Christ in the Eucharist. In Herrick's poem the emphasis is on the 'proper' preparation of the last couplet: "Who to that sweet Bread, unprepar'd"doth come / Better he starv'd, then but to tast one crumme." Herbert's 'holy emotion' has been refined into Herrick's didactic truth. Herrick uses the imprecation to purity in other poems concerning the sacrifice — in a Christian sense, the Holy Communion — in a number of ways. The preparatory purification is the entire poem Mattens, or morning prayer and is also used in the first two stanzas of another poem in Noble 11 F. E. Hutchinson, ed., The Works of George Herbert (Oxford, 1941), 52-3; all references to Herbert's poetry are to this edition. Malcolm M. Ross, Poetry and Dogma (New Brunswick, 1954), 64.

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Numbers, Another New-yeeres Gift; or Song for the Circumcision: Hence, hence prophane, and none appeare With any thing unhallowed, here: No jot of Leven must be found Conceal'd in this most holy Ground: What is corrupt, or sowr'd with sin, Leave that without, then enter in; But let no Christmas mirth begin Before ye purge, and circumcise Your hearts, and hands, lips, eares, and eyes. The abundance of classical and liturgical statements concerning the proper performance of purificatory rites give special emphasis to Herrick's direct statement mode of discourse. The whole significance of the Eucharist in Herrick is one of constant simplification, for he reiterates purification and gives an even greater emphasis to the ceremony of the Eucharistie banquet. In To God (VIII) he approaches the "Virgin-Altar" With golden Censers, and with Incense He approaches not to actually perform his priestly duties but To pay Thee what I owe, since what I see In, or without; all, all belongs to Thee. And like his beloved parishioners (whom he conventionally finds distasteful when he leaves "loath'd Devonshire"), he feels inadequate and humble: Where shall I now begin to make, for one Least loane of Thine, half Restitution? Alas! I cannot pay a jot; therefore l i e kisse the Tally, and confesse the score. Ten thousand Talents lent me, Thou dost write: 'Tis true, my God; but I can't pay one mite. In another poem on the same subject, he again expresses his humility and his inability to offer more than the simplest gift: Gold I have none, but I present my need, Ο Thou, that crown'st the will, where wants the deed. Where Rams are wanting, or large Bullocks thighs, There a poor Lamb's a plenteous sacrifice. {To God, his good will 11. 1-4) We recall that in the Roman sacrifice, the gods were propitiated with "Bullocks thighs", but in this poem the "Lamb" is clearly a Christian

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reference which balances against and negates the classical connotations. Herrick, however, chooses to ignore the most crucial issues concerning the Real Presence in the Eucharist which troubled his contemporary clergymen and to present the more direct and simpler attitudes of his own flock. Mrs. Starkman's suggestion that Noble Numbers is a kind of "layfolks primer" is very near to the mark. 13 Yet something completely unlike that 'domestication' is found in The Star-Song: A Carroll to the King; sung at White Hall, a nativity carol and a tribute to King Charles. As such it employs the conceits traditionally associated with that theme and with that complimentary pose. It also seems to pay particular homage to the Queen, for it uses many of the symbols of the Virgin found in the Catholic emblem books and in its imagery approaches the baroque sensuousness of Crashaw's "Hymn" on the nativity subject: ... if this new Birth of ours Sleeps, laid within some Ark of Flowers, Spangled with deaw-light; thou canst cleer All doubts, anil manifest the where. (11. 4-7) When the child is found, the chorus breaks into rejoicing and prepares to bring him offerings until finally: Come then, come then, and let us bring Unto ourprettie Twelfth-Tide King, Each one his severall offering; Chor.

And when night comes, wee'l give Him wassailing: And that His treble Honours may be seen, Wee'l chuse Him King, and make His Mother Queen.

(11. 19-24)

The urgency of the adoration of the Infant Babe is not, here, to be confused with any pagan heathen ceremonial; the essence of the poem is simplicity, straight-forward adoration and praise, even a quite lyrical English praise. Nor is it surprising to find Herrick praising the Queen, of earth and of Heaven. The mode of this poem is simple acceptance, of the festival time of the year and of the ceremonious occasion of the poem. To call this "childlike" or "domesticated" is, really, to refine the poet out of existence. An Ode of the Birth of our Saviour tells us more about the range of Herrick's mode than the Star-Song, for it does not depend for its imagery on the conventional Christ-King Charles conceits. It recalls, rather, the nativity ballads and carols of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and it 13

Starkman, 17.

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bears a close relationship to Robert Southwell's two Nativity poems, "The Burning Babe" and "New Prince, new pompe". Southwell forms a link between the medieval lyrics, from which he draws many of his images, and the great major poets of the seventeenth-century; and, Southwell's poetry indicates many of the directions in which devotional poetry was to travel in the half-century after his death. 14 A detailed 'composition of place' establishes the physical scene in Southwell's "New Prince, new pompe": Behold a silly tender Babe, In freesing Winter night; In homely manger trembling lies, Alas a pitteous sight: The Innes are full, no man will yeeld This little Pilgrime bed ; But forc'd he is with silly beasts, In Crib to shrowd his head. 15 This visualization of scene, so necessary a part of the meditational structure, degenerates in Herrick's Ode to a reiterated "here": In Numbers, arid but these few, I sing Thy Birth, Oh JESU! Thou prettie Babie, borne here, With sup'rabundant scorn here: Who for Thy Princely Port here, Hadst for Thy place Of Birth, a base Out-stable for thy Court here. We see the babe in Herrick, while in Southwell we feel the presence of His very Person. Besides serving as a composition of place, Southwell's lines immediately impress upon us the central doctrine of the Incarnation which motivates his poem: With joy approach ο Christian wight, Doe homage to thy King; And highly prise this humble pompe, Which he from heaven dooth bring. His effort to express the paradox of the Incarnation is even more concerted in "The Burning Babe", where the "prettie Babe" laments that "none approach to warme their harts, or feels my fire".16 Herrick's last 14

See Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, revised edition (New Haven, 1962),

38. 15

James H. McDonald & Nancy Pollard Brown, eds., The Poems of Robert Southwell (Oxford, 1967), 16; all references to Southwell's poetry are to this edition. 16 Martz, 81-2.

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stanza, where we might expect some statement of the significance of the Birth, disappoints our expectations only if we are looking for meditative technique: The Jewes they did disdaine Thee, But we will entertaine Thee With Glories to await here Upon Thy Princely State here, And more for love, then pittie. When Herrick chooses to write an explicit statement on the Incarnation, he entitles his poem Christs Incarnation, and explains the doctrine in the simplest and most straight-forward terms: "Christ took our Nature on him ... Because our flesh stood most in need of him." Literal directness is characteristic of Herrick, whereas contemporary and earlier poets were exploiting the symbolic possibilities of the Incarnation. There is, as well, a similarity of imagery in Southwell and Herrick. Southwiell's "This stable is a Princes Court" and Herrick's "Princely Port" and "a base Out-stable for thy Court", as well as both writers' use of "Babe" and "Prince", .ire typical of the imagery of the medieval religious lyrics. Herrick's "Kingly Stranger" and Southwell's "Pilgrime" bear a remarkable relationship to these fourteenth-century lines: Child, thou ert a pilgrim in wikidnis ibor, Child, thou nert a pilgrim bot an uncuthe gist,1 7 Beyond this sharing of images, there are few similarities between Southwell and Herrick, for Southwell's poems seek out the meaning and the truth of the Incarnation through an "application of the senses". Herrick's poem accepts the implied Incarnation, much as the medieval lyrics always imply the Incarnation, though they rarely state it explicitly. Furthermore, a common subject for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century nativity carols is the forecast of the Passion by the child in the manger. 18 The Incarnation takes place in time as an historical event. Southwell implies this explanation; in Herrick there is only a suggestion of the Passion, and even this applies only to the immediate time of the Nativity. In the Parasceve Herrick moves closer to a typically Protestant view of the Person of Christ than toward a Catholic-Anglican view such as we find in Herbert. In the Ode his figures are straightforward and intensely personal. The metaphorical mode is consistently one of plain statement. The full symbolic suggestion of Christ in Vaughan's 17

Carleton Brown, ed., Religious Lyrics of the XlVth Century No. 28 (Oxford, 1952), 36. 18 Carleton Brown, ed., Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, No. 1 (Oxford, 1939), 1-2.

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'Tis now cleare day; I see a Rose But in the bright East, and disclose The Pilgrim-Sunne.

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becomes in Herrick's To His Saviour, a child; a Present, by a Child: Go prettie child, and beare this Flower Unto thy little Saviour; And tell him by that Bud now blown He is the Rose of Sharon known: The Rose of Sharon, recalling the chapter heading in the Song of Songs, has lost its symbolic usage; the language of analogy has dissolved into metaphor. 20 Recognition of this loss is fully discerned when the child (here the child is a persona) gives the Infant Christ a whistle "to charm his cries" but, regretfully, because he, too, is "monilesse", cannot give Him any coral. The same medieval quality which pervades the Ode - even to its treatment of the Incarnation — is also felt in this poem. Specifically, it refers to that precious adoration and the simplicity of devotion in the Second Shepherds' Play, produced by the offering of a "bob of cherys", a "byrd", and a "ball". 21 The medieval devotion is very dominant in Herrick's poems, for the direct statements of simplicity and piety are those of the rural folk for whose customs and festivals, as we shall later see, Herrick has great affection. Gifts and roses reveal another aspect of Herrick's mode in the Circumcision poems. A New Year's gift, "that little prettie bleeding part of Foreskin", for which the poet will return "a bleeding Heart" (To his Saviour), reminds us that the Infant Christ began to shed his blood for the love of man at an early age. Furthermore, in Herrick, tulips and roses grow "from his sacred Blood, here shed". This may be a commonplace in devotional literature except that in The New-yeares Gift, or Circumcision Song the figures are representative of much more than a "child-like acceptance, an innocence, a lyrical purity that naturalizes them". 2 2 The poem has a dramatic immediacy rare in much of Herrick's poetry. The child is brought into the presence of the priest, who is asked: 19

L. C. Martin, ed., The Works of Henry Vaughan (Oxford, 1957), 405. Note that the full symbolic intent is retained in Vaughan's "The Holy Communion" (Martin edition, 458): 20

21 22

Ο rose of Sharon! Ο the Lilly Of the Valley ! How art thou now, Thy flock to keep, Become both food, and Shepheard to thy sheep. J. Q. Adams, Chief Pre-Shakespearean Dramas (New York, 1924), 157. Starkman, 12.

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And tell us then, when as thou seest His gently-gliding, Dove-like eyes, And hear'st His whimp'ring, and His cries; How canst thou this Babe circumcise? While there was no particular attempt to comprehend the Incarnation in symbolic terms in the Ode, in this poem the full irony of the Circumcision is recalled, and the Incarnation is explicit in Ye must not be more pitifull then wise; For, now unlesse ye see Him bleed, Which makes the Bapti'me; 'tis decreed, The Birth is fruitlesse. The same image is used in Another New-yeeres Gift Come then, and gently touch the Birth Of Him, who's Lord of Heav'n and Earth; And softly handle Him: y'ad need, Because the prettie Babe do's bleed. Poore-pittied Child! who from Thy Stall Bring'st, in Thy Blood, a Balm, that shall Be the best New-yeares Gift to all. In the same poem the circumcision theme is toyed with in a quite metaphysical conceit: But let no Christian mirth begin Before ye purge, and circumcise Your hearts, and hands, lips, eares, and eyes. Though The New-Yeeres Gift was sung in the presence of King Charles, the conventional praise of the crown as a religious symbol is lacking, replaced, perhaps, by direct adulation of the Queen. It is still difficult, however, to grasp that peculiar mode of Herrick's in this poem unless one examines the first three stanzas in a light heretofore never shed upon them: Prepare for Songs; He's come, He's come; And be it sin here to be dumb, And not with Lutes to fill the roome. Cast Holy Water all about, And have a care no fire gos out, But 'cense the porch, and place throughout. The Altars all on fier be; The Storax fries; and ye may see, How heart and hand do all agree, To make things sweet. No one has ever pointed out the close similarity of these stanzas to the

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ceremony of lustration (lustratio) and the preparation for the funeral of Misenus in the Sixth Book of the Aeneid. After the funeral, Aeneas purifies his companions with a lustration of "pure water" (Aeneid, VI. 229). Herrick adopts the pagan rite but Christianizes it: "Cast Holy Water all about". And we note the great resounding "sin" of Corinna's Going a Maying in the second line; it is a sin not to fill the room with music, the proper thing to do. Pyres and incense and the "pitchy pine" are also part of the funeral. The first words of the next poem Another New-yeeres Gift are the familiar "Hence, hence prophane" which are also found in the Aeneid (VI, 255-258): Away, away, unhallowed ones: (procul o, procul este, profani) The poem continues in this vein, mingling orthodox Christian themes: No jot of Leven must be found Conceal'd in this most holy ground and another reference to the blood shed by the Infant Christ: Poore-pittied Child: who from Thy Stall Bring'st, in Thy Blood, a Balm, that shall Be the best New-yeeres Gift to all, with overtones of classical ceremony: The room is cens'd: help, help t'invoke Heaven to come down, the while we choke The Temple, with a cloud of smoke. The poem ends with praise of Christ and Charles, again with no religious association. By way of contrast, Ben Jonson's "A New-ye ares-Gift sung to King Charles" is a tribute to "Old Janus". While Herrick's use of ceremonial rite is a devotional one, Jonson's use of Pan is meant to represent the King to whom ... we owe all profits of our grounds. Our milke. Our fells. Our fleeces, and first Lambs. Our teeming Ewes, and lustie-mounting Rammes. 23 The spirit of early forms of religion, of the simple country pieties, is strongly felt in Jonson's poem. In Herrick this same spirit is so completely absorbed into the fabric of his verse as to be indistinguishable from his orthodox Christian statements. So intimate is he with the literature of the 23

Ben Jonson, Works, ed. C. H. Herford & Percy Simpson, Vol. VIII (Oxford, 1947), 263-5.

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ancients thpt we need not wonder at the natural and unforced manner with which he uses pagan elements in his devotional poems. In addition, it goes without saying that the intent of these lyrics is devotion; they are devotional to the core. But they are devotional in ways in which the poems of the major poets never are. The poems which form Herrick's Passion play may rely on Herrick's own observations of Christian pageants in rural dramatic presentations. They are, also, similar in subject to the medieval religious lyrics, to the liturgy of Holy Week, and to the work of George Herbert. They have a direct and intensely personal note, derived from their apparent simplicity and the artful mingling of the simple emotions of pity and love. Their effect is explicitly Incarnational, as far as Herrick can go in accepting the full significance of the Incarnation. In Good Friday: Rex Tragicus, or Christ going to His Crosse, Christ is the actor as well as the tragic King: The Crosse shall be Thy Stage·, and Thou shalt there The spacious field have for thy Theater. Thou art that Roscius, and that markt-out man, That must this day act the Tragedian, The "eye of truth" is focused, generally, on the actor who puts off the "Robe of Purple", goes to the "sad place of execution" where the "Tormentor stands ready, to pierce" His hands and feet. Mrs. Starkman suggests that this poem, and the others in this group, "read almost like poems meant to be publicly performed". 24 Indeed, the poems are so highly visualized, so real a re-enactment of the Crucifixion, that they are 'played' as poems. All of Herrick's dramatic poems are quite literally plays at the same time that the structure, imagery, and rhythms are playful recreations of the ur-element of drama, ritual. Only toward the end of Good Friday is the simple piety of the viewer apparent: And we (Thy Lovers) while we see Thee keep The Lawes of Action, will both sign, and weep; And bring our Spices, to embalm Thee dead; That done, wee'l see Thee sweetly buried. In Herbert's Good Friday Christ's sorrows are written within the sinner's heart, driving out sin by the blood shed on the Cross. In Herrick the Tragic King acts out his Passion outside of the lover's heart, obeying the "Lawes of Action" for the stage production and for divine law, and focusing our attention on what is important to the poet, the visual presentation of the 24

Starkman, 11; cf. D. C. Allen, "Rex Tragicus", in Image and Meaning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968), 138-151.

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scene and the love-act which concludes the poem. Of the two short poems which follow Good Friday, His words tö Christ, going to the Crosse bears some similarity to Herbert's "The Sacrifice". Miss Tuve has shown how Herbert's poem is an amalgam of traditional matter found in the medieval lyrics, iconography, and the ironies of the liturgical improperia.25 Two stanzas, in particular, of Herbert's poem suggest Herrick's knowledge of the earlier poet: Oh all ye, who passe by, whose eyes and minde To worldly things are sharp, but to me blinde; To me, who took eyes that I might you finde: Was ever grief like mine? Ο all ye who passe by, behold and see;

Man stole the fruit, but I must climbe the tree; The tree of life to all, but onely me: Was ever grief like mine? 2 6 Though at least one critic has disagreed with Miss Tuve's reading of the poem, and has suggested that Herbert's use of the traditional ironies and paradoxes is without precedent, the essential point is that Herbert keeps before us at all times the "companion powers of punishment and mercy". In Herrick's poem Christ's mercy is the dominant feeling: Have, have ye no regard, all ye Who passe this way, to pitie me, Who am a man of miserie! A man both bruis'd, and broke, and one Who suffers not here for mine own, But for my friends transgression! The irony of the liturgy, as well as of the medieval 'leman' as Christ's 'Friend', is easily recognized. Only in the last two stanzas are the companion powers of mercy and punishment explicitly stated: For Christ, your loving Saviour, hath Drunk up the wine of Gods fierce wrath; Onely, ther's left a little froth, Lesse for to tast, then for to shew, What bitter cups had been your due, Had He not drank them up for you. 25

Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago, 1952), Part I. See for a dissenting view, William Empson, Kenyon Review, XII (1950), 335-8. And see Carleton Brown, Religious Lyrics of the XVth Century, 166, stanza 6, 11. 47, 59-60 and stanza 8 and note, p. 327, for just such a poem as Empson accuses Miss Tuve of not being able to find. 26 Hutchinson, 26, 33.

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In the next poem, His Anthem, to Christ on the Crosse, repeating the shift in dramatic voice from Christ to the observing worshiper, the worshiper explains the significance of the Incarnation: But yet it wounds my soule, to think, That for my sin, Thou, Thou must drink, Even Thou alone, the bitter cup Of furie, and of vengeance up. Fear of God's omnipotent punishment is not completely allayed, for there is still left in the cup "a little froth". The last three poems, Herrick's expression of devotion to the Sepulcher, are quite different from Herbert's "Sepulcher". Herrick employs the proper ceremonial trappings, a "flowrie Diaper" and a "Virgin-Flower". He offers the classical and Christian gifts to the Tomb. Herbert treats the sepulcher symbolically and with personal intensity; he turns inward to show how his heart withholds Christ. Herrick lies ravished in "this brave Extasie": Here let me rest; and let me have This for my Heaven, that was Thy grave: And, coveting no higher sphere, I'le my Eternitie spend here {To his Saviours Sepulcher, 11. 22-25) It is worth noting that in these poems which are the most traditional and the most intensely devotional of Noble Numbers, the references to ceremonials are kept at a minimum, as though in the presence of the greatest of Christian mysteries Herrick has allowed Scripture and the liturgy to provide with his devotional metaphor. The poems of the Passion represent the closest approximation to the emotion felt in the medieval religious lyrics. The emotion is direct and intense; it is the emotion of the simple Christian in the coutryside. In Herbert's poetry the emotion is conveyed indirectly; it is implied through his metaphoric and symbolic harshness. His tone and his ideas are always appropriate, and his impersonality is achieved through the poetry's association with the liturgy. In Herrick, the tone is lyrical and affective; it is appropriate to his position as the humblest of simple pious Christians whose emotional response to the mysteries and paradoxes of his religion is one of fear and love. His is a devotion, but it is constantly colored by his classicism, his longing for the ways of the past, and perhaps even by the direct observation of the piety and devotion of his parishioners. His distance from Herbert is indicated not by religious experience alone, but by a difference in mode. Instead of passion and ecstasy, we find directness, frankness, and sincerity. It is much more to the point to suggest that

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Herrick's plain statement is a result of a devotional simplicity which is achieved without strain or sentimentality and which cuts across symbolic and analogical relationships. It is a simplicity which is based on acceptance, even an acceptance of the will of God in the oldest, the classical sense. It is a simple and primitivistic dependence upon God's order in the cosmos and its reflected order in the realm of man's devotion. Ill In the tradition of Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, William Browne, and Simon Steward, Herrick wrote four poems about the world of fairy. Fortunately, the fairy world, with its lore and its "illiterature", is the subject of a chapter, "The Fashion for the Miniature", in Katherine M. Briggs's recent study The Anatomy of Puck (London, 1959). Miss Briggs's learned documentation of the sources of A Midsummer Night's Dream, of Polyolbion and Nymphidia, of Britannia's Pastorals, and of A Description of the King of the Fairies, by the authors above, cannot be improved upon. Unfortunately, her concern is not to show that fairy poems in general, and Herrick's in particular, are very much more than a "pretty game" of "miracles of littleness".2 7 Herrick, for instance, views his fairies as though through a glass, but lightly, for it is a tendency of his time, a period of Baroque tendencies in art and in literature, to use the telescope for seeing the infinitely large and also to invert it so as to see the infinitely small. In the older Renaissance analogy, the microcosm reflects the macrocosm. But by Herrick's time the multiplicity and plurality of parts in the microcosm — brought forward by the advent of science, new philosophy and psychology (Hobbes is the special case), the Reformation and the counterReformation - take on a uniquely new importance. Poets of the middle years of the seventeenth century (and thereafter), reflect this multiplicity. They spend half their poetic and dialectical processes in the inflation of ideas and thoughts so as to give them universal dimension and significance. The other half of their time they spend in reducing their ideas and thoughts to the "minute spheres". Recent phenomenological philosophers like Georges Poulet have suggested that the twin movements of expansion and reduction are part of the intellectual 'air'. Recent literary critics like Murray Krieger and the so-called "Geneva school" of philosopher-critics have become interested in the literary ramifications of this essentially historical and cultural vision. In one sense, then, I wish to add Herrick to the spectrum of the Baroque, along with Marino, Crashaw, Marvell, even Donne, as a member of that group of culturally and historically dependent 27

Katherine M. Briggs, The Anatomy ofPuck (London, 1959), 56,47.

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men who bear witness to the transformation and the metamorphosis of the "maximum to the minimum" and the "natural to the artificial". 28 Having provided for a "Feast" at the end of The Fairie Temple, a poem dedicated to John Merrifield, Herrick presents another friend, Thomas Shapcott, with a miniature gourmet's treat in Oberons Feast. The first six lines are in the nature of an introduction which contains a further promise of another poem: Shapcot! To thee the Fairy State I with discretion, dedicate. Because thou prizest things that are Curious, and un-familiar. Take first the feast; these dishes gone; Wee Ί see the Fairy-Court anon. The caution of the word "discretion" is perhaps intended to refer to the "Fairy State", a kingdom of fairy lore and verse. But an artistic kingdom is being described, and, later after the promised poem on Oberons Palace, Herrick suggests the proper context in which to view the Feast and the Palace: I've paid Thee, what I promis'd; that's not All; Besides I give Thee here a Verse that shall (When hence thy Circum-mortall-part is gon) Arch-like, hold up, Thy Name's Inscription. Brave men can't die; whose Candid Actions are Writ in the Poets Endlesse-Kalendar: Whose velome, and whose volumne is the Skie, And the pure Starres the praising Poetrie. Farewell. (To his peculiar friend Master Thomas Shapcott, Lawyer) Shapcott's own immortality, his "Circum-mortall-part", is circular and should therefore be immortal, but paradoxically it is not until endowed with the poet's 'naming' verse. Herrick provides him, nonetheless, with immortality in the fairy verses which hold his name up to the "Skie" where the pure (and eternal) stars give eternal praise. This poem represents the poet's infinite expansion toward universal significance — a truly prophetic function — as the two fairy poems, the Feast and the Palace represent the poet's infinite reduction toward the "minute spheres". Herrick's role here is visionary and historical. There is, to return to the Feast, the special note provided by things that are "Curious, and un-familiar". The fairies are certainly curious, but their unfamiliarity is another question. It is a question of how extensively the 28

Georges Poulet, The Metamorphosis of the Circle (Baltimore, 1967), 16-18.

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belief in fairies, as one version of reality, persisted into the middle years of the seventeenth century. Miss Briggs has amply illustrated that, while fashionable currents of satiric disbelief were common in the city in the last years of the sixteenth century, the countryside maintained for a longer time its older versions of reality and its belief in fairies. Recent folkloristic investigations have suggested that beliefs in fairies, demons, ghosts, and witches persisted even in, and frequently as a result of, sophisticated literature emanating from the city. Hamlet delays until he determines that what he sees is a ghost and not some spirit from the underworld; Macbeth has his Hecates, and although changed in size (that is, in form) the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream still perform both benevolent and malevolent acts. 29 But in an age when all things were being questioned, the older and obsolete belief in fairies would be questioned as well. It is the nature of these obsolete versions of reality to leave residual traces in art. That is, the older functions of the versions of reality (belief in fairies is one such version) would have changed and even the forms of the versions would have changed. But the changed forms are changed because new features are added, and these new features could never have existed in reality. They are, in other words, transformed from the natural (as a representative of reality) to the artificial (an artistic reality). One such recent feature which affected the transformation of forms was the religious mentality. In The Fairie Temple, Herrick's own religious mentality has discovered a refreshing new art form — fairy worship — to embody obsolete, and some less remote, religious concepts and forms. And, I believe, it is Herrick's essentially orthodox religious mentality which is focused on the curious and the unfamiliar. By inverting the telescope, as it were, he is intent upon illuminating the ordinary and the familiar. Miss Briggs provides yet another context in which to view Herrick's fairy poems, though she herself apparently does not make use of that context. In her first chapter describing "the air they breathed", she hypothesizes that if a theocentric conception of the universe were the prevailing societal and cultural attitude, and to a great extent this was the attitude still prevalent in Herrick's time, then the "authority of the past would have a sanctity which we could hardly conceive, and a quotation would be an argument. All past knowledge would be felt to be more or less the result of inspiration". 30 It is precisely Herrick's sense of the continuity of the past, of his "historical awareness", which he shares with the folk minds 29

See Daniel F. Hoffman, "Folklore in Literature: A Symposium", Journal of American Folklore, LXX (March, 1957), 19-21. 30 Briggs, 3.

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that created the world of fairy. And "he demonstrates this awareness again and again in the poetry which fuses the past and the present. In the ceremonies and rituals of worship, of love, of the gods and of God, of death, of marriage, and now of fairy lore, Herrick 'sees' the past as his own present. We are, in Oberons Feast, fallen into smallness circumscribed by "short prayers" before and "Grace" by the priest after eating. Between these two ceremonious points lies a fairy "multiplicity of forms" which fill space as any work of Baroque art does. 31 The imagination is strained, in fact it is inordinately squeezed and reduced, in the creation of the reality of the fairy feast. The multiplicity and intensity of the detail is astounding, but it is restrained within almost regular xhymed tetrameter couplets. The bread, for example, is not just made of wheat. It is the "purest wheat" made from "Moon-parcht grain" (1. 9). And there are even two choices of bread, the "purest" and a coarser textured variety. This point established, the poem moves quickly away to a comment on the feast, that it is "less great then nice" (1. 12). Then the poem moves again to a description of the music provided by grasshopper, cricket, fly, and gnat, each one qualified and briefly individualized: "cherring", "merry", "peeling", "piping", for "minstralcy". For drink dew is given. It is, of course, the purest of its kind: "A pure seed-Pearle of Infant dew" served in a "blew / And pregnant violet" which sweetens the taste. From this point (1. 23), through the last thirty-one lines of the poem, the poem provides the visual spectacle of the enbuirdened table which the King sees with his "kitling" (morose) eye. It is an exquisite imaginative tour de force of fairy victuals. The total effect of the poem is the virtual transcendence of the multiplicity and intensity of the detail. Infinite reduction yields to infinite expansion. By reducing an imaginative version of reality even further than its possible faiiy reality, by the very imaginative act of reduction, that is, a transformed version of reality emerges. The natural has been pressed even further to the artificial by the imagining eye of the poet which surveys the feast. The veil of nature has been pierced in all its multiplicity of detail. What is discovered is the orderly spectacle of real artificiality. The poem is more than a miracle of "littleness" because it is a vision of miraculously and artistically existential reality. In Oberons Palace Oberon's "Hälfe tipsie" journey from the court to his queen is through a grove to a cave and into the room where Mab awaits him. Although the poem is entitled Oberons Palace, the palace is Mab's Bower of Bliss. The King, "high fed / For lust and action" by wine, leads his followers through a grove "Tinsled with Twilight", guided by the "shine of Snails" to a "bank of mosse" which is compared first to the 31

Poulet, 15.

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softest of things in the 'real' world (the "finest Lemster Ore", a wool from Leominster) and then to the most flowery and fragrant of things. Within this bank is a cave whose walls are checkered with "Squirrils and childrens teeth", with tiny stones, with gums, and warts which "Art's / Wise hand" has arranged. The entrance is a mole from the neck of a virgin, and the blue interior is illuminated by "glow-worms eyes", "shining scales", and other glowing things. But not by daylight. The light by which we see is not true light, as twilight is neither light nor dark, but a time of stasis of light: "Such is the light, / But ever doubtfull Day, or night" (U. 80-1). In this light which is not light, but still is light, Mab is seen, tanned by the Moon, lying upon "six plump Dandellions", covered by caules ("the luckie Omen of the child"), gossamer blankets and a rug which enfolds her as in a cloud. Above her bed are "Cob-web curtains" appearing as though nothing is holding them up, and fringed with pearls and maidenhead threads. The King undresses, the elves are sent away, and ... now the bed, and Mab possest Of this great-little-kingly-Guest. We'll nobly think, what's to be done, He'll do no doubt; This flax is spun.

(11. 118-121) Again there is the infinite reduction, but here without that intense multiplicity discovered in the Feast. "Great-little" one is a fairly typical Baroque paradox. There are, furthermore, explicit references to Art, to light, and to the poem as "flax" which has been spun. Of purest gossamer is the poem spun. The hand, we note, of Art is "wise" because the Art which the poem creates covers the art which has created the interior of the cave and the diaphanous room in which is found the queen of fairies who is "not without mickle majesty" (1. 5). This latter art, in turn, covers Nature, except that Nature is itself a cover for fairy nature. We are in Plato's terms even a step beyond and removed from the painted chair. Flax, likewise, is in its natural state — the metaphorical equivalent of the realities in the poem — a rather useless entity, but once spun, as fairy reality is spun by the poet's Art, it takes on definite and actual existence, even if only as thread. There may, in fact, be a later step which Herrick is asking us to take. The thread (the spun flax) that is the poem must still by art be made into a garment or an entity of some kind. The very flatness of the concluding statement of the poem, "This flax is spun", is deceptive in terms of reality which is still not conclusive and finite. This is one part of the poem's movement toward infinite expansion, toward a universal dimension. The other part concerns the light suffused through the poem.

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The light, in and of itself, is an overt indication of the suspension of the natural forces so that they can be transformed into the artificial by the imaginative re-creation of a reality which never actually existed. From our reading of Vaughan and Marvell, we are accustomed to think of the play of light, in fountains and crystals, as Baroque elements. The Platonic implications of the One light and the various light have been established with philosophical and theological positions in Marvell. There is also the tendency in Vaughan, Marvell, Marino and Crashaw (and now clearly in Herrick) to dwell upon light because of its transforming powers and because it reflects so adequately the plurality of parts. The human microcosm refracts the light as does a crystal and inadequately reflects the true, the One light of heaven. Hence the recurrent images of dews, crystals, bubbles, eyes and tears in these poets. Consider, for instance, the transformation of natural to artificial in these stanzas in which the Baroque elements figure: Hail, sister springs! Parents of silver-footed rills! Ever-bubbling things! Tha wing crystal! snowy hills, Still spending, never spent! I mean Thy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene! (Richard Crashaw, "Saint Mary Magdalene; Or, The Weeper", Stanza 1) Here at the fountain's sliding foot. . Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, Casting the body's vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide: There, like a bird, it sits and sings, Then whets and combs its silver wings, And, till prepared for longer flight Waves in its plumes the various light. (Andrew Marvell, "The Garden", stanza 7) Their eyes watch for the morning hue; Their little grain, expelling night, So shines and sings as if it knew The path unto the house of light. It seems their candle, howe'er done, Was tinned and lighted at the sun. (Henry Vaughan, "Cock-Crowing", stanza 2) But the marvel, then, while it exalts itself, Imprints on the sky an arc as beautiful as Iris. The fluid and aqueous humor metamorphosizes Into ray, comet, star, a wonder. Here dart globes, or bubbles shoot out; There without a break turn minute spheres;

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All germinates, ooozes, the jets multiply themselves, All undulates and streams, spurts and flows. (Marino, Adone, Canto IX, stanza 108) 32 The light in Oberons Palace is, like the light, the eyes, the fountain, and the bubble in the poems above, predominantly artificial. It is not daylight; it is multiplicity of light. Even more it is artificially natural light because it emanates from jewels, from snail's paths, from moon-dew (1. 32), from the eyes of peacock's tail-feathers, from the "curious wings" of trout flies, and from a host of other 'natural' objects, But these objects, while given the appearance of being natural are, in the poem, made totally artificial by the poet's vision. If the world of man, the microcosm, even the Platonic soul embedded in fallen matter, gives off the various light and not the true, the One light, the fairy microcosm within that microcosm gives off even more pluralities of the various light. The ligfrt by which we see the poem, and at the same time see into the poem, represents the Baroque poet's movements from large to small, and from natural to artificial, with a corresponding and complementary movement back again. This movement from natural to artificial and artificial to natural is found throughout the poem. We are reminded constantly of the movement toward human reality — from artificial outward toward the natural again: in lust, drunkenness, loss of virginity, voluptuousness, and consummation. But we are always aware of the very non-human reality being created by the poem. Here it is as though the version of human reality has left its residual traces in fairy art. And this movement back and forth in the poem is the mark of all Baroque poetry. It is also the mark of a poet who sought seriousness in the most complex and engaging artistry. Herrick's artistic and Baroque awareness of the significance of the ceremonies of the past for his own present is nowhere better illustrated than in the last of the fairy poems, The Fairie Temple: or, Oberons Chappell. Yet recent criticism has failed to deal with the poem on its own terms, or to deal with it in terms like those used above to discuss the other fairy poems. Katherine M. Briggs, for instance, advances the theory that Herrick makes the fairies Roman Catholic and pagan (simultaneously! ), but then identifies many of the details of classical ceremony as taken from fairy lore while admitting that the poem runs "against the general trend of folk tradition". Daniel H. Woodward, who quotes Briggs approvingly, suggests that the fairy religion in the poem is Herrick's "rather surprising criticism of [Anglican] ritual... masked ... by the seeming frivolity of the fairy subject and the red-herring of Papistical satire". But what Woodward defines as "parody of church ceremony — Anglican as well as Roman 3'2 Marino, Adone, Canto IX, stanza 108, quoted by Poulet, 16, note p. 358.

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Catholic", can be shown to be classical ceremony as well and, therefore, humble affective piety couched in Herrick's typical ceremonial mode and seeking poetic order and significance in the eternal value of all ceremony, pagan and Christian.3 3 Ceremony is the performance of ritual acts which manifest a dependence upon the order in the universe even if that order is to be found in the minutest of things, in the details and the articles of fairy worship. The "Fairie Temple" reveals a precise sense of realistically conceived ceremony. The ceremony in the temple provides a clear exposition of Herrick's classical and contemporary borrowings, of his use of actual ceremonial for, perhaps, playfully evaluative purposes and, lastly but far more importantly, of his humanistic Anglicanism. The temple is described in the first twenty-five lines, and there is little doubt as to what religion this temple serves: Herrick informs us that the fairies would have us know that "Theirs is a mixt Religion". It is "Part Pagan, part Papisticall". The temple, like the ceremony that takes place there, is a blend of pagan, Anglican, and Roman Catholic — a "mixt Religion" very like the via media itself. The satire is directed, through the imagery of a "mixt Religion", at more than one actual "mixt Religion". The actual ceremony of the sacrifice begins at line thirty-eight: First, at the entrance of the gate, A little-Puppet-Priest doth wait, Who squeaks to all the commers there, Favour your tongues, who enter here. Pure hands bring hither, without staine. A second pules, Hence, Hence profane.

This cautioning to silence is from Rosinus's account of the Roman sacrifice and can be found in many classical writers as well. Classical insistence upon purity before sacrifice considerably antedates, and may even be the source for, Miss Briggs's identification of the fairy insistence upon purity. 34 Surely, also, Herrick has penetrated the historical distance that separates this classical imprecation from the Anglican insistence of his own day upon reverence and seemly behavior in one's worship, in spite of the Puritan dislike for this kind of sanctity attributed to a place.3 5 33

Briggs, 65-7; Daniel H. Woodwaid, "Herrick's Oberon Poems", JEGP, LXIV £14%5), 276-9. Briggs, 66. Herrick's ideas about purity may be found in Godwin, Book II, section 2, cap. xix, p. 59; Seivius on Aeneid, V. 71, VIII. 173; Horace, Odes, I. xii. 59; Propertius, Elegies IV. vi. 1-2; Ovid, Fasti I. 71. 5 See for instance, G. W. O. Addleshaw, The Ηϊφ Church Tradition (London, 1941), 118, 124; the first of William Laud's Visitation Articles, 1635, reprinted in Anglicanism, edited by Paul Elmer More & Frank L. Cross (London, 1957), 702; and William Prynne, Canterbury's Doom (1646), passim.

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Since we are primarily concerned with details of ceremony, a partial summary of those in the poem seems called for. The fairy temple is complete with "Holy-water" in its font, the shell of half-a-nut; with "Holy-Grist" offered by the Priest; with "Linnen-Drapery"; with "Shewbread" on the "Fetuous board"; with the "Fairie-Psalter" at one end of the altar; with a "Bason" to take the "free-Oblation"; with "Two pure, and holy Candlesticks"; with "Frankincense"; and with "Their Holy Oyle, their Fasting-Spittle', / Their sacred Salt". Although these particulars of the ceremony may be intended to recall the lustration water, the salt-meal cakes (mola salsa), and the oil used in classical sacrifices, it is far more likely that they represent Herrick's imaginative re-creations of Roman Catholic and High Church Anglican rituals during his own lifetime. "Shew bread", for instance, alludes to the contemporary Anglican controversy about whether or not the Eucharistie wafer, also called "singing bread", was made with leavened or unleavened bread.3 6 The Laudian party paid particular attention and reverence to the altar, which they covered with a "carpet", one of Herrick's fondest words for any kind of covering.3 7 As George Herbert notes in his "A Priest to the Temple", the "Bason" for alms and offerings seems to have been placed in the center of the altar.3 8 Incense was commonly used in services, but the use of candles and lights was limited until the period of Laud and Andrewes, Cosin and Wren. A typical Puritan attack on such 'abuses' is provided by Peter Smart's "The Vanity and Downfall of Superstitious Popish Ceremonies" (1628). Of particular interest are points four and five of Smart's "Narration" concerning John Cosin's innovations at Durham Cathedral: ... on Candlemas Day last past Mr. Cosens, in renewing that Popish ceremony of burning candles to the honour of Our Lady, busied himself from two of the clock in the afternoon till four in climbing long ladders to stick up wax candles in the said Cathedral Church ... he hath brought in a new custom of bowing the body down to the ground before the Altar (on which he hath set Candlesticks, Basons, and Crosses, Crucifixes and Tapers which stand there for a dumb show) ... 9 Indeed, with the exception of the "Fasting-Spittle", most of the "Romish 36

Hierurgia Angticana, Vol. II, ed., Vemon Staley (London, 1903), 129, 141. Addleshaw, 52-3; see also Hierurgia Anglicarta, I (London, 1902), 42-50. Also note the preliminary directions before Holy Communion in the 1637 (Scottish Rite) Book of Common Prayer (Edinburgh, 1637), fS 3 r : "The holy Table having at the Communion time a Carpet, and a faire white linen cloth upon it, with other decent furniture, meet for the high mysteries there to be celebrated." 38 Hutchinson, Chapter XIII, 246. 39 Smart as quoted in Anglicanism, More and Cross, eds., 550-3. For the use of incense see Hierurgia Anglicana, I, 122-131 and II, 171-180; for the use of candles, I, 113-4,65-101. 37

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furniture", to use William Prynne's phrase, and ornaments of the Temple are very much like those found in the chapel of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes 4 0 The "popish" baptismal rites so condemned by the Puritans are also suggested by the oil, spittle, and salt; they did not form part of the Anglican baptismal rite. 41 The contemporary dispute about the proper shape and material of alters provokes in Herrick the satiric description of the fairy altar: The Altar is not here foure-square, Nor in a forme Triangular; Nor made of glasse, or wood, or stone, But of a little Transverce bone; Which boyes, and Bruckel'd children call (Playing for Points and Pins) Cockall. (11. 54-59) The shape of the altar is hardly like the Roman altar (ara) described by Thomas Godwin as "foure-square", nor like the square altars of Laud and Andrewes, but the parallel between pagan and Anglican is certainly suggestive. And the priest when he enters stands "neere to the Altar" (1. 50) — note that he dots not kneel or genuflect — and later he stands "Just in the middle of the altar" (1. 70), in the position, that is, dictated by the 1549 Book of Common Prayer ("Afore the middes of the Altar"), but thereafter changed in the later liturgies to the northside of the Table. The elaborate ceremony which takes place in the poem does seem to "much affect the Papacie" (1. 110). It is dedicated to The Saint, to which the most he prayes And offers Incense Nights and dayes, The Lady of the Lobster is,

Whose foot-pace he doth stroak & kisse; And, humbly, chives of Saffron brings For his most cheerfull offering. (11. 129-133) The elaborate withdrawal of the priest who "lowly to the Altar bows: / And then he dons the Silk-worms shed, / (Like a Turks Turbant on his head)" and then departs "Hid in a cloud of Frankincense", suggests that this is liturgically a major feast, for the priest seems to be a bishop. And this is only fitting, for throughout the poem, even bearing in mind that 40 See the description of the furniture and ornaments of Andrewes's chapel in Hierurgia Anglicana, I, 93-7, and in Florence Higham, Lancelot Andrewes (London, J?5 2), 56. I have examined the accounts of Anglican baptismal rites in the facsimile reprints of the 1549, 1552, and 1637 Book of Common Prayer (London, 1884), and the Prayer-Book of Queen Elizabeth (1559) (Edinburgh, 1911). For Puritan criticisms of baptismal rites see Hierurgia Anglicana, II, 237, and John F. H. New, Anglican and Puritan (Stanford, 1964), 64-9.

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this is faiiy worship, the tone is one of the "beauty of holiness", the epitome of Laudian ritualism. Herrick combines details from Anglican and pseudo-pagan and popish ceremonies. He does not attempt to fuse the pagan with the popish but to infuse the popish religion of his own day (perhaps his own liturgical tendencies) into the new "Fairie" religion by his sense of their ceremonial relationships. Admittedly, the poem could be read as a totally anti-popish blast, but this, I think, would run counter to his identification of the Saint as Our Lady, and to the sentiment, if not the theology, of his devotional poems to the Virgin Mary in Noble Numbers. The satiric comments and even the occasional parody seem humorously blasphemous, achieved by the tension of the real ceremony and the fairy subject. His intention in the Fairie Temple, as his intention in all the fairy poems, is to reflect the order of the cosmos in the "order found in minutest nature", as Woodward and others have suggested. Ceremony is the vehicle by which order in both the 'real' cosmos and order in his 'unreal' cosmos is served. Ceremony of all kinds allows him to criticize and to parody at the same time that he creates a new awareness of the significance of the past (even the near "fairie" past) for his own present. The one thing that makes these fairy poems very indelibly Christian and very noticeably non-pagan is that the fairy world, including its worship service, is more sensible than the real world. Most Roman ceremonies, in the latest stages of the State Religion, for example, were marked by bloody sacrifices in contrast to the older Roman rites when "spelt" and "sparkling grains of salt" were used for sacrifice. It is precisely this point that distinguishes these fairy poems from those poems of bloody sacrifice that follow. IV Also typical of Herrick's use. of the due and proper ceremony is a group of poems about love in which he uses what might be called the "ceremonial of love". In most cases, a love-sacrifice is the subject of the poem; it takes place because the lovers have committed some "Trespasse". That is, they have committed the same "sin" as the lovers in The Sacrifice and as Corinna in Herrick's famous statement of "sin" against God, nature, and man. The lovers must petition and sacrifice to the god of Love to remove the "sin" so that the natural order will be restored. The ceremonies by which they achieve this end are mixtures of classical and Christian elements, the latter often of a very Roman Catholic sort. These, in turn, produce different approaches by the poet to love-worship and to lovereligion.

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The proper performance of the sacrifice, observing the 'law' and the order of the limited cosmos of Love, is the framework in To Julia, the Flaminica Dialis, or Queen-Priest: Thou know'st, my Julia, that it is thy turne This Morning Incense to prepare, and burne. The Chaplet, and *Inarculum here be, With the white Vestures, all attending Thee. This day, the Queen-Priest, thou art made t'appease Love for our very-many Trespasses. One chiefe transgression is among the rest, Because with Flowers her Temple was not drest: The next, because her Altars did not shine With daily Fyers: The last, neglect of Wine: For which, her wrath is gone forth to consume Us all, unlesse preserv'd by thy Perfume. Take then thy Censer; Put in Fire, and thus, Ο Pious-Priestressel make a Peace for us. For our neglect, Love did our Death decree, That we escape. Redemption comes by Thee. * A twig of Pomgranat, which the queen-priest did use to weare on her head at sacrificing, (note in 1648 edition of Hesperides) Herrick's knowledge of the function of the flaminica may well have come from Ovid's Fasti (Book VI. 226) as L. C. Martin's note suggests. Ovid is, however, only concerned with the functions of the flaminica and her taboos; Herrick is not concerned with these things. Furthermore, the gloss on "Inarculum" in the 1648 edition may well have come from Paulus ex Festus in Lindsay's edition of the Glossaria Latina (as Martin also notes). It is far more likely that Herrick is reflecting his reading of Gellius (Attic Nights X.xv.27), who mentions that the flaminica has a "twig from a fruitful tree in her head-dress" or Servius's commentary on Virgil's Aeneid IV.137. Herrick seems almost the flamen Dialis, the flaminica's husband and one of three major priests in the Roman state religion, who has failed in his duties as priest of Jupiter. It is now Julia's turn as "Queen-Priest" (perhaps a confusion between the priestesses flaminica Dialis and Regina sacrorum) to fulfill her duties as Priestess, to Love.4 2 There is a further accommodation of the classical materials about the divinity to whom the flaminica sacrifices. Is Herrick thinking of Plutarch who says, incorrectly (in Roman Questions, LXXXVI), that the flaminica 42

Since Herrick has failed in his duties as a priest, John Press's statement [in his Herrick Writers and Their Work, No. 132 (London, 1961), 31] does not seem applicable: "... we feel that Herrick himself would have made an admirable priest of a Roman temple or a Hindu shrine, that he was more fitted to be a devout guardian of holy mysteries than an apostle of Christ".

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was a priestess of Juno, transformed in Herrick's poem to a priestess of Love; or is he thinking of Servius's comment (on Aeneid 1.335) that sacrifices to Venus consisted only of frankincense and flowers? Herrick is undoubtedly conflating his sources. Another very illuminating reference comes from Servius (on Aeneid IV.29) who states that the flaminica could only be univira; he is supported by Gellius's statement (X.xv.22) that the flamen ceased to be flamen upon the death of his wife, for the very nature of their sacred marriage was a spiritual and divine union as well as a physical union. Julia is to effect this same kind of union by her redemptive offering of perfume and "Fire-Incense" and thereby save them from death. With the addition of these ceremonial contexts, contexts of the poem and of flerrick's reading, it is possible to suggest the fullness of the Christian doctrine expressed in the poem's last line. The renewed love which Julia is being asked to rekindle is not solely physical; the poem is not just an invitation to love physically. Their revived and mutual love of both body and soul, a true religion of love, is being requested. By enumerating in greater detail what Gellius or Servius or Plutarch have said about the flaminica, it could easily be shown that Herrick has not sought to make the poem a mere exposition of Roman antiquities. His errors, historically speaking, are too numerous (or too inventive). Herrick is not thinking of an actual flaminica or an actual ceremony; the poem is 'about' Julia. She will make her offering to Love because the poet has designated her "Queen-Priest". 43 Because of her "Perfume" and her "Fire", she can propitiate the angered goddess; Venus-Love is placated by these offerings with their accompanying flowers and wine. Yet even the ceremony as Herrick has presented it is but an epitome of the proper Roman sacrifice. The poem becomes an elaborate lovecompliment wherein the ceremonial imagery achieves a heightening of emotion with the sprinkling of classical elements in the poem. Herrick intermingles images associated with classical ritual — flowers, altars, fires, wine - and images of profane or secular love. And the former images are not exclusively identified with pagan Rome, as any seventeenth-century Puritan would be quick to point out. Herrick is neither parodying Roman Catholic-Anglican ritual nor seeking to reconcile them with a ceremony of romantic love. He thinks of the Roman ritual performed by the flaminica as a divine ritual, as indeed it was. Because of this ritual he and Julia share a divine union as much as they share the implied physical union. The tension of the poem arises partly from the fact that the two traditions, 43

Thomas R. Whitaker, "Heirick and the Fruits of the Garden", ELH, XXII (1955), 31-2, identifies Julia as both "Roman priestess and Virgin Mary". Although the latter identification is possible, there is little support for it in the poem itself nor in Herrick's attitude toward the Virgin Mary as presented in Noble Numbers.

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divine love in a more-or-less Roman sense and romantic love, in a profane sense, are not reconciled philosophically or theologically. The poem is a very elegant compliment and a bit of learned foolery. In other poems where Julia figures as a priestess or participant in a sacrifice, a part of the sacrifice is described with close attention to detail and with, at least, some atmosphere of the Roman ritual. The Christian context of Mattem, or morning Prayer is not, for example, transformed by what appears to be a pagan sacrifice: When with the Virgin morning thou do'st rise, Crossing thy selfe; come thus to sacrifice: First wash thy heart in innocence, then bring Pure hands, pure habits, pure, pure every thing. Next to the Altar humbly kneel, and thence, Give up thy soule in clouds of frankinsence. Thy golden Censors fil'd with odours sweet, Shall make thy actions with their ends to meet. The repetition of the word "pure" is emotionally effective, and quite in keeping with the precautions, both Roman and Christian, against rites performed by impure persons. The sacrifice in the poem is not an act more readily associated with Herrick's "insistent paganism" or "ancient Roman ceremonies" than with Christian ceremony, as one critic has suggested, unless we assume that celebrants of a Christian ceremony do not maintain a state of purity before the sacrificial action (which of course they do), or that communicants do not attain a state of purity before they receive the benefits of the sacrifice (which they also do), or that purity is not necessary and indeed forthcoming because of the sacrifice (which, of course, it is). 4 4 After the elaborate preparatory purification, he (or she, since it is not clear who the celebrant is) kneels and gives up his "soule". Never in Roman ceremony is a "soule" mentioned nor, what is more important, is the intent of a Roman sacrifice ever to make the actions of the celebrant meet the 'ends' for which the sacrifice is made. The poem is a totally Christian conceptualization of the act of sacrifice. It has definite "pagan" overtones, but hardly anything sanctioned; this is not a sacrifice to a "counter Religion". The sacrificial act and the un-named god are being evaluated through an inter-penetration of the secular and the divine. The image of purification performs quite a different function, though no less typical of Roman sacrifice, in To Julia. In the first two lines Julia is told: Holy waters hither bring For the sacred sprinkling: 44

See Roger Rollin, Robert Herrick (New York, 1966), 134-5.

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These waters are for the sacred sprinkling of the victim, but in the normal process of a sacrifice in the State Religion wine was sprinkled on the brazier (focultis) which stood beside the altar and, with the salted cake (mola salsa), sprinkled over the victim, usually down the forehead. Herrick has used the pagan sprinkling in a Christian context, however: Baptize me and thee, and so Let us to the Altar go. Undoubtedly he is thinking of a Christian baptismal rite where the priest pours holy water over the head of the infant, but the purification by baptism before a sacrifice at an "Altar" is not used in a totally Christian sense. The purification image, then, is being used in the poem in a double sense, and it continues to be so used in the remainder of the poem until it is resolved: And (ere we our rites commence) Wash our hands in innocence. Then I'le be the Rex Sacrorum, Thou the Queen of Peace and Quorum. Again, the 'law' is invoked. Herrick thinks of himself, furthermore, as another of the priests of Rome, whose wife the Regina Sacrorum we encountered in connection with the flaminica Dialis. Julia's designation as "Queen" may be a reflection of Herrick's reading where the Rex is frequently called the "king-priest", due no doubt to a survival of an earlier period when the king was also a priest. The second half of Julia's title, "Peace and Quorum", is explained (by Godwin, 50) to mean a justice without whom a committee of justices cannot act, but I suspect that Herrick was merely filling out the rhyme with the notion of the queen of a select group, for Godwin's gloss makes little sense in the poem. Whatever thought Herrick had in mind, it is not, in my opinion, successfully expressed. The purification image is even less organic than in the former poem To Julia, and the emotional level is sacrificed for the rhyme. Moreover, this same image is also used by Herrick in not quite a totally Christian context in another poem To Julia. He asks Julia to help him sing or say Mattens for "... the Fiend will fly / Far away, if thou beest by". Music supplied by flute players (tibicines) was necessary during a Roman sacrifice so that no inauspicious sound might be heard. This may be what Herrick has in mind, or he may be thinking of saint's bells which frightened off fiends. The Romans certainly believed in demons, but only Herrick's awareness of the way the music in the Roman sacrifice and the singing of hymns and saying of prayers at Mattens could be similar and, possibly, for the same effect allows him to make this extravagant claim. In yet another poem To Julia in the Temple, there is no preliminary

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purification, for the poet and Julia are alone in the temple. He urges her to accompany him to the "Altar of Perfumes" to offer prayers so that in a little while "Saints will come in to fill each Pew and Place". If the un-named god is the god (or goddess as she seems to be in Herrick) of Love, she requires not only purity, but, as we recall, "incense" and "fire". In The Perfume, a love compliment is paid through the perfume, Julia's breath: Tomorrow, Julia, I betimes must rise, For some small fault, to offer sacrifice: The Altar's ready; Fire to consume The fat; breathe thou, and there's the rich perfume. But for the final line, the poem would read as a "plea for paganism". It is, nonetheless, a most charming and dramatic lyric, the ceremony functioning as realistic description of a Roman sacrifice, and the final sentence removing it from the taint of the pagan spirit to, for Herrick, the level of a typical ceremonial love-poem. The propitiatory sacrifice, and note that it is for "some small fault", is consumed not by the fire on the altar but by Julia's sweet breath. The real is ceremoniously elevated to the level of art while the purpose of the poem remains substantially realistic. Much the same kind of realistic identification of Julia with the paraphernalia of a sacrifice occurs in Love perfumes all parts: If I kisse Anthea's brest, There I smell the Phenix nest: If her lip, the most sincere Altar of Incense, I smell there.

,„ , „. (11. 1-4)

And, in an even more sensuous identification that reminds us of Crashaw, the "incense" becomes the entire poem in The Frankincense'. When my off'ring next I make, Be thy hand the hallowed Cake: And thy brest the Altar, whence Love may smell the Frankincense. The "incense" here becomes virtually lost in the celebrant's eagerness to place his cake-offering, her hand, on the altar, her breast, forming a physical union whereby Love, the divinity, may smell (and accept) the incense that permeates, evidently, her entire upper body as well as her breath. Quite a different function, however, is performed by perfume or incense together with fire in still another poem To Julia, where the extreme compliment is given to Julia, in a role very similar to the one which she played as flaminica Dialis, that her fire will gain for them a blessing:

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For I thinke the gods require Male perfumes, but Female fire

(11. 3-4)

Julia's "fire" is both the fire on the altar and the consuming fire of Love. The same necessity to perform the rites of love — with the proper offerings — can be found in Virgil's eighth Eclogue: Bring out water, and wreathe these shrines with soft wool; and burn rich herbs and male frankincense, that I may try with magic rites to turn to fire my lover's coldness of mood.

(11. 64-7 ) 4 5

But where we would expect Herrick to expand on the fire/ice paradox, so common a theme in the Petrarchan love convention, he approaches the same subject through the medium of ceremony: Shall I go to Love and tell, Thou art all turn'd isicle? Shall I say her Altars be Disadorn'd, and scorn'd by thee? Ο beware! in time submit; Love has yet no wrathfull fit: If her patience turns to ire, Love is then consuming fire. ("To Electra") With Flowers and Wine, And Cakes Divine, To strike me I will tempt thee: Which done; no more Ille come before Thee and thine Altars emptie. (An Hymne to Love, 11. 19-24)

There is, it seems, a perfectly logical explanation for Herrick's use of perfume and smoke. Of all the elements of the Roman sacrifice which appealed to Herrick, none was so intriguing as the smoke which rose from the brazier (focus) when the entrails were being entirely consumed. The efficacy of the rising smoke and incense, the "perfume" of his poems, permeates virtually every line of his poetry. In some of his poems on sacrifice which use this element of sacrificial smoke as perfume acceptable to the gods, Herrick is sometimes conventionally classical, following Ben Jonson: 45

Viigil, Eclogues, translated by H. Rush ton Fairclough (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1935), Volume I, 60.

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All-gracious God, the Sinners sacrifice, A broken heart thou wert not wont despise, But 'bove the fat of rammes, or bulls, to prize An offering meet For thy acceptance ... What odour can be, then a heart contrite. To thee more sweet? (The Sinners Sacrifice. To the Holy Trinitie, 11.9-13,15-16) Herrick's reasoning is a great deal simpler than Jonson's: 'Tis not a thousand Bullocks thies Can please those Heav'nly Deities, If the Vower don't express In his Offering, Cheerfulness. (Cheerfulnesse in Charitie) Although this simple affective piety is characteristic of Noble Numbers, Herrick's typical use of the sacrificial victim and the smoke which rises when it is burnt is more in keeping with his own preference for incense, for he states: 'Tis not greatness they require, To be offer'd up by fire: But 'tis sweetnes that doth please Those Eternall Essences. (Sweetness in Sacrifice) or in another place, Steamc in Sacrifice". If meat the Gods give, I the steame High-towring wil devote to them: Whose easie natures like it well, If we the roste have, they the smell. or in The smell of the Sacrifice : The Gods require the thighes Of Beeves for sacrifice; Which rosted, we the steam Must sacrifice to them: Who though they do not eat, Yet love the smell of meat. Herrick's basic idea here, that the gods were pleased by the smell of the burning fat, the perfume as it were, is worked out in much greater detail than in any classical or dictionary precedent, except in the First and Second books of the lUiad and the Third book of the Odyssey. He seems to be torn between offering, as he says in another place (To the King, 11.

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7-8), "a thousand thighes / Of Beeves" as the older piacular sacrifice, and the sacramental sacrifice in the previous love-sacrifices. He is totally original in English poetry in the application of the perfume of the burning victim as the proper offering to the gods; propriety and decorum are all important. And while he is original in his use of perfumes to appease God, his usage is not unique, for Marvell uses the metaphor exactly in Herrick's sense in "The Dialogue Between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure": Pleasure If thou bee'st with Perfumes pleas'd, Such as oft the Gods appeas'd, Thou in fragrant Clouds shalt show Like another God below. (11. 25-8) Nor is there any precedent, except in Herrick's own poems of lovesacrifice, for the niggardliness of A Mean in our Meanes : Though Frankinsense the Deities require, We must not give all to the hallowed fire. Such be our gifts, and such be our expence, As for our selves to leave some frankinsence. This notion of the sacrifice contains the most primitive sense of agape that is encountered anywhere in Herrick. There is, however, some precedent in I Samuel II. 13-16 for the following poem concerned solely with the fat of the sacrifice: Like those infernall Deities which eate The best of all the sacrificed meate; And leave their sevants, but the smoak & sweat: So many Kings, and Primates too there are, Who claim the Fat, and Fleshie for their share, And leave their Subjects but the starved ware. {Bad Princes pill their People) What is only briefly stated in the handbooks of antiquities, that after the portion of the victim is burnt on the altar all the people go to a common feast, has here become the entire subject and 'cause' of the poem. Except that the usual situation is imaginatively and quite realistically reversed. The sacrifices to Love, the ritual acts in a "religion of love", are to be performed, then, with as great a care for detail and for propriety (the 'law' of decorum and "sensible actions"), as are the orthodox observances to the gods, and to God, and the very unorthodox observances of fairy worship. The classical ceremony, the flower-bedecked altars, the incense and fires, the divine cakes utilized in these poems suggests that Herrick does not consider them unreal fantasies. He considers the love-sacrifices, at

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least, as realistic evaluations of love experience. No doubt he considers the experience of the gods, God, and the fairies in the same way. But the poems are also as expressive of a pagan devotion as they are of Christian devotion. Herrick probably did not consider them as either pagan or Christian (unaccustomed, as are we, to instant dichotomies). For he saw sacrifice, devotion, propriety as crowning and orderly acts in religious experience. And the poetic recreations examined in this chapter are proper and orderly ceremonies. His love-sacrifices actually partake less of the traditions of earlier love religions than of the traditions of the typical "Renaissance religion of love".4 6 For pagan sacrifice becomes fused with a Christian love which allows a poet to move in both worlds, choosing what he considers significant and meaningful from either so as to elevate both to a higher order. Ceremony is the vehicle of this elevation. The poems in this chapter represent several facets of Herrick's poetic cosmos. They may be described as ceremonies to 'life' and to 'spirit' because they all involve the poet in forms of sacred play. If, as Harvey Cox has suggested, the human spirit needs the vital elements of festivity, which invoke memory, which invoke hope, Herrick's poetic cosmos (as far as it has been opened here to the perspective of ceremony's mediation) is an image of historical memory served by poetic hope. 47 There are other facets, as well, of Herrick's poetic cosmos, and these are also prepared for in The Argument of His Book. These are the ceremonies of death, of "Time trans-shifting", and the eternality of verses. There are the great festival poems which celebrate society and culture. Yet those poems of death and culture are dependent upon the vision that ceremony provides into the poems of the infinitely large and the infintessimally small worlds that have been the subject of this chapter.

46

See Fritz Saxl, "Pagan Sacrifioe in the Italian Renaissance", Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes, II (1939), 363 and note; and C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936), 21-2. Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 8.

3. CEREMONY AND DEATH

The preoccupation of seventeenth-century poets with death and decay is extensively documented. Herrick's modern editor, L. C. Martin, comments on the great number of Herrick's poems which appear to reflect Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. And Victor Harris's All Coherence Gone (Chicago, 1949) remains the best account of the century's concern with decay in nature and in all creation. What these studies provide us with is the assurance that death formed a considerable part of the consciousness of the century, for new philosophy did, for many, call all in doubt. Still, the medieval emphasis upon life as a preparation for death continued to characterize men's thinking within a Christian context. A confrontation of the poetic consciousness with the decay of the body, both the immediate body and the body politic, was not something newly thought and felt. Imagination still provided alternatives to a harsh reality, even if the imagined forms were only toys to deceive one into the illusion of the transcendence of death. Poets had always devised ways of escaping from the flux of "times Trans-shifting" as Herrick so aptly states it in The Argument of His Book. Yet Herrick's death-rite poems rarely admit the contemptus mundi and momento mori attitudes. His poetic cosmos, which includes ceremonies that enhance and elevate life, also includes ceremonies that enrich and transcend death. Death in his poetic cosmos includes the simple and uncomplicated statement in the first part of Upon a Child. An Epitaph: But borne, and like a short Delight, I glided by my Parents sight. That done, the harder Fates deny'd My longer stay, and so I dy'd. with the characteristic call for ritualistic remembrance in the second part of the poem: If pittying my sad Parents Teares, You'l spil a tear, or two with theirs: And with some flowrs my grave bestrew, Love and they'l thank you for't. Adieu.

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This latter element, the ritualistic and ceremonial extension of the fact of death, is most elusive at the same time that it is most characteristic. As though the two elements of the poem were somehow separable, the critic usually focuses on the first element, labels it (neo-Stoic or satirically unorthodox) and ignores the second element. To ignore either element is, of course, misleading. To ignore the second, in particular, is to involve Herrick and his numerous personae only in the pastoral convention since flowers, perfumes, and spices are the typical artifacts in Herrick's ceremonies. The intent is to make him a 'nature' poet or to dismiss all poems like Upon a Child as trivial or occasional. Blossoms and daffodils are, however, introduced by Herrick into his poetic death-rites for their own intrinsic value and to give force to the ironic contrast between the brevity of their existence (with the promise of next spring's regeneration) and the brevity of man's existence (with no promise of a new "Spring" unless an explicitly Christian context is also provided). It is, for instance, the order in the order of nature that provides for the first two stanzas of To Blossoms : Fairi pledges of a fruitfull Tree, Why do yee fall so fast? Your date is not so past; But you may stay yet here a while, To blush and gently smile; And go at last. What, were yee borne to be An houre or half s delight; And so to bid goodnight? 'Twas pitie Nature brought yee forth Meerly to show your worth, And los you quite. It is the order in the order of grace that provides for the third stanza: But you are lovely Leaves, where we May read how soon things have Their end, though ne'r so brave: And after they have shown their pride, Like you a while: They glide Into the Grave. And it is Herrick's consciousness of the relatedness of these two orders, ironically forecast in the first two stanzas, that allows him to "read" that order. Certainly the poem allows for the neo-Stoical reading that one critic has suggested.1 But it also allows for the reading that suggests that the 1

Roger B. Rollin,

RobertHerrick (New York, 1966), pp. 40-2.

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poem itself is a "leaf' from Herrick's poetic text. It is a pledge. One that blushes and smiles, that delights and shows its worth, where we may read that the blossom-man identification, artifically identified in a work of art, survives ironically because of a shared consciousness on the part of the poet. It is a playful - and ritualistic - recreation of nature without the Springtime flux of actual Nature. Herrick seems perfectly well aware that his poem will escape the very end he speaks of and not "glide / Into the Grave" if we, like him, engage in the artistic act of play. The poem has allowed for and acknowledged the flux of Nature, but it also provides for the artistic transcendence of Nature by both the blossom and the analogously implied man. The principle of order artistically wrought by the conscious poet allows for an absolute poetic transcendence which is not otherwise possible. This artistic concern to transcend Nature is even more clearly stated in A Meditation for his Mistresse with all the changes the poem rings upon the analogy between flowers and the mistress in the first four stanzas: You are a Tulip seen today, But (Dearest) of so short a stay; That where you grew, scarce man can say. You are a lovely July-flower, Yet one rude wind, or ruffling shower, Will force you hence, (and in an houre.) You are a sparkling .Rose i'th'bud, Yet lost, ere that chast flesh and blood Can shew where you or grew, or stood. You are a full-spread faire-set Vine, And can with Tendrills love intwine, Yet dry'd, ere you distill your Wine. But in the fifth stanza Herrick elevates his metaphor, virtually stilling it in an ecphrastic metaphor like the stilled figures on Keats's urn: You are like Balme inclosed (well) In Amber, or some Chrystall shell, Yet lost ere you transfuse your smell. Rather than break the metaphoric relations (as, at first, it seems he has done), he has fused the metaphoric relations within the crystal before the analogous balm, the extract of the flower and the distilled wine of the woman, is smelled. Once preserved in crystal, it ceases to exist in temporal time (during which it would lose its fragrance). It exists now in the poem in spatial and metaphoric time, and it partakes of the ecphrastic principle's desire to transcend time.

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In the next development:

stanza

Herrick

continues this spatial

metaphoric

You are a dainty Violet, Yet wither'd, ere you can be set Within the Virgins Coronet. The mistress-flower, separable as woman and violet but now paradoxically fused as emblem, may wither and may even not be set in the circle of a coronet. Here the transcendent metaphor, the "Coronet", is withheld. Surely Herrick is playing with his mistress, first suggesting death and decay when she is a Tulip, a July-flower, and a Rosebud. Then he suggests to her the possibility of an essence of mistress-flower as metaphoric identification, and he follows this with an actual flower preserved spatially (preserved, as it were, in the poem as plastic art form). He then withholds transcendence from her, and then finally in the last stanza gives her back that transcendence: You are the Queen all flowers among, But die you must (faire Maid) ere long, As He, the maker of this Song. Here the mistress has become supra-flower, yet still susceptible to death, as is he, the poet. And she is still further transcendent in the last two words of the poem, "this Song". The movement of the poem is circular, the development of the imagery is also circular. The poem has become a circle, the very image of a plastic and spatial form, preserved qua art in spatial time and transcending temporal time. It is a highly provocative, ironic and playful playing with the apparent terrors of "time's winged chariot". It is, perhaps, closer to Marvell's very ecphrastic "To his Coy Mistress" than to Donne's "Death be not proud". And it surely is more uniquely representative of a new attitude toward death in the seventeenth century. It is uniquely a poem by Robert Herrick, and it suggests some of the range and variety of his death-rite poetry. In this poetry, in this aspect of his poetic cosmos, the world of nature is transformed by mixed ceremonies. And in the poems on death, like the poems of previous chapters, there is an emphasis upon the elements of order, propriety, ritual, ceremony, and play. It should be helpful to an understanding of Herrick's funereal verses to know what materials were available to him, what details of ceremony he felt were 'right and just', and what use he put these to in his poetic cosmos. He seems to have found poetically useful certain particulars of the Roman death-rites which he could have discovered in the Roman poets themselves, or in the great Renaissance dictionaries of antiquities. What can be traced to some earlier account is considerably changed, blended,

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and recreated. What poet or dictionary account may, or may not, establish the actual source of his 'indebtedness' is not as important a consideration as are the uses he makes of classical ceremony. The following details of the Roman death-rites are suggestive for a reading of Herrick: at the time of death the next of kin received the last breath of the dying person into his own mouth; the deceased was washed and anointed with oil; daily incense was offered for seven days at an altar erected outside the gates of the home; cypress garnished the gate; the bier was covered with purple or richly-colored offerings and coverings; the body was burnt on a pyre around which boughs of cypress were placed to diminish the odor of burning flesh; the collected ashes and bones were washed with milk and wine; and the urn which contained the ashes was kept in the home for seven days before it was deposited in the earth. Herrick seems to believe, in some cases, that the soul lives after the body is consumed and that it, surprisingly, lives under the earth (as the Manes of the departed), and that the departed spirit demands offerings for its continued subsistence and repose. Not all, then, of Herrick's treatments of burial rites indicate a strictly Christian faith in the soul's immortality. In fact, some of his views on death are imaginative and apocalyptic. Though Herrick is not typically prophetic in the usual sense, he is prophetic in a Shelleyean sense. In those few poems in Noble Numbers that concern death, the depth of religious experience and imagination is measured in particular and personal terms — as though, in fact, he poetically legislates on the subject of death. The complete acceptance of God's power and mercy marks out the difference between Herrick's poems on death and other seventeenth-century meditations upon death. None of the terror, grim humor, seeking after self-knowledge, or last-minute reflection, such as we find in Donne or Herbert, is to be found in Herrick's poems. In To God, on his sicknesse, the poet laments his own passing and concludes with the common emblematic image: Yet I have hope, by Thy great power, To spring; though now a wither'd flower. (11. 7-8)

In the most 'metaphysical' of these death-rite poems, in To his sweet Saviour, he moves through what might be called the first two stages of an Ignatian meditation (composition of place and application of the senses) and through the first two stages of a Salesian meditation (apprehension of the presence of God and greater intimacy with the divine presence): 2 2

Louis L Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, revised edition (New Haven, 1962), pp. 147-8, 250.

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Night hath no wings, to him that cannot sleep; And Time seems then, not for to flie, but creep; Slowly her chariot drives, as if that she Had broke her wheele, or crackt her axeltreee. Just so it is with me, who list'ning, pray The winds, to blow the tedious night away; That I might see the cheerfull peeping day. Sick is my heart; Ο Saviour! do Thou please To make my bed soft in my sickenesses: Lighten my candle, so that I beneath Sleep not for ever in the vaults of death: Let me Thy voice betimes i'th morning heare; Call, and I'le come; say Thou, the when, and where: Draw me, but first, and after Thee He run, And make no one stop, till my race be done. Neither method of meditation is carried to its completion in the poem. For although Herrick is probably closer to the Salesian spirit of meditation and to Herbert (the poem sounds like Herbert's "The Collar" merged with his "The Pulley") and to the language of the Psalms and Song of Solomon (from which much of "he imagery is drawn), than to the more purgative Jesuit meditations, Herrick is not typically meditational. While To his sweet Saviour may employ some of the technique of the meditative manner, a sense of dramatic immediacy and vividness are not indications only of 'meditation'. In fact, both qualities are definitely indications of medieval lyrics composed long before the Spiritual Exercises of. St. Ignatius Loyola. They are also qualities of much Renaissance poetry. For a full perspective on the influence of meditative techniques on seventeenth-century devotional poetry, one begins with Louis Martz's The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, 1954), then compares that work with Helen Gardner's commentary on meditative techniques in her edition of Donne's Divine Poems (Oxford, 1954), then reads a few reviewers of both works, and then spends a few years reading Renaissance poetry. One is at least then able to follow the application of Martzian theory to Herrick's His Meditation upon death by another critic.3 The three-part structure of the meditative exercise (composition of place, application of the senses, and colloquy), should, according to the meditative paradigm, regulate the structure of Herrick's poem. The poem begins with a long introductory passage, but not curiously with a "composition of place" by Martzian or any other terms. But an actual "composition of place" comes after the introductory section. One wonders if Herrick's notions about "composition of place" are like St. Ignatius's or like Martz's, for the second introductory section is not an event from Christ's life, as a composition of 3

Rollin, p. 158.

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place ought to be, but from the poet's own life: And when the night persuades me to my bed, I'le thinke I'm going to be buried: So shall the Blankets which come over me, Present those Turfs, which once must cover me: And with as firme behaviour I will meet The sheet I sleep in, as my Winding-sheet. (11. 1 3 - 1 8 )

Blankets which metaphorically become "Turfes" which are still coverings are a game, a kind of 'play'. The same kind of play pervades the whole next section of the poem which should be the second step in the meditative exercise, where the speaker "dreames" of his own Resurrection. Not only is Herrick not following the prescribed structure, but he is also not exactly creating a second "composition of place" either. His dream of his Resurrection is real; but dream is not real — as Shakespeare told us in Midsummer Night's Dream. And like the characters and audience addressed by Puck at the end of that play, Herrick will remember his dream of Resurrection when, and if, he wakes. Apparently, after this dream sequence, he should move into an analysis of the implications of this composition of place (though now there are at least two compositions of place): Let me, though late, yet at the last, begin To shun the least Temptation to a sin; Though to be tempted be no sin, untill Man to th'alluring object gives his will. (11. 2 9 - 3 2 )

What ratiocination! What colloquy! Surely these lines, and the next four, are supposed to be the colloquy: Such let my life assure me, when my breath Goes theeving from me, I am safe in death; Which is the height of comfort, when I fall, I rise triumphant in my Funerall. (11. 3 3 - 3 6 )

In the third stage of the meditative exercise, the will is the power of the soul that is operative (as memory and understanding are the powers in the first two stages, respectively), and Herrick even uses the word "will" to indicate his state of mind near the end of the poem. The colloquy is his own resolution revealed in the last eight lines. One wonders whether the resolution, the closing-up of the poem as it were, is really a colloquy in the meditative sense at all. If it isn't, and if the second stage is left out altogether, and there is a long introduction followed by two "compo-

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sitions of place", then the poem is hardly meditative in its structure. Only very loosely applied as a descriptive term could 'meditative' be applied to this poem. Nor is the intellectual progress in the poem meditative. Only the title is meditative. Herrick, furthermore, does not refer to a "rise triumphant" at some later time. In the last line he rises precisely after he falls, which is a rather extraordinary way of circumventing Doomsday. This amounts to resurrection now, or in waking from sleeping which is the metaphor he uses. And note that he rises triumphant in ceremony, "in my Funerall". The final figure is extremely unorthodox from a narrow Christian point of view. But that ceremony of his funeral rite, like that playful resurrection provided in his dream, a kind of metamorphosed sleep, is the eschatology of art. The dream resurrection is playful because it is not real and represents an actual suspension of the rules of the game. Art transcends life and becomes the "height of comfort" because it provides transcendence of the flux of life. Meditative technique is replaced by artistically playful dream resurrection. The poem, finally, does resemble a 'play', an imaginative rehearsal during those "few hours" remaining of a "good" life. Herrick even rehearses, without fear, his death. And when he goes to bed he pretends ('Tie thinke") he will be buried, pulls up his blankets and meets his "Winding-sheet". Pretending still, he "will believe" he dies. But, and here the play element enters in the fullest sense, when he wakes he will remember his resurrection. The next six lines in the poem (11. 23-28) are his "dream" of resurrection. Having assured himself of the goodness of his life, the "height of comfort", he can afford to shun even the "least Temptation to a sin", and he ends where he began: "I am safe in death". He no doubt considers himself safe because he has rehearsed his part so often, knows his cues and lines, and is assured that the 'form' of his actual death will be precisely the same as the form he has rehearsed. What a delightful way to meet death. In a dream. And then to wake again. The traditional paradox of life in death is circumscribed by the artistic and playful death in life. In His Letanie, to the Holy Spirit, we see Herrick at his most ironically playful. Though, indeed, the entire poem is a detailed "composition of place" and makes use of the eye of truth that sees all life's follies, the reiterated refrain, "Sweet Spirit comfort me! ", produces what has been called the childlike quality of the poem. This quality is a significant distinction, for a childlike attitude may be used in the sense of complete acceptance and dependence upon God, not like the usage of Vaughan or Traherne, in whose poems the child represents a desire for a lost baptismal innocence, a way out of, not a way into, the flux of the world, both present and future. But, to further define this attitude as "an adult

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assumption of an ingenu role", as Professor Starkman does, seems to gainsay the very quality of simplicity achieved through a childlike acceptaiice of God's will, even as a catalyst to adult action, and to overlook a very important aspect of Herrick's mode which this childlike attitude may represent.4 After carefully creating the scene of the death bed in the first five stanzas of the poem, Herrick prays: When the passing bell doth tole, And the Furies in a shole Come to fright a parting soule; Sweet Spirit comfort me! When the tapers now burne blew, And the comforters are few, And that number more than true; Sweet Spirit comfort me!

(11. 21-28)

The tolling of bells for the passing of the dead is surely common, but the presence of "Furies" and evil spirits (signified by the tapers which burn blue as a sign of the presence of devils or evil spirits) at a Christian deathbed is certainly not. It is more than coincidence that Furies, or the Dirae, come to strike terror into the heart of Turnus in the Twelfth Book of the Aeneid (XII. 849-52). As Virgil explains: "These attend by the throne of Jove ... and whet the fears of feeble mortals, whene'er heaven's king deals diseases and awful death ...". And, when a Fury appears to Turnus, A strange numbness unknits his limbs with dread; his hair stood up in terror and the voice clave to his throat, (my italics)

Compare this passage with Herrick's: When the Priest his last hath praid, And I nod to what is said, 'Cause my speech is now decaid; Steeped as Herrick was in the Latin poets, there is certainly some feeling analogous to the classical acceptance of the will of the gods in the Letanie as well as the childlike acceptance Professor Starkman has identified. Furthermore, if this image of the poet as child leads to "the intense and simple naturalizing of prayer, the assumption of a passive role that breeds strong Christian acceptance", what Professor Starkman has called Herrick's "domestication", 5 might not this domestication also derive from the spirit 4 Miriam Starkman, " 'Noble Numbers' and the Poetry of Devotion", in Reason and the Imagination, edited by Joseph A. Mazzeo (New York, 1962), p. 8. 5 Ibid., p. 10.

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of the simple country pieties, so strong a part of Virgil's religion? One senses a naturalizing of prayer in this poem; but, it is a naturalization and a domestication and a childlike tone far more complex poetically, and more individually Herrick's, than has been recognized. Classical and Christian details of death-rite ceremonies are also combined in The Dirge of Jephthahs Daughter: sung by the Virgins, which is derived from Judges, XI. 30-40. Jephthah makes a vow to the Lord that if he is granted victory over the Ammonites, whatever living person first greets him upon his safe return he will offer that person in burnt-sacrifice. (Note Herrick satirizes this arrangement in the lines: "His was the Bond and Cov'nant, yet / Thou paid'st the debt.") Jephthah has one daughter, and it is she who comes out first to welcome him. When she learns that she must submit herself to the pure, she requests one favor from her father: that she be allowed to go into the hills for two months with her fellowmaidens, bewailing her ill fortune that she must die unwed.6 At the end of the two months she returns and dies unwed. Herrick's poem on this subject commences the story a year after the daughter (although she is called Iphis in Buchanan, there is no biblical source for her name) has been sacrificed. The focus of the poem is, obviously, on the lamentations of the virgins and the proper commemorative rites performed for her: Ο thou, the wonder of all dayes! Ο Paragon, and Pearle of praise! Ο Virgin-martyr, ever blest Above the rest Of all the Maiden-Traine! We come, And bring fresh strewings to thy Tombe. Thus, and thus, and thus we compasse round Thy harmlesse and unhaunted Ground; And as we sing thy Dirge, we will The Daffadill, And other flowers, lay upon (The Altar of our love) thy Stone. Although this poem could be called a "pastoral" because of the ceremonial properties of the "daffadill" and the flowers and perfumes, the presence of the elaborate ceremony of the death-rite in all its accuracy leads us to believe otherwise. Indeed, the words "unhaunted Ground" may be taken as a representation of the Greek belief that unless a body were duly buried it would not enter the lower world and find its proper resting place.7 Nor 6

The story of Jephthah is treated in the "Phisiciens Tale" of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, 11. 240-276, in Book IV of Gower's Confessio Amantis, 11. 1505-1595, and in a version very similar to Herrick's in George Buchanan's play Jephthah. 7 Cf. Aeneid VI. 175, where the funeral and due burial of Misenus was a condition of

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are we unduly surprised to find the daughter's "Tombe" described as an altar; the Stone is used for an altar, if only for the devotion of the Virgins. And the elaborateness of the commemorative rite itself is one familiar to us: Receive, for this thy praise, our teares: Receive, this offering of our Haires: Receive these Christall Vialls fil'd With teares, distil'd From teeming eyes; to these we bring, Each Maid, her silver Filleting, To guild thy Tombe; besides these Caules, These Laces, Ribbands, and these Faules, These veiles, where with we use to hide The Bashfull Bride, When we conduct her to her Groome: All, all we lay upon thy Tombe. To gloss these two stanzas (the seventh and eighth of the poem) is to be taken back into the mixture of sophisticated state religion and the simple Italian rites in the verses of Virgil and the classical poets. Though there is a biblical source for the offering of hair (in Jeremiah VII. 29), there is also the custom of the early Italians who plucked the hair of a victim's head as a "first offering". 8 The gilded forehead (a "fillet") of the victim is representative of the first step in the preparation and adornment of the victim in the sacrificium, the most common act of worship among the early Italians. References to a woolen fillet abound in Virgil, who is probably relying on a Homeric precedent. 9 In like manner, "Caules" were snatched from the heads of foals to be used in love potions; ribbons and flowers are frequently mentioned in Virgil; and "Faules" or veils were used in prayer to avoid inauspicious omens. And "Male-incense" (1. 76) was used in the making of the mola salsa, the sacrificial cake. 1 0 The real vitality of the older religious forms, the simple ceremonies of the household (see Herrick's A Thanksgiving to God, for his House as an example) and the fields survived as "paganism", the last real foe of Christianity. Throughout Virgil, for instance, there is the feeling that only through suffering can man reach the depth of religious experience, the Aeneas's admission into the lower world; and III.22f., where Aeneas gives a due burial to the uneasily resting body of Polydorus. 8 Cyril Bailey, Religion in Virgä (Oxford, 1935), 75. Cf. Aeneid, IV.702. 9 See Georgics UlAS6;Aeneid H.132,156; IX.627;Odyssey III.425. 10 Bailey, 46-7. "Male-incense" (mascula thura) can be found in the Aeneid 1.416; XI.481, and Eclogues VIII.65. Ben Jonson also has a reference to "masculine gums" in The Kings Entertainment, 1L 615-16 in Works, ed. Herford & Simpson, VII (Oxford, 1941), 103.

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"ultimate triumph through 'sacrifice and suffering' ", 1 1 Herrick could not have failed to recognize, given his preference for the ceremonial, the religious value of Virgil, whom the Church of the Middle Ages greeted with such enthusiastic acclaim and to whose popularity the many translations and adaptations of the Renaissance testify. Primarily, however, the Virgins in the "Dirge" vow to keep a "Lent" for the daughter; they vow to "fast and weep". The poem is neither a parody of the epithalamium nor of the virgins' religious zeal, for the rites performed at the daughter's tomb are not the same as those that would be performed at her nuptials. They are the proper ceremonies of the deathrite and the commemorative celebration. The poem emerges, in spite of the pagan overtones given it by the identification of the sources of its ceremony, as a pure lyrical form of devotion which sanctifies the daughter's death but does not, in any sense, seek to transcend it. Though I should hesitate to insist that Herrick had any serious devotion to the Virgin Mary in mind, such devotion was not uncommon among the Anglicans who were closer to Roman Catholicism than to Puritanism. One need only recall such poems as Herbert's "Anagram of the Virgin Marie" or "To All Angels and Saints", Charles Fitz-Geoffrey's "The Blessed Birthday Celebrated", and Vaughan's "The Knot", as a survey of Anglican feelings about the place of Mary in an otherwise inhospitable period. And since Herrick's 'Mary' poems make use of the common iconographical and liturgical symbols associated with Mary, there is no need to completely discredit the idea that the "Dirge" was intended as a devotional poem in honor of the Virgin Martyr. 12 The poem takes its peculiar tone from the implements of Herrick's imagery, and the intention is devotional; but the worship is completely unlike that of any other devotional poet of the seventeenth-century. The other dirge in Noble Numbers, The Widdowes teares: or, Dirge of Dorcas, is also based on a scriptural story (Acts, IX. 36-43). Dorcas, or Tabitha, was a woman of great charity and almsdeeds who, having been taken ill and died, was placed in an upper room after her body had been washed. St. Peter, being nearby, came to this place and, upon entering the room, was shown by the weeping widows the coats and cloaks Dorcas had made for them. Peter then sent the women out of the room and raised Dorcas from the dead, thereby winning many converts to the new religion. Herrick's poem is the lament of the widows; St. Peter does not appear, and Dorcas is not resurrected. The first stanza recalls the opening lines of Herrick's His Saviours words and the fifty-first stanza of Herbert's The 11 12

Bailey, 318-19. See Christs Birth, The Virgin Mary, Another, The Virgin Mary.

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Sacrifice, all derived from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, I. 12:

Chor.

Come pitie us, all ye, who see Our Harpe hung on the Willow-tree: Come pitie us, ye Passers by, Who see, or heare poore Widdowes crie: Come pitie us; and bring your eares, And eyes, to pitie Widdowes teares. And when you are come hither; Then we will keep A Fast, and weep Our eyes out all together.

Like the Virgins in the Dirge of Jephthahs Daughter, the widows will also "keep / A Fast", but the significance of Dorcas's death is unlike anything in the former dirge. For, not only are the specific acts of her charity now to cease: Ο modest Matrons, weep and waile! For now the Corne and Wine must faile: The Basket and the Bynn of Bread, Wherewith so many soules were fed. Chor. Stand empty here for ever: And ah! the Poore, At thy womed Doore, Shall be releeved never. (11. 13-20) but the very processes of nature will now fail as well:

Chor.

But, ah, alas! the Almond Bough, And Olive Branch is wither'd now. The Wine Presse now is tane from us, The Saffron and the Calamus, The Spice and Spiknard hence is gone. The Storax and the Cynamon, The Caroll of our gladnesse Ha's taken wing, And our late spring Of mirth is turn'd to sadnesse. (11. 51-60)

And Dorcas is shrouded in her own beauties, while her acts of charity become the "strewings" of her tomb: And though thou here li'st dead, we see A deale of beauty yet in thee. How sweetly shewes thy smiling face, Thy lips with all diffused grace! Thy hands (though cold) yet spotlesse, white, And comely as the Chrysolite. (11. 71-76)

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Sleep with thy beauties here, while we Will shew these garments made by thee; These were the Coats, in there are read The monuments of Dorcas dead. These were thy Acts, and thou shalt have These hung, as honours o're thy Grave, And after us (distressed) Sho'd fame be dumb; Thy very Tomb Would cry out, Thou art blessed. (11.81-90)

The lasting articles of her charity are to live on while Dorcas's natural beauties die with her; even when the widows also die, her "fame" will not be "dumb". Dorcas's death is given special veneration by the Dirge sung for her; it is also given universal and ethical significance because the good she has done is not "interr'd with her bones". In both Dirges, the proper death-rites are performed. The ceremonies are not exactly the same, for one is more classical than the other. But the essential commemoration of the dead is assured both by the ceremony of the poem and by continuing ceremony explicitly stated in both poems. Jephthah's daughter is to have incense and flowers strewn upon her tomb, and Dorcas, being the more saintly and more Christian of the two, is to have not anything as classical as flowers, but the acts of her own charity strewn upon her tomb. After these are gone, Dorcas will live in fame, not in visible articles but in her name. For she, also, is a type of Virgin Mary: "Thou art blessed". In Herrick's secular death-rite poems, there is also a willingness to dwell upon two. elements in his poetic cosmos: the proper performance of sacred ceremonies as the right and just enactment of the law, and the power of these ceremonies to form a bond which links the mortal with the immortal life. Thomas Stroup, in describing the ritual in Milton's Lycidas, makes a number of suggestions which fit Herrick's death-rite ceremonies: "Ritual merges with non-ritual, the finite with the infinite, time with the timeless." 13 . Herrick, like Milton, adopts classical funeral rituals to suggest Christian death-rites. It is the nature of the funeral elegy, the logos of the form as it were, to declare itself a memorial service, not an occasional event, and in the truest sense, an act. Some have suggested that from his classical reading Herrick received Stoic, neo-Pythagorean, neo-Platonic, and mystical notions about the efficacy of such rituals. As we have seen in the death-rite poems from Noble Numbers, however, these concerns (if they exist at all) are 13

Thomas Stroup, Religious Rite and Ceremony in Milton's Poetry Kentucky, 1968), 14.

(Lexington,

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submerged beneath the ceremonial surface of his poetry. Placed in an atmosphere of ceremonial and ritual, part classical and part Christian, but, ultimately catholic and universal, the death-rites in Hesperides are complex reflections of his bookish antiquarianism, his unbounded interest in classical poetry, and his own fondness for the ceremonies of paganism and Christianity. There is little difference, in other words, between secular and sacred death-rite poetry in Henick. The mixture of pagan and Christian ceremonies in the famous "Funerall Rites of the Rose" has caused some concern for modern critics who seem unaware of the actual ceremony involved and who ignore the proper working of the ceremony in the poem itself. F. R. Leavis, for one, objects to the poem because it "does not refer us outside itself'. It is, he suggests, but a trifle compared to those poems in the "line of wit" because it asks us only to be "absorbed in the game, the 'solemn rite' ", 1 4 That is precisely Herrick's point, as I have tried to show it. It is surprising that though Douglas Bush has successfully countered Leavis's statement, he does not do so with direct reference to this particular poem: Herrick's best poems have a vein of seriousness that is more than pagan ... he has the unified vision that was the common inheritance of his age, the vision that embraces God and the book of the creatures in a divine whole.15 Of course Professor Bush is correct; he always is while he leaves it to lesser minds to add the final correcting adjective (in this case "ceremonial") between "unified" and "vision". Sydney Musgrove shares Professor Bush's defense of the Christian context of Herrick's poetry because the "commonest form of identification between one world and another in Herrick's poetry is that between the world of men and the world of plants". 16 Thomas R. Whitaker avoids discussing the ceremony of the poem for the sake of the "essentially religious concern for transcending the flux of life" whereby death "is sanctified by art; the beauty of the rose is removed from the flux of nature to the static realm of art ...", 17 Hence, The Funerall Rites of the Rose is the best fusion of the insistence upon the pioper ceremony with Herrick's special poetic concern: 14

F. R. Leavis, Revaluations (London, 1936), 40. Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, second edition, revised (Oxford, 1962), 118. Sydney Musgrove, The Universe of Robert Herrick (.Auckland University College Bulletin, No. 38, English Series No. 4) (1950), 18. 17 T. R. Whitaker, "Herrick and the Fruits of the Garden", ELH, XXII (1955), 19, 21. H. R. Swardson in his chapter "Henick and the Ceremony of Mirth" in Poetry and the Fountain of Light (London, 1962), 40-63, has very wisely not discussed the poem at all since it certainly does not support a view of Herrick's poetry as mirth. 15

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The Rose was sick, and smiling di'd; And (being to be sanctifi'd) About the Bed, there sighing stood The sweet, and f l o r a e Sisterhood. Some hung the head, while some did bring (To wash her) water from the Spring. Some laid her forth, while others wept, But all a solemne Fast there kept. The holy Sisters some among The sacred Dirge and Trentall sung. But ah! what sweets smelt every where, As Heaven had spent all perfumes there. At last, when prayers for the dead, And Rites were all accomplished; They, weeping, spread a Lawnie Loome, And clos'd her up, as in a Tom be. The Roman burial ceremony is clearly drawn here. 18 We meet this particular sisterhood elsewhere, as well: as the Virgins who come to sing the Trentalls in To Julia, to dress the tomb with flowers each morning and evening in An Epitaph upon a child, to weep and bring "flowrie honours" in To Flowers. The water used to wash the body is brought from a "Spring", the eyes of the mourners. Virgins also keep a "Fast", offer prayers and strew roses over the tomb in Upon his Kinswoman Mrs. M. S. In the poem Upon the death of his Sparrow, we are reminded of other poems by Catullus (III) and Marvell in this minor genre, where a "Lawnie Loome" is spread over the deceased. We may also speculate about the hearse cloth which Herrick spread over the Rose. In many poems he seems as much aware as was Sir Thomas Browne in Hydriotaphia, Urne Burial of the classical preference for roses and violets strewn on tombs, at the time of burial and at the yearly commemorative rites of the Feralia and Lemuria. Had he consulted Servius (on Aeneid III. 67 or V. 79), he would have found the explanation that red or purple flowers were strewn on the corpse in imitation of the blood which earlier flowed at all funerals. 19 Finally, in spite of all that he might or might not have known about the use of hearse cloths and their elaborate decoration in his own day, or about monthly commemorative 18

Information on the classical death-rite ceremony can be found in the following dictionaries (editions cited in Chapter II, Notes): Godwin, 90-95; Rosinus, Book V, cap. xxxix, 439-444 ;Giraldi, 741-2. " H e r r i c k may have found the same information in Ovid Fasti 11.535, or in Propertius, Elegies I.xvii.1-22; he may also have been aware of the Roman custom of leaving property to pay for the scattering of roses (cf. Cicero pro Flacco, 38-95; Suetonius, Nero LI.l), or the frequency with which roses are mentioned on Roman epitaphs (cf. Ausonius, Epitaph XXXI. 1-3).

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ceremonies, most certainly with Trentals and Requiems, he has envisioned a complete death-rite ceremony for the Rose. The most obvious point is that since the flowery "Sisterhood" is a religious order, it is impossible in either the world of flowers or of human beings to transcend the flux of life, i.e., Death. The poem is about the Death of the Rose, it is also about the "Funerall Rite" — indeed, it is the funeral rite. Where in the poem, either implicitly or explicitly, is there any justification for the Sisterhood's not accepting the fact of death? Their sole function as they see it (and as Herrick always sees it) is to prepare the body for final repose, to make sure that it is "to be sanctifi'd". There is no desire to transfigure death in the rites of sanctification, for all nature decays and dies. This is not an unusual preoccupation with decay of nature in Herrick's age. Death, then, cannot be transformed, transfigured or changed; it can, however, be sanctified. The death of the Rose is sanctified by "art" — the rite of sighing, hanging heads, bathing, laying her out, weeping, fastings, singing Dirge and Trentall, anointing, praying, and spreading over her the "Lawnie Loome". There seems to be no pun on "Spring" (as pastoral place and spring-time freshness of growth), for Herrick means very explicitly to involve the dew of the flowers (their tears) and the actual washing of the body in the conceit of the tears of flowers and mourners. 20 But the tears cannot awaken the Rose, or resurrect her in the Spring-time. For they are the tears shed for the decay the Sisterhood sees before them, the tears shed as part of the proper performance of the death-rite ceremony, and the tears shed in poems written in honor of the dead, like the "melodious tear" in Lycidas 14. The ceremony of the funeral rite is, then, the art of the poem. It is the art of sanctification neither for an escape from the flux of nature, nor for an escape into the realm of art, for the ceremony is itself of short duration. It can, however, be repeated daily, monthly, or yearly, as a commemoration of the beauty of the Rose. The Rose can, like friends, relatives, lovers, and other flowers, join Herrick's poetic calendar and hence not live statically but mnemonically. Since beauty is temporarily dead, and Herrick and the flowery Sisterhood accept that fact, it is only necessary to perform the ceremony of the occasion, thereby insuring sanctification for the dead. The "Lawnie Loome" now covers the beauty — art is covered by art — and, we might infer, only the ceremony as art can be renewed, not the beauty itself nor the Rose itself. For memory of the dead decays into memory of the ceremony of the dead. The function of the death-rite changes after the initial burial, but the form remains the 20

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity

(London, 1930), 162-3.

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same. The "art" of ceremony "lives". For this reason, only ceremony is eternal and, from Herrick's point of view, only the proper poetic ceremony can insure eternal significance. To a limited extent, then, there is an optimism of art provided by the poem but it is hardly pagan simply because of the attitude Herrick expresses. For Herrick's assumption here is that ceremony as art provides a mythic extension of life, an extension not provided by Christianity. If this is a pagan assumption, a good many Christians, and virtually all non-Christians are still pagans. In quite a few other death-rite poems Herrick is concerned primarily that the proper rite be performed over his remains. Typical of this concern, and of his use of the Roman rite in much of his poetry, is the poem To Perilla: Ah my Perilla! do'st thou grieve to see Me, day by day, to steale away from thee? Age cals me hence, and my gray haires bid come, And haste away to mine eternal home; 'Twill not be long (Perilla) after this, That I must give thee the supremest kisse: Dead when I am, first cast in salt, and bring Part of the creame from that Religious Spring·, With which (Perilla) wash my hands and feet; That done, then wind me in that very sheet Which wrapt thy smooth limbs (when thou didst implore The Gods protection, but the night before) Follow me weeping to my Turfe, and there Let fall a Primrose, and with it a teare: Then lastly, let some weekly-strewings be Devoted to the memory of me: Then shall my Ghost not walk about, but keep Still in the coole, and silent shades of sleep. The poem has classical precedents: Tibullus (III.ii.9f) describes the rites to be performed at his tomb, though they appear to be made in memory of him and not at his initial burial; and Propertius in the Elegies (I.xix.23f) voices an anguished fear that the proper rites will not be performed at his tomb. No modern critic has, however, reckoned with the fourth line: "And haste away to mine eternal home", a statement of the certitude of salvation which recalls the simple assurance of the last couplet of The Argument of His Book: I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall) Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all. Herrick is not often this explicit in his affective piety, but this spirit infects his secular verse as much as his devotional poems in Noble Numbers. The "supremest kisse" is, of course, the last breath of the dying man

•

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given, with an ironic reversal, to his next of "kin", Perilla. It represents Herrick's genius for finding that one element in classical ceremony which, in its own poetic context, can give a fresh and illuminating insight into his meaning. The salt is also a common element in all Herrickean ceremonies as are Perilla's tears, the "creame from that Religious Spring", her eyes. A bed sheet now serving as a winding sheet is another common image. At this point, however, the poet shifts the direction of his narrative, seeking concrete and realistic images which will in some way sanctify the action he is describing; he finds them in the Roman ceremony of death-rites. For in To Perilla Herrick describes himself as being buried: his "Turfe" may be either the turf which covers his body or ashes, or it may be the present turf which will become the future turf of an altar on another day of commemoration. Or, the turf may be the altar of his tomb as in His charge to Julia at his death. The "Primrose" and the "teare" are typical elements in Herrick's death-rites, as in An Epitaph upon a child, where a yearly observance of the child's death is invoked in terms of the primrose: Virgins promis'd when I dy'd, That they wo'd each Primrose-tide, Duely, Morne and Ev'ning, come, And with flowers dresse my Tomb.

(11. 1-4)

If, then, Perilla will perform the ceremony over his remains as Herrick instructs her, his "Ghost" will lie tranquil. In like manner, when a Roman died, his family could insure his easy repose in the "silent shades of sleep" by the exact fulfilment of the burial rites (the iusta facere).21 These rites were carried out with the most elaborate attention to detail so that the deceased would not find his way back (he was carried out of his home feet-first), and so that this ghost or "shade" would pass safely down to the underworld where he would become, presumably, one of the Manes.22 Herrick is, therefore, very much concerned that the rites be properly performed. In To Perilla, in spite of the reference to his "eternal home", the primary reason for the exposition of the ritual is to assure his "Ghost" a peacefull repose. Yet, in other poems urging the proper ceremony, Herrick chooses to be less accurately pagan concerning the danger of 21

Warde Fowler, Religious Experience, 84-5. Additional assurance of the continued well-being of the Manes was provided by the annual festivals of the Lemuria and the Feralia, according to Ovid's Fasti V.421. Since there seems little doubt that Herrick knew Virgil intimately, he may also have recalled Virgil's description of the reburial of Polydorus, who rests uneasily in his grave because he was not properly buried (Aeneid III.62-8), or the anniversary ceremony at the grave of Anchises when a snake appears from beneath the tomb to accept the offerings of wine, milk, and flowers (Aeneid V.4 2-103.). 22

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resurrected Manes while at the same time drawing upon the pagan burial rites. He charges Julia to Cut off thy haires; and let thy Teares be shed Over my Turfe, when I am buried. Then for effusions, let none wanting be, Or other Rites that doe belong to me; (His charge to Julia at his death, 11.3-6) and in a more Christian manner, implores Biancha: Some effusions let me have, Offer'd on my holy Grave; Then, Biancha, let me rest With my face towards the East. (To Biancha, 11. 4-8) Although there is ample classical and biblical precedent for the hairs cut off as a first-offering and for the custom of laying the body in the grave facing east, so that he may rise to meet the Son (with the obvious pun) at Doomsday, the whole concept of offerings made to the dead, in the same spirit as those made to placate the gods, is unique with Herrick 2 3 Perhaps justifiably, he has been condemned for being more concerned with the Roman than with the Christian ceremonies of the dead. Herrick does not seem concerned with the ethical or orthodox implications of either ceremony but with the purpose of the "effusions" in his poetry. In To the reverend shade of his religious Father, the orthodox rites have not been performed, and the "effusions" have not been given. Herrick's own father, a prosperous goldsmith, had possibly committed suicide and though he was buried promptly, Herrick has maintained the older belief that a suicide could not be buried with the proper funeral rites. The poem is a not altogether imaginary exposition of the rites that Herrick would wish to have performed for the restless "shade": That for seven L usters I did never come To doe the Rites to thy Religious Tombe: That neither haire was cut, or true teares shed By nie, o'r thee (as justments to the dead) Forgive, forgive me; since I did not know Whether thy bones had here their Rest, or no. But now 'tis known, Behold; behold, I bring Unto thy Ghost, th'Effused Offering: And look, what Smallage, Night-shade, Cypresse, Yew, Unto the shades have been, or now are due, Here I devote; And something more then so; 23

See Homer, Odyssey IV.264; Virgil, Aeneid IV.694; Job 1.20; Jeremiah VII.39; Isaiah XV. 24; see also the contemporary account of the burial rite in Hierurgia Anglic ana, I, 254.

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I come to pay a Debt of Birth I owe. Thou gav'st me life, (but Mortall;) For that one Favour, lie make full satisfaction; For my life mortall, Rise from out thy Herse, And take a life immortall from my Verse. It would be interesting to speculate whether Herrick had ever encountered the designation of the death-rites as the iusta facere and had consciously echoed the term in "as justments to the dead", or whether by the word "Lusters" Herrick had in mind the passing of seven years of anniversary purifications (derived from the Latin for purifying, "lustratio") which he would have found in the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, or just the seven days when incense was offered on an outside altar. There is ample classical evidence that the "shade" did, indeed, wander about the world or lie restless in its tomb until it received proper burial. 24 Elsewhere, Herrick offers crowns of parsley ("Smallage") to the Lares as a household god (in To Larr and Α Hymne, to the Lares); here he offers them to the spirit of his father. First fruits — hairs cut from the head of the victim, or the first crops taken from the fields — were proper offerings to the household gods, as was parsley. They would all be particularly appropriate to the dead. 25 Night-shade (belladonna), cypress and yew are the sacred boughs consumed in funeral pyres, placed over the deceased's gate, and symbolized mourning as Herrick, no doubt, knew had he heard Feste's song in Twelfth Night (II.iv. 50-65): Come away, come away, death, And in sad cypress let me be laid. My shroud of white, stuck all with yew, Ο prepare it. Not a flower, not a flower sweet, On my black coffin let there be strown; The cypress is used because it is the tree of death and loses all its vitality as soon as it is cut from the tree. 26 Symbolically it represents the mutability of life, the "Times trans-shifting" theme presented in The Argument of his Booke. It has, therefore, considerable intrinsic value. The proper rite having been indicated, Herrick proceeds to the purpose of the poem and my second major concern. The ritual is necessary for 24

Aeneid VI.365, and III 63ff., where Palinurus cannot cross in Charon's boat until he receives the proper burial. 25 Plutarch, Quaestiones Romanes, ed., Η. J. Rose (Oxford, 1924), XXXIV. 26 See also To Perenna, To the Yew and Cypresse..., His Age, Upon M. William Lawes.

120 CEREMONY AND DEATH honoring the dead and for providing a link between the mortal and immortal worlds. The ritual does not remove his father from "Times trans-shifting"; indeed, it assures him of it. In return for the gift of life given him by his father, Herrick provides a resurrection, not of his father's ghost as for the ghost in To Perilla, but an immortality in his verses. The death-rites provide a proper burial for the wandering "shade", a consolation to be sure, but death is not evaded or sanctified by the death-rites. The assurance of quiet rest is sanctified by the ritual which becomes the vehicle of sanctification. But the ceremony of burial only provides a temporary and inimitably necessary conclusion to the human life. The ceremony dies, like the now safely reposing shade, and is given further significance and immortality only in the verse which describes it. The ceremonial verse, the "art", has not transcended, by any means, the fact of death, nor has it removed the body from death, only continuing significance for the value of the life which the ceremony of the death-rite has informed. Having fulfilled the proper ceremony, Herrick provides his father with a poetic afterlife and assures him a place in a poetic eschatology. This conception of death-rites clarifies much that has formerly been judged pagan in Hernck's funereal verses, and by implication, in all of Henick's poetry. Still another combination of the concern with the proper ceremony and the poetic efficacy of that ceremony confronts us in A Dirge upon the Death of the Right Valiant Lord, Bernard Stuart. There is, in the very first couplet, a unique combination of the Roman and the Christian: Hence, hence profane; soft silence let us have; While we this Trentall sing about thy Grave. The first line is the typical Roman imprecation for purity and silence at the beginning of a sacrifice. The "Trentall" was part of Roman Catholic usage and continued to be used throughout the Elizabethan period. Herrick's frequent use of Dirge and Trental is always in a Roman Catholic context, mitigated (and thereby catholicized) somewhat by the occasion of the poem: I a Dirge will pen for thee; Thou a Trentail make for me: That the Monks and Fryers together, Here may sing the rest of either:

(To Perenna 11. 3-4)

The Saints-bell calls; and, Julia, I must read The Proper Lessons for the Saints now dead: To grace which Service, Julia, there shall be One Holy Collect, said or sung for Thee. Dead when thou art, Deare Julia, thou shalt have

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Α Trentall sung by Virgins o're thy Grave: Means time we two will sing the Dirge of these; Who dead, deserve our best remembrances. {To Julia) [iv] In these poems the dirge and trental are merely vehicles for the expression of the proper ceremony. Indeed, Herrick seems to see his role as poet as one of providing these dirges and trentals for those who deserve "our best remembrances", as public verses in other words. This function he fulfills in the Dirge upon the Death of... Stuart with the additional lament that Had Wolves or Tigers seen but thee, They wo'd have shew'd civility; And in compassion of thy yeeres, Washt those thy purple wounds with tears. But since th'art slaine; and in thy fall, The drooping Kingdome suffers all. (11. 3-8) Herrick's Royalist loyalty and his outrage at the Civil War (through which he lost his vicarage of Dean Prior) allow him to declare the upstart Puritans, his natural foes, "Wolves or Tigers". He would perhaps have sanctioned all that they might have done had they "shew'd civility". This is the "civility" of observing the proper ceremonies as well as the decorous "civility" of war. These uncivilized men are, as Marvell labels them, "Wanton troopers", lacking in that synonym for civility, a "cleanly Wantonesse". As a poet, therefore, the only thing for Herrick to do upon the death of a man whose loss is the microcosm of all losses is to offer the appropriate ceremony: This we will doe; we'll daily come And offer Tears upon the Tomb: And if that they will not suffice, Thou shalt have soules for sacrifice. Sleepe in thy peace, while we with spice perfume thee, And Cedar wash thee, that no times consume thee. (11. 9-14) These lines are parts of the usual burial custom, except that Herrick has consciously made Stuart a divinity whose tomb is not strewn with gifts of wreaths, boughs, salt, wine or milk, but an altar on which a sacrifice of "soules" will be made. The nature of Stuart's divinity is hardly comparable to Christ's unless the world suffered by Christ's fall. Stuart is Adamic not Christ-like. As though the "soules for sacrifice" were a wailing chant sent up to the gods, or as though Herrick were aware of the significance of what he has just written, a noteworthy shift in dramatic voice occurs in the poem at

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this place. The celebrant or narrator who speaks the first two passages is halted by the Chorus which now indicates its intention of performing the ceremony. Their interruption is an antiphonal remonstrance: Live, live thou dost, and shalt; for why? Soules doe not with their bodies

Cho.

die:

Ignoble off-springs, they may fall Into the flames of Funerall: When as the chosen seed shall spring Fresh, and for ever flourishing. And times to come shall, weeping, read thy glory, Lesse in these Marble stones, then in thy story. (11. 15-22)

Here, then, is the full expression of the potentially troublesome Christian dualism of body and soul; peculiarly, at least for the pagan detractors of Herrick's verse, the same statement can be found in Ovid and Tacitus. Whereas in earlier poems there was the suspicion that devotion to the tomb amounted to nurture for the soul living beneath the earth, devotion to a "shade", in this poem the Roman concept is completely avoided. The bodies — the "Ignoble off-springs" — die when they fall into the funeral fire; the souls "live". The souls live as the "chosen seed". Herrick's use of "seed" to represent the soul comes directly from the 'Order for the Buriall of the Dead' (I Corinthians XV. 38): "but God giveth it a body at his pleasure, to euerye sede his own bodye". 2 7 Paradoxically, the seed shall "spring" again, as the seed of the plant, with all the implications of that mythopoeic identification. And it shall "spring" again at the Last Judgment with the full Christian implications of the transcendence of death. 28 The seed shall also be "Fresh, and for ever flourishing", and not subject to nature's decay because its glory is written, not in the tomb ("these Marble stones"), but in Stuart's story - Herrick's poem and his poetic pantheon. We meet this eschatological conception repeatedly in Herrick's poetic calendar, in ceremonial poems about sacrifice, love, and, of course in death-rite poems: I've paid thee, what I promis'd; that's not All; Besides I give Thee here a Verse that shall (When hence thy Circum-mortall-part is gon) Arch-like, hold up, Thy Name's Inscription. Brave men can't die; whose Candid Actions are Writ in the Poets Englesse-Kalendar: Whose velome, and whose volumne is the Skie, 27

The Pray er-Book of Queen Elizabeth, 1559 (Edinburgh, 1911), 137. For the Christian implications of the word "seed" see Paradise Lost, Book X, 179-81; Book X, 1031;Book XII, 543-4, 621-23.

28

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And the pure Starres the praising Poetrie. (To his peculiar Friend Master Thomas Shapcott) and in To his Honoured Kinsman, Sir Richard Stone '. To this white Temple of my Heroes, here Beset with stately Figues (every where) Of such rare Saint-ships, who did here consume Their lives in sweets, and left in death perfume. (11. 1-4)

All nature, then, from the seeds to the blossoms to the natural world of man is part of this, Herrick's poetic Proper. Poetry's saints, like the actual saints in To Julia, are served by the ceremonial ritual performed as their obsequies. Herrick's ambition in this kind of poetry is, doubtless, a noble one; to write his verses in the "Skie" is to awaken all men and God and the Saints and all orders to the power of ceremonial for sanctifying the dead he celebrates in his poetry. One of Herrick's most famous poems is His Prayer to Ben Jonson: When I a Verse shall make, Know I have praid thee, For old Religions sake, Saint Ben to aide me. Make the way smooth for me, When I thy Herrick, Honouring thee, on my knee Offer my Lyrick. Candles lie give to thee, And a new Altar; And thou Saint Ben, shall be Writ in my Psalter. The sprinkling of religious terminology in the poem creates an emotional effect that "Saint Ben" himself would have admired. But the saint image only serves to frame the lyric and to heighten the emotion. Image and thought are held, peculiarly, apart. And the words "old Religion" are puzzling unless we read them as nostalgia for something which has been abandoned with some reluctance. Indeed, they may be read as nostalgia for an older and now alien (to Herrick at least) veneration of saints. But these readings seem to overlook the last two words of the prayer: "my Psalter". Herrick's meaning is obvious, the Psalter is his book, Hesperides, just as it is in two other poems which also use the saint image to refer to his poetic volume: To his worthy Kinsman, Mr. Stephen Soame Nor is my Number full, till I inscribe

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Thee sprightly Soame, one of my righteous Tribe: ... since I doe prefer Thee here in my eternall Calender. To his Kinswoman, Mrs. Penelope Wheeler Next is your lot (Faire) to be number'd one, Here, in my Book's Canonization: Late you come in; but you a Saint shall be, In Chiefe, in this Poetick Liturgie. The last two words of the latter poem have been italicized because they provide the key to much of the ceremonial we have been examining. Herrick thinks of his ceremonial poems as liturgical pieces; some of the poems in Noble Numbers were used in liturgical services. Though we may agree with H. R. Swardson that there seems to be a "fairly superficial play on Christian terms" in the Jonson poem, certainly there is little to indicate that the reference of "for old Religions sake" is to a "counter-religion", a "pagan, or pre-Christian religion", for Herrick's reference is to a poetic liturgy and a poetic-Christian religion. The poem is a statement of the ritualistic realism of a poetic mode that is not seeking to reconcile a "double perspective", pagan and Christian, but to render a single vision which, perhaps coincidentally, has two (or even more) complementary parts.2 9 Indeed Herrick reminds us again and again that he is concerned with the immortality of his poetry. By casting these poems in the framework of religious terms, of saints and psalters, he is transcending the veneration of his verses through the sainthood of Jonson, Soame, and Mrs. Wheeler. This and this alone is Herrick's 'text'. The eternal significance of the saints in the "old Religion" is, by this poetic transference and realism, assured for his poetry, and not exclusively for his ceremonial poems, though only these concern us here. And in this context and under this perspective, though the images are often drawn from what appears to be a pagan religion, or a religion which is not quite what we would expect of Christian Anglicanism, the effect, poetically, is almost always an acceptance of Christian values. But the fusion of the 'traditions' of paganism and Christianity, if we must dichotomize them, is not always complete, nor should we expect it to be so. In the poem To Groves, all the elements of death-rites examined here are found and, if my analyses have been just, we can no longer read the poem simply as a devotion to the "Legend of those Saints / That di'd for love": Yee silent shades, whose each tree here Some Relique of a Saint doth weare: 29

Swardson, 48-9.

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Who for some sweet-hearts sake, did prove The fire, and martyrdome of love. Here is the Legend of those Saints That di'd for love; and their complaints: Their wounded hearts; and names we find Encarv'd upon the Leaves and Rind. Give way, give way to me, who come Scorch't with the self-same martyrdome: And have deserv'd as much (Love knowes) As to be canoniz'd 'mongst those, Whose deeds, and deaths here written are Within your Greenie-Kalendar: By all those Virgins Fillets hung Upon your Boughs, and Requiems sung For Saints and Soules departed hence, (More honour'd still with Frankincense) By all those teares that have been shed, As a Drink-offering, to the dead: By all these True-love-knots, that be With Motto's carv'd on every tree, By sweet S. Phillis·, pitie me: By deare S. Iphis\ and the rest, Of all those other Saints now blest; Me, me, forsaken, here admit Among your Mirtles to be writ: That my poore name may have the glory To live remembred in your story. Here is that rare blend of the Roman burial and commemorative rites the "silent shades", the "Virgins Fillets hung / Upon your Bough", the "Frankincense", the tears shed as a "Drink-offering", the "Mirtles" — with the more Christian references — the "Relique, the fire, and martyrdome," those to be "canoniz'd", the "Requiems" (Trentals), the saints invoked. The eternal essences are contained within the realm of the ceremony performed; all men and all women enter into the ceremony and are temporarily sanctified by it. Herrick's own martyrdom for love reaches a higher significance (the evaluation of this experience), and his "glory" is only remembered in the "stoiy" of the other saints-martyrs. Continued remembrance is assured when he, or someone like him, reads the "Proper Lessons for the Saint now dead." It is the performance of these rites of remembrance, the observance of the proprieties of the Saints and their ritualistic requirements, that links the mortal to the immortal worlds. When the details of the death-rites are not obtrusive or interesting for more than archaeological reasons, Herrick maintains the necessary historical distance so that his "awareness" achieves in a new poetic creation a fresh and illuminating look at the past. A pervasive ceremonial mode informs these verses. This mode gives the newly created poem a life of its

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own, and informs the poem with an awareness of the relationship between the ceremonial of the past and the ceremonial of the present. If the pagan ceremonial of the past is read only as trivial artifact, used solely for embellishment, then a devotion to a "counter-Religion" can be a justifiable conclusion. And this can always be the conclusion of some readers. If the ceremony is read with an informed eye to the proper and due ceremony as it actually was performed, and as it has been transformed and transfigured by the poet's awareness, the result is something very different.

4. CEREMONY AS CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL VISION

Henick's variety in creating the English scene poetically is truly astonishing. As a London poet and reputedly the foremost among the 'sons of Ben', his poems about the rural festivals and holidays might be expected to evidence a good deal of the city poet's satire. And some poems do. But there is a definite range within the English scene. It certainly includes all the poems to the gods, to God, to fairies, to beloved girls, as well as celebrations of life and death. It includes, here, poems like the epithalamies which are 'literary' and sophisticated (as are the fairy poems), but these are almost too pedantically sophisticated. Then there are those poems which celebrate rural festivals and holidays, minor feasts and sacramental occasions. These appear to be more 'countrified'. They are Herrick's most deceptive and elusive poems because of the attitudes toward the scenes they recreate. Finally, there are the great trumpet notes of civilization in the grand tradition, the 'country life' and 'country house' poems. All of the poems in this range of the English scene are concerned with Herrick's awareness of the historical and cultural vision which his poetry embodies. The order in which they are discussed here is an order of aesthetic distancing. I Herrick's epithalamies betray an obvious literary debt to Renaissance commentaries on Roman marriage customs, to the classical poets (notably to Catullus's Carmina LXI, LXII, LXIV), to Ben Jonson's masque Hymenaei, and of course to Edmund Spenser's Epithalamium and Prothalamium. Although it may be interesting to suggest a more positieve influence, there is ample evidence that Herrick, as well as Jonson, is dependent for his antiquarian knowledge upon the handbooks of antiquities. Herrick is also as indebted to Jonson as he is to the other erudite sources. But we should like to examine his achievement in such a highly stylized and symbolic genre as the epithalamium. In particular, we would wish to observe the thematic and functional operations of the marriage

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ceremonial. For epithalamies are, after all, set literary pieces; they are 'played' performances which are guided by conventions long recognized and practised by the great 'London poets'. The Roman quality of Herrick's An Epithalamie to Sir Thomas Southwell and His Ladie is less pronounced than that in Jonson's Hymenaei. It is less a work of scholarship than Jonson's masque, for the structure of the poem is not derived from the ritual it presents as is Jonson's symbolic and topical masque. The details of the poem are not always the same as Jonson's or his avowed sources: Lilio Giraldi, Alexander ab Alexandro, Barnabe Brisson, and Antoine Hotman.1 And it is these differences that make Herrick's poem a work of art rather than of scholarship. It is a poem which, while revealing his bookish antiquarianism, also reveals the occasional but decorous and orderly celebration of a significant life-event. It is the celebration of order through ceremony. As a case in point, L. C. Martin suggests (p. 510) that Henick imagines the marriage ceremonies as taking place at the bridegroom's house, whereas the Roman marriage ceremony in fact took place at the home of the bride. The first four stanzas of the poem do not place the ceremony in any particular place, for Herrick constantly urges the evidently reluctant bride along in her march to the bridegroom's house where "the Bridegrooms Torch I [Is] Hälfe wasted in the porch". But the bashful bride is dallying from fear as her advisor, perhaps Herrick as priest, reminds her: Is it (sweet maid) your fault these holy Bridall-Rites goe on so slowly? Deare, is it this you dread, The losse of Maiden-head? Beleeve me; you will most Esteeme it when 'tis lost: Then it no longer keep, Lest Issue lye asleep. Then away; come, Hymen guide To the bed, the bashfull Bride. Even the moon would be willing to perform the nuptial rites for the bride if the promise of the union were as great: 'Tis strange, ye will not flie To Love's sweet mysterie. Might yon Full-Moon the sweets Have, promis'd to your sheets; She soon wo'd leave her spheare, To be admitted there. (Stanza IV, 11.33-38) 1 Ben Jonson, Works, Volume X, ed. C. H. Herford & Percy Simpson (Oxford, 1950), 468-469; see also the article by D. J. Gordon cited in Chapter I.

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H. J. Rose in his translation and edition of Plutarch's Roman (Questions (Oxford, 1924) supplies a great deal of information about the actual Roman marriage ceremony: the bride spent a long time attiring herself while still at her father's house, with reddish veils and her hair arranged in six curls; she then meets the groom, enters into a formal contract with the bridegroom after which a 'love feast' follows. Not until the evening was the bride brought to the bridegroom's house in procession. Herrick is not, however, concerned with the actual parts of the marriage ceremony except to refer to them in analyzing the delaying tactics of the bride (a new twist to the conventional delaying tactics of the bride in most Renaissance epithalamia). And his poem does take place at night: "Night now hath watch'd her self half blind" (1. 31). The fifth through the ninth stanzas of the poem are concerned with the procession to the bridegroom's house. Plutarch informs us that the bride was taken by force from the arms of her mother and, accompanied by three boys (and we imagine others in the wedding party), made her way to her husband's house. One boy carried before her a torch of white-thorn or of pine wood; the other two carried a distaff and spindle, symbols of the wifely duties the bride would now have to assume. Five tapers of virgin wax were carried by servants, and boys (favorites of the husband) threw nuts in the path of the bride. When the bride reached the house, she rubbed fat on the door-posts, wreathed them with wool fillets, and was lifted over the threshold by her kinsmen. Herrick's stanzas, however, merely use this ritual procession as a point of reference. Among the many animistic deities (Domiduca, Interduca, Unxia, Cinxia) who protected the bride and her train — the Roman counterpart to Belinda's cortege of spirits — Herrick mentions only "Domiduca", a "Genius who attends / The bed for luckie ends", and Juno with the Horae, caretakers of the seasons and the parts of the day. Nowhere in Jonson, in his sources or in the classical poets, is it mentioned that the Graces (Aglaia, Thalia, and Euphrosyne) strew flowers in the path of the bride, as they do in Herrick's poem (1. 46). He also avoids the controversy over whether Hymen or the boy preceding the bride carried a torch, and whether the torch was of pine or white thorn.2 Hymen's torch merely shows how much of the night has past. He also fails to mention that Hymen is crowned with Roses and Maijoram, as does Jonson. Nor does he follow Jonson's (and Jonson's sources) accounts that the "Tapers five" are necessary in nuptials because the number five cannot be divided into equal parts, or that they represent the need of five nuptial deities. He has changed completely the implications of the torches: 2

Ben Jonson, Hymenaei, 11. 48-51 and notes, in Works, Volume II, ed. C. H. Herford & Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, 1941), 210-11.

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And now those Tapers five, That shew the womb shall thrive: Their silv'rie flames advance, To tell all prosp'rous chance Still shall crown the happy life Of the good man and the wife. (11. 55-60) The five torches symbolize not unity (as in Jonson), but fecundity; their flames are "white" or propitious omens signifying that Hymen is favorably disposed to the couple. Indeed, the phrase "the happy life" could be used to condemn Herrick's anthropocentric conception of the marriage union, a physical union which is not of any higher significance, i.e., final salvation. It is not, or so it seems to me, necessary that "the happy life" have any other significance except a kind of half-hearted theocentric one, unless all epithalamies are to be viewed as anthropocentric statements and unless fecundity and fertility in the new couple are not integral and at least hoped-for parts of every marriage ceremony, literary and real. Surely Herrick's subtle satire is not all that subtle. Nor is Herrick's invocation to Hymen in any sense an erotic and pagan plea for sensual abandon. The union is of a "good man" and "wife", and nothing further need be said since the proper order is established without any taint. In stanza seven the procession moves forward on "Rosie feet". Catullus (LXI. 8.162-3) has indicated that the bride wears, as she should, yellow shoes; Herrick does not mention her shoes, but he does note that she wears a yellow veil (1. 71) signifying modesty. And the bride walks on characteristically Herrickean roses until she is at the threshold, where she knits her fillets to the posts and anoints their sides (Stanza IX), and then is lifted inside the house by her kinsmen, as is appopriate. She enters, the doors are barred, the bridegroom distributes nuts (note this is after the doors are barred), fire and water with all their symbolic implications are indicated (11. 125-6), and the epithalamium closes with seven stanzas of prayers and supplications for health and happy life. The last two stanzas provide the ceremonial conclusion: On your minutes, hours, dayes, months, years, Drop the fat blessing of the sphears. That good, which Heav'n can give To make you bravely live; Fall, like a spangling dew, By day, and night on you. May Fortunes Lilly-hand Open at your command; With all luckie Birds to side With the Bride-groom, and the Bride.

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Let bounteous Fate your spindles full Fill, and winde op with whitest wooll. Let them not cut the thred Of life, untill ye bid. May Death yet come at last; And not with desp'rate hast: But when ye both can say, Come, Let us now away. Be ye to the Barn then born, Two like two ripe shocks of corn. The celebrant's poetic effort here is to supply the apotheosis of eternity. The ceremony which supplies the sanction of union and the blessing for and hope for issue of that union is completed, the further promise of lasting and immutable union is given. The spheres and Heaven and Fortune give their blessing. The dramatically playful movement of the poem is through delaying time, to a time of potential ripeness, and then through all time to eternity. In A Nuptiall Song, or Epithalamie, on Sir Clipseby Crew and his Lady the use of the Roman marriage ceremony is even less intrusive than in the Epithalamie. What little ceremony there is is contained in the first two couplets of the fourth stanza: Him en, Ο Him en! Tread the sacred ground; Shew thy white feet, and head with Marjoram crown'd: Mount up thy flames, and let thy Torch Display the Bridegroom in the porch. The torch becomes even further disassociated with its symbolic function in Jonson and merely illuminates the bridegroom waiting for his bride; Hymen's feet are not held in yellow but in white shoes (or in none at all), and his head is, now, properly wreathed with Maijoram. In later stanzas, the roses of his crown are transferred or dropped to the path beneath the feet of the wedding party. In the fifth stanza, the bride and groom are sprinkled with "wheat", which has, as far as I can discover, no immediate source; and if some charm is needed to urge the two young people to bed, Herrick promises If needs we must for Ceremonies-sake Blesse a Sack-posset·, Luck go with it; A Nuptiall Song is, however, a more highly symbolic and at the same time more extraordinarily sensual poem than the Epithalamie. The bride, again, is the focus of the observer's attention, but she delays less, perhaps, because the poem is more heavily conceited. She is, in the first stanza, identified as spring, daybreak, a new star, a goddess, and finally Venus. All of these are conventional epithets; Herrick uses them to refer to the Queen

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in To the Queen. Appropriately she emerges from a shrine (in the second stanza) and exudes fragrances which precede her. In the third stanza, goddess and divinity, heavenly and earthly identity fuse incarnationally: The Phenix nest, Built up of odours, burneth in her breast. Who therein wo'd not consume His soule to Ash-heaps in that rich perfume? Bestroaking Fate the while He burnes to Embers on the Pile. (11. 25-30)

Herrick's Baroque tendencies are indicated here in the sensuousness of the imagery and in the excessively hyperbolic identification. The emphasis is on seeing and smelling but without the intellectual sharpness of the metaphysical poets. The sensuous apprehension is on this side the intellectual identity, and the image is more characteristic of Crashaw than any other poet. In Donne's "The Canonization", the conceit of the selfimmolating Phoenix is focused on the new entity which arises from the fire — a new "love". In Herrick the fire is all, and sensuousness never is consumed foi the sake of a new creation. And in the next stanza, the sensuousness of the fire continues to be identified with the hyperbolic situation, this time with Hymen's torch which Display/i/the Bridegroom in the porch, In his desires More towring, more disparkling then thy fires: Shew her how his eyes do turne And roule about, and in their motions burne Their balls to cindars: haste, Or else to ashes he will waste. The Phoenix with its sensuous parallels never becomes a conceit precisely because the fire of desire in the bridegroom will be continued and the incarnational ashes will not produce, at this point in the poem at least, the new phoenix. Two stanzas of conventional delay and ceremonial progress follow, wherein the bride is urged, rather grotesquely, to multiply "as doth a Fish" and is urged not to "turne Apostate" to love. The bride is then greeted by Cook and Butler and urged, by the narrator, "to bed, to bed" after distributing appropriate gifts. She is very obliquely undressed amid Sirens, Cherubin, Cupids, and the bed is (finally! ) ready: . . .and the maze of Love Lookes for the treaders; every where is wove Wit and new misterie; read, and Put in practise, to understand

CEREMONY AS CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL VISION 133 And know each wile, Each hieroglyphick of a kisse or smile; And so it to the full; reach High in your own conceipt, and some way teach Nature and Art, one more Play, then they ever knew before. (Stanza XIII, 11. 121-130) The extended compliment here is indeed hyperbolic, for the united pair will 'play' an improvement on both Art and Nature by providing a new play, a new drama as it were. In the entire poem as playful compliment, the play of bride and bridegroom is beyond what either Nature or Art can provide. And like the other epithalamium, the final place in eternity is provided. It is fitted out with the onlooking stars through the "two Nations" which will spring from their union. Fires of desire and of love, once sanctified by marriage, will prove immutable artifacts which will transcend time. And in the other marriage poems — Upon a maid that dyed the day she was marryed, The Entertainment', or, Porch-verse, To the Maids to walke abroad. To Anthea — the same kind of selective detail is employed, not for an accurate and impeccable account of the Roman marraige ceremony, but only to focus the attention upon the present ceremony, or preparation for that ceremony. On a briefer scale, Herrick's most characteristic use of the articles of the marriage ceremony can be seen in To Anthea: Lets call for Hymen if agreed thou art; Delays in love but crucifie the heart. Loves thornie Tapers yet neglected lye: Speak thou the word, they'l kindle by and by. The nimble howers wooe us on to wed, And Genius waits to have us both to bed. Behold, for us the Naked Graces stay With maunds of roses for to strew the way: Besides, the most religious Prophet stands Ready to joyne, as well our hearts as hands. Juno yet smiles; but if she chance to chide, 111 luck 'twill bode to th' Bridegroome and the Bride. Tell me Anthea, dost thou fondly dread The loss of what we call a Maydenhead? Come, He instruct thee. Know, the vestall fier Is not by marriage quencht, but flames the higher. Here the elements of ritual and ceremony are merely suggested; and to the minds of his contemporaries, Herrick's debts and sources would have been instantly recognized, particularly after Jonson's pedantic exposition of them. But Jonson's Hymenaei is wholly Roman, even with its topical and symbolic significances. Herrick's masque-like poems become dramatic

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analyses by virtue of the un-intrusive ceremony. The Christian-Roman details of the marriage ritual remain interrelated and fused, and virgin devotion to God — represented by the vestal fire in the poem above — is not quenched and starved by marriage, it only "flames the higher". The fire and heat germinated by the culmination of the epithalamia (always in the forefront in Herrick's marriage poems) are sanctified by the ceremony. The ceremony sanctifies the progress of the epithalamia, particularly when the "religious Prophet" stands ready to sanctify (with another ritual) the physical union. Herrick, in his role as priest, prophet, as narrator and observer, stands by ready to sanctify the natural world's unions. The marriage poems, precisely because they are not accurate historically, seem to seek a universality of expression, a revaluation of what is eternally taking place between men and women in a natural world which always has eternal significancy. II Although there are many poems in the Herrick canon which specifically recreate his English scene, his eclectic sense of rituals, and his ability to find in rituals and ceremonies the vehicles for the expression of his ideas and evaluations, he seems to have been only slightly stimulated by the liturgical calender of his own church. Elsewhere I have observed that Herrick undoubtedly saw a distinct relationship between Holy Communion and the Roman sacrifice, between the proper and due offerings to the gods and the veneration of saints, and between the veneration for the dead and the devotion due both spiritual and poetic saints. The present group of poems will demonstrate that his use of the ceremonies and the feast days of the Anglican Church seems, by comparison, to be less functional and less realized. Nowhere in the secular poems does he reflect his intimate acquaintance with the ceremonies and rituals of the great immovable Christian feasts — Christmas, Circumcision, Epiphany, Candlemasse, All Saints and All Souls, or the proper of the Saints. He seems, however, to have been attracted by the more simple rituals of the Anglican Church and by the rural festivals and ceremonies. For, even the poems celebrating Christmas, Candlemasse, and Twelfth Night are not poetic statements or recreations of the liturgically appointed ceremonies for those feast days, but, rather, the rural and pastoral observances and effusions celebrated on those festival days. Four poems treat what in modern liturgical terms would be called "sacramentals" rather than "sacraments". In each case, Herrick has a double view of the ceremony involved: a classical and a contemporary view. The ancient classical devotion to the god of boundaries, Terminus, find its seventeenth-century counterpart in ToAnthea:

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Now is the time, when all the lights wax dim; And thou (Anthea) must withdraw from him Who was thy servant. Dearest, bury me Under that Holy-oke, or Gospel-tree: Where (though thou see'st not) thou may'st think upon Me, when thou yeerly go'st Procession: Or for mine honour, lay me in that Tom be In which thy sacred Reliques shall have roome: For my Embalming (Sweetest) there will be No Spices wanting, when I'm laid by thee. In its own way, this poem is a simple plea for remembrance and commemoration in the typical Herrickean death-rite ceremony. But it, also, draws upon a tradition of great antiquity. In the period of the early settlement of Italy, the rural folk marked the boundaries which seperated their farms from the encroaching forests with stones or stumps.3 Each year an assembly of the people would make the circuit of the boundaries, offering a sacrifice to the stone, a sacrifice (in earlier times) of the "first fruits" of the ripening crops, and later of living things.4 The ceremony of Terminalia continued until the fifth century at which time it was taken over by the Roman Catholic Church. The new ceremony became known as the Rogation Days, the three days before the Feast of our Lord's Ascension. On one of these days, the minister (or priest), churchwardens, and parishioners went out in a religious procession to seek a blessing on the new crops (for it was spring) and to fix the bounds of the parish. Hence, the ceremony became known as "beat the bounds". s Commentators on English antiquities, namely Frazer, Brand, and Smith (among others), have noted the similarity between the 'heathen' custom of the Terminalia and the various English recensions of the ceremony. Herrick, as well, has seen the similarity between the Roman and the English ceremony and has used this ceremony to provide visual detail to what is, in essence, a death-rite poem. For, once again, Herrick implores commemoration of his death by a yearly remembrance; he even chooses the day for that commemoration. He wishes, furthermore, for the even greater remembrance of his love for Anthea that she lie with his "Reliques", giving them their embalming through her own bodily spices. The ceremony of "beat the bounds" provides little significance for his death or for his love. It does insure that he will be remembered; yet, it is a 3

Dionysius Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, ed. Earnest Cary (Cambridge: Loeb Classical Library, 1937), II, 74. Plutarch, "Numa" in the Lives, ed. Bernadotte Perrin (London: Loeb Classical Library, 1914), XVI. 1. 5 Horatio Smith, Festivals, Games, and Amusements, Ancient and Modern (New York, 1858), 128-9; John Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, revised and enlarged by Henry Ellis, Volume I (London, 1873), 197-212.

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mere stopping place in realistic ceremonial detail on the way to a playful compliment to Anthea. Neither the place of burial (though it is a holy place), nor the fact of his death is considered very seriously or in much depth, but the ceremony does provide visual delight, a tension of oppositions, and the sanctiflcation given by commemoration. It is an old custom, and, for Herrick, it is worthy of being celebrated. No attempt is made in Evensong to present the proper ceremony of Evensong: Beginne with Jove; then is the work hälfe done; And runnes most smoothly, when tis well begunne. Jove's is the first and last: The Morn's his due, The midst is thine; But Joves the Evening too; As sure as Mattins do's to him belong, So sure he lay es claime to the Evensong. Any prayer such as that which would begin the evening's devotion in the Anglican service would, in the Roman period, not "Beginne with Jove" but with Janus. Janus and Jove (and sometimes Juno) were addressed in all prayers because their intercession was needed in any request.6 Herrick's use of Jove, that is Jupiter, is not, then, historically accurate; yet, this is not a case where the classical allusion is "less alive" and more "literary" than the usual Renaissance practice, as Douglas Bush has suggested, for one quality of Jupiter's, as the source of light (whether of the sun or the moon), is being drawn upon. 7 The implications of the poem are, therefore, more 'theocentric' than has been suspected when it is seen that Jove or Jupiter is invoked in the poem as the Sun and as the Moon; that is, as the beginning and the end of life and as the scriptural Alpha and Omega. He is also invoked as Matins and Evensong, and as God and Christ. The crucial words "the midst is thine" represent the middle state between birth and death, or life itself. Birth and death are not, however, man's to determine; only the time between Matins and Evensong is man's to play out his tragi-comedy. The liturgical order for Matins and Evensong is suggested only as the beginning and the end of the day, and of life: the poem refers us outside itself. But this 'awareness' comes to us only when we recognize that Matins and Evensong do, indeed, belong to Jove and God and do, therefore, require a complementary order in that part of life's day which is our "midst". The "midst" requires an order "hälfe" as important as the ecclesiastically sanctioned and regulated order for Matins and Evensong. 6

W. Warde Fowler, The Religious Experience of the Roman People (London 191 η 182-3. rj

Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, new revised edition (New York, 1963), 231.

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The ceremony of the Churching of Women consists Of prayers and thanksgiving and a special blessing; neither a purfication of the mother nor a presentation of the child is mentioned in the Book of Common Prayer used during Queen Elizabeth's time. Herrick's poem Julia's Churching, or Purification retains the sense of purification (according to the old Jewish law of Purification, Leviticus, XII) which is lacking in the Christian ceremony without actually invoking the simple sacramental ceremony of the Christian religion: Put on thy Holy Fillitings, and so To th'Temple with the sober Midwife go. Attended thus (in a most solemn wise) By those who serve the Child-bed misteries. Burn first thine incense; next, when as thou see'st The candid Stole thrown ore the Pious Priest \ With reverend Curtsies come, and to him bring Thy free (and not decurted) offering. All Rites well ended, with faire Auspice come (As to the breaking of a Bride-Cake) home: Where ceremonious Hymen shall for thee Provide a second Epithalamie. She who keeps chastly to her husbands side Is not for one, but every night his Bride: And stealing still with love, and feare to Bed, Brings him not one, but many a Maiden-head. The poem is a blend of ceremonial elements from the classical Roman sacrifice — "Holy Fillitings", incense — and from Christian ceremony — the "Stole", the "reverend curtsies". But it does not accurately present the proper ceremony for the Churching of Women. For, when the rite is "well ended", Julia returns home purified (as though for another wedding day). The purification is, however, contingent upon the due performance of the rite according to the public institutions. The Churching seems merely to have renewed her fecundity, not to have blessed the fruit of her womb but the womb itself. Although there are certainly Christian implications in the last two couplets, they are totally submerged beneath the performance of the ceremony. The simple affective piety that is so characteristic of Noble Numbers can be found in the rural observance of Mid-Lent or Laetare Sunday. Herrick's To Dianeme. A Ceremonie in Gloucester is, if the commentators on English antiquities are to be believed, of Roman Catholic origin: I'le to thee a Simnell bring, 'Gainst thou go'st a mothering, So that, when she blesseth thee, Half that blessing thou'lt give me.

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On Mid-Lent Sunday children went visiting ("mothering") their parents, to whom they presented gifts of buns of flour and currants. Brand suggests that the festival is left over from Roman Catholicism, wherein the Church is called Mother-Church, or is called "mothering" because the Epistle for the day (Galatians, IV. 2 1 - 3 1 ) alludes to Jerusalem as the "mother of us all". 8 The Gospel reading for the day (John, VI. 1-14) relates the parable of the loaves and fishes; either, or both, of these scriptural passages may have given Herrick the idea of gaining half the blessing that the child receives from her mother. Indeed, the blessing that he will receive is the promise or gift of God that man will receive salvation if he believes in Christ. The joyous relief from the rigors of Lent provided by Mid-Lent Sunday, and the half-blessing given by the mother, are all, really, that the simple Christian can expect. Many of the more well-known rural customs that figure most prominently in Herrick have been identified; there is no need here to repeat these identifications. There are, however, many ceremonial elements in the poems for Christmas and Candlemass which have escaped previous notice and which are worthy of note. Besides those poems from Noble Numbers on Christ's birth and death examined in an earlier chapter, there are three other poems from that collection which celebrate the observance of seasonal feasts in the English scene. In six rhetorically emphatic stanzas, Herrick creates the proper attitude toward fasting in To keep a true Lent. A true lent is not observed by over-eating fish or by putting on a sour face: Is this a Fast, to keep The Larder leane? And cleane From fat of Veales, and Sheep? Is it to quit the dish Of Flesh, yet still To fill The platter high with Fish? Is it to fast an houre, Orrag'dtogo, Or show A down-cast look, and sowre? (Stanzas 1,2, & 3) A true lent provides, rather, nourishment for the soul: To shew a heart grief-rent; To sterve thy sin, 8

Brand, I, 111.

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Not bin; And that's to keep thy Lent. (Stanza 6) The poem is heavily indebted to Isaiah, LVIII. 3-7 with an echo of George Herbert's "Lent" (11. 43-4). The statement is simple and straight forward but not pietistic. Far more formal and ceremonial is The Star-song: A Caroll to the King; sung at White-Hall, a song for the twelfth day after Christmas. The song in the first three stanzas asks where the "Babe" can be found and answers itself with conventional nativity images: among "Lillie-banks", within an "Ark of Flowers", in the "Mornings blushing cheek", or in the "beds of Spices". Having rung these changes on the typical and the Baroque artifacts of the Nativity, Herrick supplies a Star which answers that the babe is in all these places at once because he is in his "Mothers Brest". The echoes of Southwell and Crashaw are unmistakable. The Chorus then announces that the babe will be king, in fact and in metaphor, he will be a "Twelfth-Tide King" (that is, King Charles) and his mother will be Queen, of the Twelfth-night games. The poem is a highly conventional and elegant compliment elevating the minute, the English festival, to divine-right kingship and thereon to divine kingship. Much the same sort of compliment, with the Son-Sun metaphor changing winter to spring is found in A Christmas Caroll. The poem moves in almost ritualistic incantation. Ceremonial lyrics are supplied for the music composed by Henry Lawes. After seven lines of joyous awakening, four soloists sing, in turn. The first suggests that Christ's birth turns night into day, December into May. The second asks why this is so, that all things "Seem like the Spring-time of the yeere", and the third reiterates the question. The fourth soloist supplies the answer: Come and see The cause, why things thus fragrant be: 'Tis He is borne, whose quickning Birth Gives life and luster, publike mirth, To Heaven, and the under-Earth. (11. 17-21) Spring and Christ are both "quickning" the earth and giving "publike mirth" to Heaven and to earth. But there is need for a room for the "Darling of the world", for a room for the infant Christ and for a room, "the heart", in man where Christ may dwell. The room is then garlanded in traditional "Hollie" and "Ivie" for the King - both sacred and secular — who is the "Lord of all this Revelling". The ritual has become poem, an emblem of order in the worlds of grace and of nature. While very much a

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formal compliment to King Charles, the poem still manages to capture the festival atmosphere of Christmas in playful terms. And in the lushness of the identifications of the sun/sun and the mother's nest/breast, it resembles other Baroque poems. The full and infinite significance of the Incarnation is sounded for the infant which springs again in men's hearts and in nature. The usual Herrickean imprecation for purity in all human and religious action is combined with the Christmas rite of lighting the Yule Log: Wash your hands, or else the fire Will not teend to your desire; Unwasht hands, ye Maidens, know, Dead the Fire, though ye blow. (Christmasse-Eve. Another to the Maids) The breath of maiden perfumes which is capable, elsewhere at least, of pleasing the gods and the god of Love more than fire, is useless to stir up the flames under the Yule Log if the maidens have "Unwasht hands". And there is the further qualification, which comes directly from the folk-lore of the season, that the Yule Log must be lighted with a brand from the previous year's log.9 This rural custom in only part of the Ceremonies for Christmasse: With the last yeeres brand Light the new block, And For good successe in his spending, On your Psaltries play, That sweet luck may Come while the Log is a teending. (11. 7-12) For, the ceremony of lighting having been completed, other ceremonies — the playing on "Psaltries", — must also be perfomed so that there will be both "sweet luck" for those gathered about the fire and "good successe" for the log during its consumption in the fire. Herrick is not, however, very consistent about when the Yule Log is Lighted, for The Ceremonies for Candlemasse day inform us that it was relighted that day (February 2nd), when in fact the log was usually lighted on Christmas eve and burnt continuously until Candlemass night. 10 Kindle the Christmas Brand, and then Till Sunne-set, let it burne; Which quencht, then lay it up agen. Till Christmas next returne. 9

Howard Harris, "Christmas in the Seventeenth Century", The Western IV, no. 7 (December, 1884), 132. 1 °Brand, 1,467-474.

Antiquary,

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Part must be kept wherewith to teend The Christmas Log next yeare; And where 'tis safely kept, the Fiend, Can do no mischiefe (there). There is a "Fiend" at Herrick's Candlemass ceremony because the season is the Festival of Lights and fiends or evil spirits are always affrighted by the flames of tapers, as a service-book of the sixteenth-century informs us. 1 1 Another Christmas ceremony is found in Christmas-Eve. Another. Wassaile the Trees, that they may beare You many a Plum, and many a Peare: For more or less fruits they will bring, As you doe give them Wassailing. This is not an account of the traditional Wassail-bowl of spiced ale that is so common a feature of the Christmas holidays (as Herrick's annotators have suggested), but a very traditional English custom of throwing the dregs of the Wassail-bowl against the stems of the best bearing fruittrees.1 2 Furthermore, this little fertilizing ceremony took place on the eve of Twelfth-Day. As in the Ceremonies for Candlemasse day, there is a very conscious attempt to be historically accurate in the use of rural detail. And there is a very good reason for this accuracy. One of the most popular of the late eighteenth-century expositions of these customs for Christmas and Candlemass is John Brand's Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain. In each of the chapters given over to the discussion of these English customs, there is always some mention of what Brand or his own sources consider to be the ultimate sources of these customs. As in the section on "Evergreen-Decking at Christmas": "This custom, too, the Christians appear to have copied from their Pagan ancestors". Or, if there does not appear to be any pagan ancestry for an English custom, there is usually given a Popish ceremony behind it. Frequently Brand attempts to make a Christian allegory of the pagan custom. Brand seems terribly sensitive about the pagan and Roman Catholic ancestry of English customs, undoubtedly because he saw the obvious similarities among them. I am quite sure that Herrick was also aware of the pagan similarities to the English festivals he was celebrating in his verses. I am also certain that he was aware that, as John Taylor the Water Poet states, the Puritans did their utmost to "keep Christmas day out of England". 13 Taylor was 11

Brand, 1,43-51. Harris, 132. See also the ceremonial decoration of houses and churches during the Christmas season described in Ceremonies for Candlemasse Eve and Ceremony upon Candlemas Eve. Quoted by Harris (132) from "Christmas in and out; or, Our Lord & Saviour 12

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vehemently anti-Puritan, and his "The Complaint of Christmas" appeared in time for Herrick to have read that Christmas was a Popish day ... as other superstitious daies were, such as are Christmas, Candlemas, Lammas, Michealmas, Hallowmas, Martinmas, &c. Or that the Puritans had suppressed all popish and all rural pastimes, for ... all the liberty, and harmlesse sports, with the merry Gambolls, dances and friscolls, which the toyling Plowswaine, and Labourer, once a year were wont to be recreated, and their spirits and hopes reviv'd for a whole twelve month, are now extinct and put out of use, in such a fashion as if they never had bin. Thus are the merry Lords of misrule, supprest by the mad Lords of bad rule at Westminster. Nay more, their madnesse hath extended it selfe, to the very vegetables, the sencelesse Trees, Herbes, and Weedes are in a prophane estimation amongst them, Holly, Ivy, Mistletoe, Rosemary, Bay es, are accounted ungodly Branches of Superstition for your [Master Christmas] entertainment. 14 Quite naturally, the Puritans had abrogated the proclamations of Kings James and Charles which had decreed that "lawful recreations and honest exercices" could be indulged in by the rural populace on Sundays and holidays after the afternoon service or sermon and that "May-games, Whitson-ales, and morris-daunces" could be held and were not to be prohibited by "some puritanes and precise people". 15 But in spite of the Puritan opposition, these rural activities seem to have continued. Although Herrick is not as blatant in hifr anti-Puritan sentiments as Taylor, surely he was anti-Puritan enough to have upheld the rural festivals and customs, just as he elsewhere upholds the older Roman Catholic and high-Anglican forms of worship and ceremony. Indeed, if his poetry is any indication of his sympathies, he is as conservative with respect to maintaining the rites and services as any of the major Anglican voices who wished to retain the elaborate ceremonies and liturgy of the Catholic-Anglican church and thereby fed the fires of the Puritan dispute. 16 There is, furthermore, the whole notion of Herrick as a 'city' poet with the concomitant notions about Herrick as a pastoral poet. There is very little of the commonplace pastoral opposition between country and court

Christ's Birth-day" which is included in the table of contents of volume I of The Works of John Taylor the Water Poet, not included in the Folio Volume of 1630, 5 vols. (London: Spenser Society, 1870-1878), but is, in fact, not in the volume, nor is it in one of the other four volumes of Taylor's works. 14 Taylor, Vol. I, 3,7. 15 Quoted in Smith, Festivals, Games, and Amusements, Ancient and Modem, 110. 16 William P. Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire, 1572-1642 (= Yale Studies in English, Vol. 126) (New Haven 1954), 13,32; my discussion of Herrick's anti-Puritanism and of the Puritan dangers to the old order is greatly indebted to this work.

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ideals in Herrick. Indeed, if any overstatement of this opposition is advanced, it surely is derived from such a poem as To Dean-bourn, a rude River in Devon, by which sometimes he lived: Dean-Bourn, farewell; I never look to see Deane, or thy warty incivility. Thy rockie bottome, that doth teare thy streams, And makes them frantick, ev'n to all extreames; To my content, I never sho'd behold, Were thy streames silver, or thy rocks all gold. Rockie thou art; and rockie we discover Thy men; and rockie are thy wayes all over. Ο men, Ο manners; Now, and ever knowne To be A rockie Generation! A people currish; churlish as the seas; And rude (almost) as rudest Salvages. With whom I did, and may re-sojourne when Rockes turn to Rivers, Rivers turn to Men. Herrick in the poem has the proper city poet's hostility to the countryside, but there is certainly no attempt to idealize this countryside. A pastoral ideal is impossible, Herrick seems to say, after his years surrounded by a pastoral version of reality — Devonshire and his parishioners. The canon of his poetry attests to the country reality, and this poem is his most satirical and direct statement. But his poetry never affirms the artificial pastoral ideal. The version of reality presented in His returne to London is actual and unideal. Where we might expect the greatest vituperation toward "dull Devonshire", we have instead only praise for the city where, no doubt, he resided with "men" and "manners". Saluting the "fruitfull Genius" of place and enchanted by the "Place", "People", "Manners", Herrick declares London his home and himself a "free-born Roman". And the poem ends with a vow which we would hardly expect of a city-poet with pastoral attitudes toward the ideal life which he now finds in the city: For, rather then Fie to the West return, Fie beg of thee first here to have mine Urn. Weak I am grown, and must in short time fall; Give thou my sacred Reliques Buriall. (11. 1 7 - 2 0 )

Surely if he is the typical city poet advocating a pastoral view of life, and vowing never to return to the country, he is hardly a conventional pastoralist or else we should find the pastoral ideal expressed in his poetry consistently. The point, therefore, is that Herrick is not a pastoral poet in the conventional sense, nor does he even often uphold the pastoral spirit as Renato Poggioli has defined it: "A double longing after innocence and

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happiness, to be recovered not through conversion or regeneration, but merely through a retreat." 17 The poems in this chapter, and in the next, are the ones usually adduced to the 'pastoral' reading of Herrick's poetry. But they never present an 'escape' into pastoral idealism or idyllicism. They never present the ideal of otium either physically or psychologically. They never represent a rejection of Christian ideals or an opposition to them. And they never provide a mode of expression for the fusion of classical and Christian ideals. For labeling Herrick a "pastoral poet" has as little validity as the generic term "pastoral poetry". The latter is a style of poetry, and Herrick rarely has the necessary commitment beneath the apparent pastoral surface to be labeled a pastoral poet. In order for a pastoral reading to be valid it must demonstrate that the virtues — pietas, gravitas, virtus — exist only in the country. Instead Herrick's poems demonstrate happiness, order, and naturalness in an active, flourishing and frequently harsh country society. This admits the pastoral view only slightly, even a sophisticated as opposed to an innocent pastoralism. Pastoral elements in Herrick are, then, transformed by art; flowers, trees, and birds are ordered and metamorphosed by art just as all objects and persons are in his poetic calendar. But Herrick's poems went quickly out of fashion, if they even were in at some time or other, precisely because the countryside itself was in a state of flux. His sanctions for the older ways, with festivals and fairies and mirth, were always artistic ones. By the time Herrick's volume of verses appeared in 1648 his poems recreating the rural festivals and ceremonies would have been particularly abhorrent to the Puritan majority. For much that in Herrick might now seem to have a high Anglican or Roman Catholic flavor would have been highly suspect to Puritan eyes, but none so much as his recreations of the simple joys and healthy fun of the rural festivals. The complaint of John Taylor, that the yearly "harmlesse sports" were tp be abolished and thereby deprive the young of a "whole twelve month" of revived spirits and hopes, is often sounded in Herrick. Here is a catalogue of those "harmlesse sports" which the Puritans sought to suppress: Come A nthea let us two Go to Feast, as others do. Tarts and Custards, Creams and Cakes, Are the Junketts still at Wakes: Unto which the Tribes resort, Where the businesse is the sport: Morris-dances thou shalt see, Marian too in Pagen trie: And a Mimick to devise 17

Renato Poggioli, "The Oaken Flute", Harvard Library Bulletin, XI (1957), 147.

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Many grinning properties. Players there will be, and those Base in action as in clothes: Yet with strutting they will please The incurious Villages. Neer the dying of the day, There will be a Cudgell-Play, Where a Coxcomb will be broke, Ere a good word can be spoke: But the anger ends all here, Drencht in Ale, or drown'd in Beere. (The Wake, 11. 1-20) And the poem ends with a great secular blast against those who would deprive the "Happy Rusticks" of their only apparent happiness: Happy Rusticks, best content With the cheapest Merriment: And possesse no other feare, Then to want the Wake next Yeare. (11. 2 1 - 2 4 )

It is rather difficult to find the "slight note of condescension" in the distinction between "us two" and "others" that Roger Rollin has suggested. One suspects that Rollin would like to see the poem as a "gentle satire upon those happy primitives" because this fits his notions of condescension and his pastoral vision.18 That certain "Junketts" are "still" served at Wakes (that is that they are bad because they are traditional) is, not even by inference, the speaker's point. As recently as August 25, 1968, the New York Times revealed its own condescension in the description of "old customs" — wassailing of apple trees, hobby horse processions, ball fire, Oak Apple Day - that are 'still' practised in the more remote areas of Devon, Cornwall, and Somerset.19 Herrick simply does not have this kind of modern skepticism, but The Wake does betray some traces of sentimentality and perhaps even a little satire. It does not sentimentalize the happiness of the rustics, as would a conventional pastoral poem, so much 3S the happiness of the speaker. There is, in the last four lines, a good deal of sympathy for the "Happy Rusticks", but it only presents their version of reality. Their fear, and Herrick's, is that there will not be a Wake the next year. Again, in Saint Distaffs day, or the morrow after Twelfth day, the rustic awareness that Christmas fun and Yule-tide folly must end at Twelfth-day, and that tomorrow's work must be done in spite of Today's pleasure, is explicit: 18 19

Roger B. Rollin, Robert Herrick, 61. New York Times (25 August 1968), 66.

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Give S. Distaffe all the right, Then bid Christmas sport good-night. And next morrow, every one To his owne vocation.

^

^ ^ 14)

Nor is Herrick, like the Puritans, convinced that such secular pastimes are sinful, for he notes: Give then to the King And Queene wassailing; And though with alle ye be whet here; Yet part ye from hence, As free from offence, As when ye innocent met here. (Twelfe night, or King and Queene, 11. 25-30) His fate as an Anglican clergyman would surely have been decided by a court of Puritan judges for having written such a poem as The May-pole, where he even drinks from the may-cup. Furthermore, we may wonder whether the Puritan stalwarts would have thought very much of his cognizance of his role as priest when he urges his "Girles" to marry and reproduce as rapidly as he suggests: The May-pole is up, Now give me the cup; I'le drink to the Garlands a-round it: But first unto those Whose hands did compose The glory of flowers that crown'd it. A health to my Girles, Whose husbands may Earles Or Lords be, (granting my wishes) And when that ye wed To the Bridall Bed, Then multiply all, like to Fishes. Finally, we note in The Wassaile that it is a "sin" not to perform the proper ceremony — the great resounding "sin" of Corinna's going a Maying - for the blessing that the Wassail singers are prepared to give extends to all things. For a penurious house which offers neither "Ale or Beere" to the Wassail singers, there is only one fate in store: It is in vain to sing, or stay Our free-feet here; but we'l away: Yet to the Lares this we'l say, The time will come, when you'l be sad, And reckon this for fortune bad, T'ave lost the good ye might have had. (Stanzas 12 & 13,11. 34-39)

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It is, furthermore, a "sin" against the proper and traditional order to deprive the simple folk of these simple pleasures. With Herrick's sense of order and ceremony, and his special poetic sense of the ways in which ceremony serves that order by performing the duly constituted rites, a Puritan attack against the rural sins was tantamount to an affront upon God and his natural order. One example of a modern critic's failure to take into account Herrick's characteristic attitude toward these rural ceremonies may be cited here. I refer to the note by Robert Lougy on The Hock-Cart, or Harvest Home which makes the point that the last five lines of the poem are meant to criticize Mildmay, Earl of Westmorland, to whom the poem is dedicated.2 0 These are the lines in question: And, you must know, your Lords word's true, Feed him ye must, whose food fils you. And that this pleasure is like raine, Not sent ye for to drowne your paine, But for to make it spring againe. Quite correctly, Mr. Lougy selects the word "spring" as the crucial word in these lines, and he suggests two interpretations: as a noun, "spring" means the season of the year; as a verb, it means to "issue forth or become". His belief is that the second interpretation has more validity than the first, that the "it" in the last line refers to "paine", that "pleasure" insures the continuing renewal of the "paine", and that Herrick is indignant and aware of the injustice of this rural arrangement. The analysis is false, for a number of reasons. "Spring" is an ambiguous word for it is both the "pleasure" and the "raine" which will spring again in the spring. This modern critic has quite overlooked the fact that the poem takes place at harvest time, not planting time. The "it" refers to "pleasure" not "paine"; the pleasure referred to here is the entire ceremony of the Harvest home which bears remarkable resemblances to the Roman paganalia.21 It is further difficult to find any other traces of indignation in the rest of the poem. The harvest ritual is addressed to the "Sons of Summer, by whose toile, / We are the Lords of Wine and Oile" and to the lord of the manor, Mildmay, Earl of Westmorland. The speaker, a sort of rural impressario and priestly master of ceremonies (as is fitting), includes

20 Robert Loughy, "Herrick's The Hock-Cait, or Harvest Home' Explicator, XXIII (1964), item 13. Cf. Roger B. RoUin, "Missing The Hock-Cart' ", SeventeenthCentury News, XXIV (Autumn, 1966), 39-40, without, of course, Rollin's pastoral bias (see also note 22 below). 21 See Ovid Fasti 1.657; Tibullus II.i.7-8; Macrobius, Saturnalia I.xvi.6; Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic (London, 1899), 294-6.

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himself in the "We" which does not, in fact, align him with the lord and opposed to the "Sons", as the next couplet makes clear: By whose tough labours, and rough hands, We rip up first, then reap our lands. There is no class distinction made here between the "Sons" and "We", for the speaker seems definitely a part of the "Sons"; and the lands, while actually belonging to the lord, become "our lands" because our "Sons of Summer" work them. To include Herrick the speaker in the "We" as a reference to the lord is to include all of them, speaker, lord, and "Sons" in a firm and orderly union. The speaker, and all of the others, are in a full communal relationship. An invitation is then extended to all to join the ritual, and the lord is now called forth: Crown'd with the eares of corne, now come, And, to the Pipe, sing Harvest home. Come forth, my Lord, and see the Cart Drest up with all the Country Art. (11. 5-8) The so-called "Country Art" which follows is historically accurate. It is 'real' ceremony, not artificial and imaginative. The elements of art do not, however, enter until the real and the natural are covered by Herrick's art: See, here a Maukin, there a sheet, As spotlesse pure, as it is sweet: The Horses, Mares, and frisking Fillies, (Clad, all, in Linnen, white as Lillies.) The Harvest Swaines, and Wenches bound For joy, to see th Q Hock-cart crown'd. About the Cart, he are, how the Rout Of Rurall Younglings raise the shout; Pressing before, some coming after, Those with a shout, and these with laughter. (U. 9-18) The harvest ritual calls forth all kinds of devotion which Herrick next catalogues: Some blesse the Cart; some kisse the sheaves; Some prank them up with Oaken leaves: Some crosse the Fill-horse; some with great Devotion, stroak the home-borne wheat: (11. 19-22) These devotions are certainly primitive, but the sincerity is hardly questionable. If we find them "semi-comic", then surely we must be prepared to defend our own liturgical manifestations of religious

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sophistication as semi-serious or even serious.2 2 I rather doubt that there are many who would sanction this dichotomy of attitude toward religious sincerity. Certainly Herrick wouldn't, though he is quick to go on in the poem to point out that not all share in the ritual to the same degree: While other Rusticks, lesse attent To Prayers, then to Merryment. Run after with their breeches rent. (11. 2 3 - 2 5 )

The speaker next turns from addressing Mildmay to the celebrants, urging them on to the ritual's conclusion, eating and drinking at the earl's manor: Well, on, brave boyes, to your Lords Hearth, Glitt'ring with fire; where, for your mirth, Ye shall see first the large and cheefe Foundation of your Feast, Fat Beefe: And for to make the merry cheere, If smirking Wine be wanting here, There's that, which drowns all care, stout Beere; (Π. 26-9, 3 5 - 7 )

After the appropriate and orderly toasts to the lord, the plough, the harvest tools, the Maids, the sickle and scythe, the speaker reminds them to remember that after the merriment they ... must revoke The patient Oxe unto the Yoke, And all goe back unto the Plough And Harrow, (though they'r hang'd up now). (11. 4 7 - 5 0 )

And the poem ends with the five lines already mentioned. The ceremony of the "Hock-Cart" survived in rural Devonshire districts in the Herrickean form until as late as the mid-nineteenth-century precisely because it was the ordered and orderly way to maintain social and economic stability. 23 The poem is a harvest ceremony which is given ethical significance, not criticism or indignation, by the last five lines. Furthermore, it is but one statement of Herrick's view of the importance of this kind of ceremony and this kind of lord of the manor-"sons of summer" (1. 1) relationship. It is as important to the lord as it is to the rural folk that the harvest festival be repeated so that "their spirits and hopes" be "reviv'd for a whole twelve month". 22

But see Rollin, 215, note 10. Mrs. Anna Eliza (Kempe) Stothard Bray, A Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar& the Tavy, Vol. I (London, 1836), 329-31. 23

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In support of the hypothesis that Herrick wished to maintain the older forms of a way of living which he found necessary to preserve from any threatening force, we can adduce those poems which may be described as the ceremonies of hospitality: A Country Life, The Country Life, and A Panegerick. These poems belong to the tradition of genre poems celebrating the English country house and the way of life it represents. The tradition begins with Ben Jonson's "To Penshurst" and "Sir Robert Wroth", continues in Herrick and Thomas Carew's "To Saxham" and "To my Friend G.N. from Wrest", and culminates with Andrew Marvell's "Upon Appleton House". Indebted to Horace, Virgil, and Martial, these poems are marked by a classical and Augustan dignity, thought, and seriousness, on the one hand, and a more typically Renaissance and seventeenth-century concern with the "reciprocal interplay of man and nature in the creation of a good life". 24 There is also a marked 'awareness' of the values in this way of living, values which must not be destroyed. The genre, then, is more than a pastoral contrast between town and country or between court and village. It admits contrasts of the proper and impoper 'use' of wealth and of Nature, of good and bad relations between man and man and between man and Nature, and of a house that is only "built to envious show" and one that is the center of a community of relations which is civilization itself. Jonson's poems are, of course, the English fountain-head of these ideas of order and harmony among men, Nature and God. For Jonson's high seriousness is focused by an explicitly and fully expressed system of ethical values which is more fully realized in Herrick's A Panegerick than the weakly stated contentment in A Country Life and The Country Life. Indebted to Jonson for the metre and much of the imagery, Herrick's A Country Life: To his Brother, M. Tho. Herrick is a statement of pastoral values which has ethical overtones in the opening twenty lines: Thrice, and above, blest (My soules hälfe) art thou, In thy both Last, and Better Vow: Could'st leave the City, for exchange, to see The Countries sweet simplicity: And it to know, and practice; with intent To grow the sooner innocent: By studying to know vertue; and to aime More at her nature, then her name: The last is but the least; the first doth tell Wayes lesse to live, then to live well: And both are knowne to thee, who now can'st live Led by thy conscience; to give 24

G. R. Hibbard, "The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century", Journal of the Warburg ACourtauld Institutes, XIX (1956), 159.

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Justice to soone-pleas'd nature; and to show, Wisdome and she together goe, And keep one Centre: This with that conspires, To teach Man to confine desires: And know, that Riches have their proper stint, In the contented mind, not mint. And can'st instruct, that those who have the itch Of craving more, are never rich. There is no question but that Herrick present the typical pastoral contrast between court and country in these lines. By leaving the city so as to see, to know, and to practice the "sweet simplicity" of the country, Thomas will grow "the sooner innocent" by knowing virtue. Hence he will know how to live well: give justice, show wisdom, and keep "one Centre". The advice here is, as Rollin convincingly shows, "part Stoic, part Epicurean".25 Thomas is to find "sweet simplicity" in the contentment of mind: about money, about his lot in life ("More blessed in thy Brasse, then Land" 1. 24), about his food and about his wife ("not so beautiful, as chast" 1. 34). He is further contented by the "sweet simplicity" of nature (11. 43-62), by the solitude of his life versus the activity of the "industrious Merchant" (11. 63-72), and by his imaginary travels ("within thy Map" 11. 73-82). The poem continues to catalogue Thomas's blessings in his "Rurall Sanctuary" until at the end it offers the hope for the simultaneous death of Thomas and his wife. As a long (146 lines) and discursive philosophical poem, it very logically focuses on the virtue to be found in a "Country Life", but always from the point of view of ethical concerns. The advantages of the country life are always there by implication. But they are always there as an ideal, perhaps an impossible ideal, even as Stoicism and Epicureanism are ideal philosphies. The poem is weakened by the absence of the country reality which suffuses so much of Herrick's other poetry and which is not lacking in the other "Country Life" poem. In that second poem there is a more extensive identification of the variety of the country's "sweet simplicity", the real as opposed to the philosophical ideal life, that Thomas Herrick would have lived had Herrick given it to him. The survival and continuance of a more fully rich harmony of man with "sweet simplicity" could be assured by the repetition of the ritual and ceremonies of the "happy life" present in The Country life, to the honoured M. End. Porter, Groome of the Bed-Chamber to His Maj. Again using the Jonsonian metre of "Sir Robert Wroth", Herrick sets out in broad and quick strokes the contrast between the town and the country: Sweet Country life, to such unknown, Whose lives are others, not their own! 2-5

RoUin, 7Off.

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But serving Courts, and Cities, be Less happy, less enjoying thee. (11. 1-4) He weights this theme with further examples (11. 5-13) of the same contrast and brings the first section of the poem to a climax which suggests the cycle of life and the change of the seasons in the performance of the lord of the manor's visitation about his grounds: ... and so to end the yeere: 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. (U. 14-18) The suggestion here of the yearly ecclesiastical ceremony of "beat the bounds" is strong and is further expressed in the symbolic interplay of man and Nature to produce the sustenance upon which the "happy life" feeds: This done, then to th'enameld Meads Thou go'st; and as thy foot there treads, Thou seest a present God-like Power Imprinted in each Herbe and Flower: (11. 29-32) A conventional statement of the fertility of the estate follows (11. 33-45), but at this point in the poem Herrick chooses to include a catalogue quite unlike anything in Jonson yet very typical of his interest in all rural activity (that we have been following in this chapter): For Sports, for Pagen trie, and Playes, Thou hast thy Eves, and Holydayes: 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 grac't: Thy Morris-dance; thy Whitsun-ale; Thy Sheering-feast, which never faile. Thy Harvest home; thy Wassaile bowle, That's tost up after Fox i'thHole. Thy Mummeries; thy Twelfe-tide Kings And Queenes; thy Christmas revellings: Thy Nut-browne mirth; thy Russet wit; And no man payes too deare for it. (11.46-61)

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These are the "Sports" and the "Playes" which are a necessary element in Herrick's civilized way of living. They are, also, a part of the direct relation of the lord of the manor and the daily activities of the community of which he and his household are the center. Porter's maintaining of these traditional ways is important to their and his preservation; but these ways are of even greater importance for the stability and orderliness of the lives of his tenants and laborers: Ο happy life! if that their good The Husbandmen but understood! Who all the day themselves doe please, And Younglings, with such sports as these. And, lying down, have nought t'affright Sweet sleep, that makes more short the night. (11. 7 0 - 7 5 )

Herrick explicitly insists upon the traditional moral and ethical values of these country activities for the whole and complete view of life and without any tinge of condescension and certainly without any suggestion of their being 'disagreeable reality'. They must be accorded a place in the society he is describing and praising, and they must, by implication, be protected and preserved. Their abolishment is sought by Puritanism, and this attack is directed against Porter, his family, his house, his land, and his way of life, which is Herrick's own way of life and that of his nation (1. 28, "the Kingdoms portion is the Plow"). A Panegerick to Sir Lewis Pemberton is also a statement of the theme of hospitality in the country-house genre. It is, as well, a statement deploring the decay in "housekeeping" which, as G.R. Hibbard has described it, began in the early seventeenth-century and, as a result of less and less direct contact between the lord of the manor and the affairs of his estate, brought about the demise of the old ways in the next century. 26 The entire house and household are gathered together in the opening ceremonial lines which are most characteristic of Herrick's use of Roman ceremony and rite: Till I shall come again, let this suffice, I send my salt, my sacrifice To Thee, thy Lady, younglings, and as farre As to thy Genius and thy Larre;

To the worn Threshold, Porch, Hall, Parlour, Kitchin, The fat-fed smoking Temple, (11. 1-6)

The lavish hospitality of the Pemberton house is described (11. 6-95), and 26

Hibbard, 161.

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each detail becomes significant of all the house stands for: the proper performance of the "Guest-rite" (1. 19). There is even an elaborate reference to Pemberton as Jove, the king of the gods: But all, who at thy table seated are, Find equall freedome, equall fare; And Thou, like to that Hospitable God, Jove, joy'sf when guests make their abode To eate thy Bullocks thighs, thy Veales, thy fat Weathers, and never grudged at. (11. 59-64) And this rite will continue to be perfomed if Pemberton and his family continue to live in the house and if they continue to fulfill their responsibilities to the community. Yet, the old way of living is threatened, and Herrick is aware of this and explicitly states his fear that the passing of the Pemberton kind of civilized living will be the passing of all this way of life: ... Comliness agrees, With those thy primitive decrees, To give subsistance to thy house, and proofe, What Genii support thy roofe, Goodness and Greatnes\not the oaken Piles; For these, and marbles have their whiles To last, but not their ever : VertuesHand It is, which builds, 'gainst Fate to stand. Such is thy house, whose firme foundations trust Is more in thee, then in her dust, Or depth (11. 95-105) Vertue dies when foes Are wanting to her exercise, but great And large she spreads by dust, and sweat. Safe stand thy Walls, and Thee, and so both will, Since neithers height was rais'd by th'ill Of others; since no Stud, no Stone, no Piece, Was rear'd up by the Poore-mans fleece: No Widowes Tenement was rackt to build Or fret thy Seeling, or to build A Sweating-Closset, to annoint the silkesoft-skin, or bath in A sses m ilke: No Orphans pittance, left him, serv'd to set The Pillars up of lasting Jet, For which their cryes might beate against thine eares, Or in the dampe Jet read their Teares. No Planke from Hallowed Altar, do's appeale To yond' Star-chamber, or do's seale A curse to Thee, or Thine; but all things even Make for thy peace, and pace to heaven.

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Go on directly so, as just men may A thousand times, more sweare, then say, This is that Princely Pemberton, who can Teach man to keep a God in man: And when wise Poets shall search out to see Good men, They find them all in Thee. (11. 1 1 2 - 1 3 6 )

The Panegerick is more than a poem in praise of an individual (though it is certainly that). It is a lament for a civilization and a way of life that will pass and be destroyed. It is not, however, a statement of the classical carpe diem in the usual sense of "live life to its fullest today for tomorrow we may die", but, rather, the carpe diem motif applied to the English scene. 2 7 Herrick chooses the classical motif without commiting himself to its classical implications — of free license, of pagan eroticism, of the improper 'use' of nature, of the urgings of the passionate shephard and of Comus. In Herrick's poem he does not urge the improper use of nature or of man. It is the proper use of nature and of all civilization to uphold and sanctify the older order that is Herrick's explicit theme. A seventeenthcentury classicist and clergyman could approach the concept of carpe diem in these terms, and Herrick did in order to voice a lament for the passing of a moral, ethical, social, and religious age that was about to come crashing down under a parliamentary blade. Ill These ceremonies of marriage, rural customs, and great civilizing forces are 'not real' in one sense, an artistic sense, but certainly are 'real' in another, a realistic sense. Because these ceremonies so artistically play with life and its social and ethical manifestations, they are not real: they are literary, they are Art, they are an idealistic 'second world'. They are not nature's "brazen" world but the poet's "golden" world, as Sidney would say. They are Herrick's own poetic cosmos. But they are also 'real' because they represent reality itself, in an historical and actual sense, or at least they represent versions of that historical reality. The very tension created between the historical and the poetic contexts is related to the tension created by Herrick's very formal poetic art which holds in and confines the levity and transport of his marriage and festival subjects. This tension could be called "Baroque" in the sense of a style characterized by play, 27

With F. H. Candelaria's unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, 'The Carpe Diem Motif in Early Seventeenth-Century Lyric Poetry with Particular Reference to Robert Herrick", Missouri, 1959, I find myself in substantial disagreement. But he is more interested in tracing the motif as "the most popular trope in lyric poetry" than in analyzing Herrick's total conceptualization of the motif in a Christian context.

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drama, and mythic extension. If the use of this term means those very qualities of style, then much of Renaissance poetry is certainly Baroque. As we have seen more forcefully in this chapter than in any other, a number of disparate strains merge in Herrick's conservative desire to preserve the old order that was rapidly being overcome by a force of religious, social, ethical, and political reform. There is his debt to classical Roman ceremony and the classical ideals of life, order, and propriety along with the seventeenth-century counterparts to these debts and ideals. There is his adherence to what by 1640 had become a 'true Catholic Church' with its attendant ceremonial and liturgy. And, finally, there is his fondness for the simple country pieties and customs. It is, then, possible to view vitually everything that this book has presented as one form or another of conceptualized poetic anti-Puritanism. By 1640 the Anglican Church was less removed from the Church of Rome than it had been since Queen Mary. The liturgy was tied to the Roman forms, rules, and regulations. For Herrick, who surely saw modern English analogues to the Roman festivals and ceremonies that he had so frequently encountered in his reading of the Latin poets and in the dictionaries of antiquities, the close proximity between the classical and Roman Catholic, on the one hand, and the Roman Catholic and Anglican ceremonies, on the other, was certainly valuable and stable. The Puritan reforming zeal would destroy all that he found secure and appealing in the Anglican religion and in the English civilization of his own day. By implication, then, a blow against the Anglican and rural ceremonies was a blow against the popish practices from which Anglicanism took its forms. As the early fathers of the Roman Catholic Church had sought to absorb as much of the pagan practice as they could into their own worship, allegorizing and modifying in other ways what resisted this impulse, and substituting new forms (such as the Candlemass for the Roman Lupercalia) for the pagan forms, so too the Anglican reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sought to maintain what was catholic in Roman Catholicism while purifying it of its abuses and excesses. This order, this stability, and this tradition were as sacred to the citizens and priests of the Roman State religion as they were to Robert Herrick, a seventeenth-century Anglican clergyman. Pragmatically speaking, Herrick had a vested interest in keeping the older forms alive; their demise meant his rejection from Dean Prior, as indeed was the case. The disruptive and 'revolutionary' force of Puritanism would not only destroy the old order and set up a new order of its own, it would deprive Herrick of his living, his ease to read his beloved Roman poets, and his own poetic dalliance. Above all, it would deprive him of his intimate association as priest with the rural festivals and ceremonies.

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The poetic statements which have been analyzed in praise of the old way of life, of fear for its passing, of agony over its persecution, and of poignant celebration of the ceremonies and festivals of the old ways, give the explicit Christian basis and the aesthetic distance for what appears to be the urgency of the classical ideals throughout Herrick's poetry. He has chosen to express his sorrow over the decay of the old order which he saw approaching and has conceptualized his experience of that decay in classical and Christian terms. The classical and the Christian ways of living and of dying and the ideals of both coexist and are interdependent in Herrick's poetic as well as his historical world. And the ceremony and rite of both worlds provide the controlling aesthetic mode which allows him to express and evaluate his experience. It is readily apparent to anyone who has read widely in Herrick's poems that his devotion to the festivals and customs is manifested everywhere. The vitality of them, their resistance to change and ecclesiastical censure, and even their resistance to Puritanism is assured by Herrick. We do not need to be anthropologists to demonstrate his devotion to them, nor do we need concern ourselves with apparent "paganism" or their "Romish superstitions" or their "heathenism". For we have lost that historical distance which Herrick had, that "awareness" that relationships between the past and the present can be established, should be established, and that these relationships may provide us with a direct or indirect, explicit or implicit, evaluation of our own present. As one brief illustration of what occurs when this "awareness" disintegrates, I have added a postscript.

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Recently, several critics have attempted to establish the relations between elements of the past and literature. The elements of the past - from paganism, classicism, and folklore — are more easily identified in literary works than interpreted in those works. The poetic use of elements from the past (or from the near present) is a far more difficult critical task than the identification of those historical contexts which seem to have become imbedded in literature. Rarely are identification and interpretation fused as one approach. Yet a blend of these approaches is desirable, as I hope I have indicated, using as my own examples the approaches made for American literature by Daniel G. Hoffman, for folklore by Alan Dundes and, to a somewhat lesser extent, for Renaissance English literature by Katherine M. Briggs and H.R. Swardson.1 As a concluding note, I would like to extend my analyses of Herrick's poetry to the visions of historical and cultural reality supplied by Hawthorne and, as an intermediating figure, by Andrew Marvell. In a superficially unrelated pair of writers, Herrick and Hawthorne, this identification/interpretation approach can be used to describe the authors' intentions. For in Herrick and Hawthorne we encounter an established, traditional artistic response to the conflict of paganism and Christianity. In both, the so-called "paganism" or more simply the past, functions in two recreations of the past, in Hawthorne's "The May-Pole of Merry-Mount" and in Herrick's Corinna's Going a-Maying. By juxtaposing these texts and these writers as they manipulate tradition, it is possible to show how Herrick is able to attain a fusion of external poetic contexts, while Hawthorne is not able to attain, even under the aegis of Art, a fusion like Herrick's. Hawthorne very conveniently identifies his historical and existential sources in the headnote to his tale. The foundation of his "philosophic 1 Daniel G. Hoffman, Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York: 1961); Alan Dundes, "The Study of Folklore in Literature and Culture: Identification and Interpretation", JAF. LXXVIII (1965), 136-142; Katherine M. Briggs and H.R. Swardson.

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romance" is, on the one hand, "the facts, recorded on the grave pages of our New England Annalists".2 G.H. Orians has identified many of these annalists, both the published and the unpublished accounts of the incident at Meny Mount, Mt. Wollaston, Massachusetts.3 For the details of the mid-summer's festival Hawthorne informs us that he consulted Joseph Strutt's Sports and Pastimes of the People of England,4 From Strutt he adopted several items not usually found in typical Mayday descriptions. Daniel Hoffman has convincingly demonstrated that Hawthorne used, as well, William Hone's The Every Day Book, a three volume antiquarian collection of traditional materials arranged in calendrical order. 5 Hawthorne undoubtedly was attracted to the antiquarian nostalgia of the golden age of Mayday customs, the explicit association in Hone's pages of the Mayday spirit and poetry, and the conflict of "jollity" and "gloom" which derived, by and large, from the tenacity of rural English gaiety, spring-time frivolity and ceremony during the culturally and socially oppressive Puritan period in England. Included in Hone's Mayday section is Herrick's Corinna's Going a-Maying, and Hawthorne probably found Herrick's attitude toward paganism and Christianity, and the resulting tension of their conflicting claims upon the participants, pregnantly suggestive for his own. Taking the confrontation of "paganism" and Christianity in Herrick and Hawthorne as, temporarily, the dichotomized elements out of which the poem and tale are created, it is clear, initially, that neither uses the elements merely for verisimilitude, or for plot and character, but both have an awareness of the relevance of the past for their own, respective, present. Neither is totally accurate in his historical facts, though Hawthorne is, by far, the more nearly exact because the outcome of the conflict was foreordained by history. This awareness resulted in a more realistic, as well as conceptually and symbolically more significant, creation than would have been ä creation which only presented an accurate historical representation of an actual custom. In other words, in 2

'The May-Pole of Merry Mount", The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, I (New York; Riverside Edition, 1882), 70-84, cited throughout. 3 "Hawthorne and 'The Maypole of Merry-Mount"', MLN, LIII (March, 1938), 159-167. Orians has identified such works as Hubbard's history in the Massachusetts Historical Collections, and historical compilations by Nathaniel Morton, Prince, Baylie, Felt, and the redaction of the unpublished accounts by Governor Bradford. 4 (London, 1801). Orians has examined the depth of dependence upon Strutt and notes mention of the stag and the goat, rarely mentioned in other accounts of Mayday festivals. 5 Hoffman (134, n.3), notes that Hawthorne borrowed Hone (London, 1826) from the Salem Athenaeum from September 5-12 and October 17-November 13, 1835 and again from February 25-March 9, 1836. Cf. for a record of Hawthorne's reading the Essex Institute Historical Collections, LXVIII (January, 1932), 65-87.

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terms of the relation of form to function in literary motifs having folk (i.e., pagan) provenience, both Herrick and Hawthorne, to some degree at least, allowed the forms of paganism to remain stable while acknowledging a change in function. 6 As such, they are liable to a judgment about the extent to which they have allowed the historical conception of the "pagan" forms (or Puritan, or Anglican forms for the polarity is reversible) to enter into the functional situation of their own present awareness. Recognition of this awareness is not a new critical judgment; it is at least as old a consideration as that of the presence of Roman sacrificial scenes in Bellini's painting "The Redeemer", as old, in other words, as the highest and most serious fusions of the pagan and the Christian in Italian Renaissance painting, philosophy, aesthetics, and poetry. Any conscious re-creation of the past derives its essence and its interest, apart from the purely 'archaeological', from the creator's awareness, conscious or unconscious, of a relationship, explicit or implicit, between that past and his own present - a realization of 'historical distance'. In order that May-Poles, garlands, Lord and Ladies of May, hawthorne boughs and "grassy skirts" be represented at all, they must have been conceived of by Herrick and Hawthorne as "real, undistorted, expressive and compatible with Christianity", either of the Anglican or the modified nineteenth-century Puritan variety.7 The persistence of this historical awareness amounts to a tradition in literature, uninterrupted even by the revolutionary forces of Puritanism. It is a minor tradition, to be sure, but a tradition so alien, and so opposed to our modern vision, represented by some of the best of our modern critics, that these critics have not as yet shaken off the whipping post ethic of their own Puritan heritage. I want to demonstrate one aspect of the tradition, in Herrick, by using the already illustrated working of the tradition in Hawthorne, and thereby to link the two in tradition, though not in intent. Hawthorne used the juxtaposition of pagan rite and "iron" Christianity to represent the conflicting claims upon Edgar and Edith, the Lord and Lady of May, and upon New England, of the forces of "jollity" (the spirit of life) and "gloom" (the worship of force). The folk-custom of Maypole worship, which he derived from Hone and Strutt, represents in the tale neither an historically accurate recreation of the seasonal custom, nor a 6

This distinction of the relatedness of form to function was first applied by Daniel Hoffman to the subject of folklore in literature in "Folklore in Literature: A Symposium", JAF, (March, 1957) 19. 7 I have borrowed the phrase from Fritz Saxl, "Pagan Sacrifice in the Italian Rennaissance", Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, II (April, 1939), 363, n.l.

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commitment to that historical custom. Indeed, Hawthorne takes his New England pagans back, historically, to a time which even Henick, with his vast knowledge of the classical past, rarely invokes: "O, people of the Golden Age, the chief of your husbandry was to raise flowers! " And the chief veneration of the Merrymounters is the Maypole, worshipped not at the conventional May festival (Hawthorne, following his sources, has the Maypole festivities take place at Mid-summer), but throughout the year. They are, thus, virtual poetic abstractions; their life is an ideal state. "Sworn triflers of a lifetime" Hawthorne calls them, and they represent in the tale a carpe diem hedonistic cult. Any possiblity of a Christian carpe diem is explicitly denied. The pull of history and his sources is toward reality; his conceptual point of view is toward idealization and abstraction; hence, the ambivalence and equivocality his critics have usually found in the tale. Although it is fashionable to emphasize Hawthorne's ambiguity, which certainly exists elsewhere, this tale is clear enough. The tale does not describe an "uncompromising equivocality of vision'' as Hoffman would have us believe.8 The rhapsodic descriptions of Blackstone's band are damningly presented, for Hawthorne, the unwilling descendant of Puritanism, points explicitly toward condemnation at the same time that Hawthorne the artist ambivalently laments the passing of an efficacious old order. He allows the Merrymounters their strut upon the stage. Yet he presents Endicott and his group of knights with equal unequivocality: The Puritans are "grim", "superstitious", "most dismal wretches", and bounty hunters (for wolves and Indians). The whipping post is their Maypole. As the Merrymounters represent the Golden Age — even the Garden of Eden — so the Puritans represent, by virtue of their fasts and sermons, the oppressive Dark Ages which succeed the Golden. Both are condemned, the one for its failure to observe the values of 'real' time, the other for its failure to even acknowledge the ideal values of an eternity in nature. Hawthorne, nonetheless, does not deny the efficaciousness of either faith: the validity of the pagan marriage is not questioned by Endicott. T ndeed, with a supreme gesture of ironic ambivalence, Hawthorne has Endicott toss the pagan symbol of sanctified marriage, the garland of roses (the fusion of Old and New England), over the heads of the Lord and Lady of May. The Puritan and Pagan ethics are ritual straw men, raised only to 8

129. I am aware of the indebtedness of my discussion to Hoffman's chapter on "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" ( 1 2 6 - 1 4 8 ) , but on this essential point we differ. I am also aware of the extent to which my own ideas have been formed by two other Hawthorne critics: Q. D. Leavis, "Hawthorne as Poet [I] ", Sewatiee Review, LIX (1951), 1 8 5 - 1 9 5 , and Richard H. Fogle, Hawthorne's Fiction: The Litfit and the Dark (Norman, 1952) 5 9 - 6 9 . My argument for an historical tradition and for recognition of "awareness" is not anticipated in either.

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be cut down in favor of a "mystery" foretold in the tale when Edgar declares: O, Edith, this is our golden time! Tarnish it not by any pensive shadow of the mind; for it may be that nothing of futurity will be brighter than the mere remembrance of what is now passing. Edith is also struck by the same thought and, saddened, replies: ...I struggle with a dream, and fancy that these shapes of our jovial friends are visionary, and their mirth unreal, and that we are no true Lord and Lady of the May. She knows not what she has said, for Edith's "mystery" is that, "From the moment that they truly loved, they had subjected themselves to earth's doom of care and sorrow, and troubled joy, and had no more a home at Merry Mount". Love, the natural and vital force of the spirit of life and, traditionally, of paganism, when confronted by reality compels submission to that reality. Hawthorne presents Puritan morality as the only reality. The possible ambivalence and equivocality we encounter in the allegorical and symbolic patterns of the tale are resolved conceptually by recourse to history — the "mystery" is a myth to be lamented in its demise. Carpe diem apparently results in marriage, on the social and moral planes. But the natural love of Merry Mount, while providing a contrast to, also provides a criticism of, conventional Christianity. And it is here, it seems, that Hawthorne is explicitly unequivocal in his condemnation of the Puritan ethic. He is, of course, aware of the reality of Puritanism, but he tries, unsuccessfully, to raise it to the same level of abstraction in "gloom" as that to which he has raised paganism in "jollity". Love must give way to duty, and the union of Edgar and Edith is only an imperfect blending of two possible perfections. Endicott predicts a higher happiness for them. In the explicit last paragraph of the story, Hawthorne presents Endicott as a rather sympathetic figure who himself has a certain nostalgia for the olden time. Although Hawthorne's feelings about the Puritans shift a bit, and although he humanizes, from different directions both Endicott and the lovers, he does throw his sympathies to the Puritans. By demonstrating in the tale the depthand intensity and immediacy of the pagan ethic, but by idealizing it and by making it an imaginative dream, Hawthorne has pushed his commitment to it to the level of symbolic abstraction, or as he says "into a sort of allegory". The pagan ethic has significance for Hawthorne only as an ideal, an abstraction; it is not 'real' for him. In precisely the same way, it is only a "mystery" for the Lord and Lady of May. Hawthorne's sympathies, artistically, are probably with Merry Mount, for it represents a dream of prelapsarian man and the

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freedom to create an exquisitely beautiful butterfly. But history and his own awareness of the relationship that exists between the Puritan past and his own present drive him artistically, ethically, and morally, to resolution in Puritanism. Equivocality of vision is not, then, the mode of the tale. Paganism on a symbolic level of significance, and Puritanism on a 'real' level, do not therefore result in a complete fusion because the imaginary is never given the appearance or the 'awareness' of being real. As R.H. Fogle has so perceptively observed: "The dour Puritan triumphs because he is in tune with the nature of things". 9 The claims upon our sympathies for the two creatures in the new demi-Eden have, of course, been strong. But we must, like Hawthorne (and Adam and Eve), bend before duty and iron force. It could have been otherwise, and Hawthorne half-heartedly wishes it were so. But the lament for the passing of the old ways is no less forceful because we have been prepared for it by the irrevocable denigration of its dreamlike qualities. There is, of course, an obvious contrast between Herrick and Hawthorne: it was far easier for Herrick in the seventeenth century to accommodate the older pagan ritual with Christian devotion than it was for Hawthorne two hundred years later. There are other comparisons: in both we discover a tension of Christianity and naturalism, both employ the sanctions of ceremony, marriage, and art, and a normative meaning and normative ideological structure inform the re-creations of the past of each, thereby implying an 'historical awareness' of the significance for the present 'real' situation of the historical past — represented in each by the forces of paganism, naturalistic activity, and jollity. The difference between Herrick and Hawthorne is that Herrick was able to accept the claim of paganism as a probable and a real claim upon his vision of life. Hawthorne was able to accept the claim of paganism only as a possible vision of life. In this sense, even though Herrick provides a Christian sanction upon his paganism, his is a wider, more embracing vision of relations between Christianity and paganism than Hawthorne's, primarily because in Hawthorne historical awareness was becoming a less forceful vehicle of apprehension. The pagan or classical way of life represented in the folk-custom of the May-pole was, by Hawthorne's time, losing both the significance of its form of representation and its function in the culture. This gradual decay of form and function resulted from the decay 9 The sentence which immediately precedes this quotation from Fogle (60) is interestingly erroneous: "The core of the story lies in a conflict between abstractions, and the outcome is determined in accordance with an assumption about the world and reality". Fogle is apparently not concerned with Hawthorne's failure to find any "reality" in the pagan customs, and he appears to be quite willing to make Endicott and the Puritans an abstraction.

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of analogous thinking. Herrick, unlike Hawthorne, is concerned not so much with dividing or differentiating as with achieving unities, with perceiving similarities. In the broadest possible sense Herrick and Hawthorne partake of a tradition of artistic response to confrontations of the pagan and the Christian. Hawthorne does not fail to see an awareness of the significance of the past for his own present. But he sees a different kind of awareness than does Herrick; an awareness, nonetheless, and hence, two facets of the same artistic tradition. Hawthorne's lack of ambivalence concerning the conflict between paganism and Christianity is not shared by Andrew Marvell. While it was possible for Herrick to entertain oppositions between paganism and Christianity (in imagistic juxtapositions and in thematic statements), and to resolve this tension in terms of an art within Nature which the poet creates by his Art, Marvell was unable to make this resolution. Ambivalence concerning this particular set of oppositions is characteristic of Marvell, and is indicative of his "perspective by incongruity", caused by his Puritan attitude toward Nature. Herrick, as was often noted above, does not entertain the conception of Nature as a post-lapsarian punishment; nor does he ever see Nature as Edenic purity — the very dialectical tensions of Marvell's poetry. Because the historical and existential context has changed so significantly by Marvell's time (and because his poetry betrays his conscious awareness of this change), he was unable to resolve the conflict of Nature and Art as easily as did Herrick earlier. The possiblity of a world view which could resolve the artificiality and artful naturalness of Corinna's world (or the world of the Merrymounters) with the real and artless reality of the oppressive Puritan ethic, is held by Marvell in an ambiguous and ambivalent relationship. All of the 'Mower' poems, especially "The Garden", demonstrate the impossibility of restoring man to harmony with Nature. Even the speaker in "The Garden", having achieved a static state as "All Mind", must be drawn back while ironically denying his being drawn back, by the symbol of temporal time represented in the sundial. Marvell has moved within the tradition of the conflict of Nature and Art (of which the pagan-Christian conflict is one aspect) to his position of ambivalence. Hawthorne, some two hundred years later, was even less capable of sustaining ambivalence and irresolution within the tradition. In Hawthorne, Nature as Edenic purity is only symbolically represented, whereas in Marvell it is metaphoric reality and in Herrick actual reality. Herrick deems the Puritan reality a destructive force in culture and in art. Marvell ambivalently holds the oppositions in tension while longing for the reality of Art. Hawthorne deems the Puritan reality a force destructive of all jollity, finds it to be without Art, yet is incapable

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of bestowing upon it even the reality o f Art. There is an artistic progression from Herrick to Hawthorne, with Marvell in the medial position. It is a development from art for art's and culture's sake, through a position of ambivalence, to the final point of art in conflict with culture and reality. It is apparent, therein, that not only have attitudes toward paganism and Christianity changed, but so too have attitudes toward Art and Nature and toward art and reality. It seems unneceessary to have to explain their changes in social, cultural, historical and artistic views — historical research during the past half-century has documented these changes more than adequately. But essentially, with reference to Herrick, we are interested in his world view — a view which is decidedly Elizabethan and yet already reflects the changes in all of the historical and poetic contexts which were being effected during his lifetime. There are, for example, many occasional poems about Herrick's contemporary England which can be used to demonstrate this point. There are poems on King Charles and the Court, on political and military events of the war, and elegies for fallen Royalists. In this context the poem The bad season makes the Poet sad reveals Herrick's awareness o f the passing of an age with a corollary longing for "that golden A g e " : Dull to my selfe, and almost dead to these My many fresh and fragrant Mistresses: Lost to all Musick n o w ; since every thing Puts on the semblance here of sorrowing. Sick is the Land to 'the'heart; and doth endure More dangerous faintings by her desp'rate cure. But if that golden Age wo'd come again, And Charles here Rule, as he before did Raign; If smooth and unperplext and the Seasons were, As when the Sweet Maria lived here: I sho'd delight to have my Curies halve drown'd In Tyrian Dewes, and Head with Roses crown'd. And once more yet (ere I am laid out dead) Knock at α Starre with my exalted Head. Here is Herrick's awareness of the cultural context, the fully poetic awareness of the poet's bearing and creating role in his fusion of the historical

context with his poetic context. A s poet, Herrick is very

intimately and poetically responsive to the external world, and his poetry is a vision of that external reality internalized b y the act o f creation. F o r his poetry is like a mirror, in that it reflects outward upon the external world at the same time that it is like a window in that it allows us to see into the world of his art and the vision of that a r t . 1 0 If the "golden A g e " (for 10

Murray Krieger uses a concept like this in his A Window to Criticism: Shake-

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Herrick the Elizabethan and early Jacobean years) could be returned, then in terms of the mythopoeic simile, the seasons would return to their proper order again. The poem quoted is also ironic because the whole volume of poems represents the poet Herrick knocking at the stars which, like the allusion to Horace's first Ode from which the line is derived, is precisely what he intends the volume to do. It is no mere coincidence that order, grace and "wilde civility" are found in the Elizabethan age which is more accurately associated with Horace's age, than in that later century which pretended to classical refinement. In discussing the historical awareness of Herrick's vision, I am essentially using the historical context both externally and internally. The elements of ceremonial and ritual, of paganism and Christianity, of play and Baroque minuteness, and of Art and Nature are external elements. They are the historical and existential contexts of Herrick's poetry. And this book (it is hoped) has demonstrated that these external contexts are internally reflected. Herrick's poetry bears these contexts as it also creates these contexts. His vision of the relation between the external and the internal, between the existential and the poetic contexts, denies the reality of the first, qua reality, so as to recreate them artistically. His vision gives body and form to artistic reality and internalizes the external so as to reflect the internal externally again. Thus we see in Herrick's poetry the cognitive vision which consciously controls certain thematic principles. The poetry truly bears the vision of historical reality at the same time that it creates a new historical reality through the poetic context. The critic studying his vision is in the unique position of being able.to discover Herrick's historical awareness (with all its complementary concerns — paganism, Christianity, ritual, play, etc.) and simultaneously to discover his aesthetic awareness (with all its complementary concerns - Art and Nature, art within Nature, poetic juxtapositions and dialectical oppositions, etc.). The discovery is possible for the critic because the vision is there, residing in the very reality of Herrick's Art. Because the poetry plays in its serious way with historical and poetic contexts, the critic must also 'play' with these contexts. He must play his ritualistically incantatory techniques and analyses back and forth, and round and round, the fusion of contexts. He must be self-consciously critical in separating the one from the other context precisely because the poet has self-consciously fused them in inseparable form and content. To say that Herrick's poetry carries a vision is not, however, to say that his poetry is visionary. Nor, therefore, should the critic pretend to be speare's Sonnets and Modern Poetics (Princcton, 1964) though in reference to the language of the sonnets themselves. I use it here as a convenient metaphor for the reflecting and penetrating vision contained in the poetry itself.

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critically visionary. For in doing so there is always the inherently dangerous critical possibility (in criticism-as-play) that he will fail in his efforts, the existential and poetic contexts being by their very natures elusive. Critical positivism applied to the first context can lead to the rawest kind of contextual historicism — forcing the poetry to become only an illustration of historical, social and cultural facts. Such positivism then directed toward the poetic context will inevitably lead to Platonic propositional statements which are equally tenuous. Only, then, by letting the critical consciousness oscillate between the contexts as they are revealed in the vision that the poetry presents, can the critic be reasonably sure that his judgments are true as well as just. For the validity of the critic's judgment will be in direct relation to his ability to 'play' Robert Herrick's game.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, Μ. H., ed., Literature and Belief: English Institute Essays, 1957 (New York, 1958). The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1953). Addleshaw, G. W. O., The High Church Tradition (London, 1941). Aiken, Pauline, The Influence of the Latin Elegists on English Poetry, 1600-1650 (Orono, Maine, 1932). Allen, Don Cameron, "Rex Tragicus", in his Image and Meaning (Baltimore, 1968). Bailey, Cyril, Religion of Ancient Rome (London, 1907). -.Religionin Virgil {Oxford, 1935). Bateson, F. W., English Poetry and the English Language (Oxford, 1934). Berger, Harry, "The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World", Centennial Review, ix (Winter, 1965),36-78. "Pico and Neoplatonist Idealism: Philosophy as Escape", Centennial Review, xiii (Winter, 1969), 38-83. Bolgar, R. R., The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries (Cambridge, 1954). Brand, John, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, revised and enlarged by Henry Ellis, 3 vols. (London, 1873). Briggs, Katherine M., The Anatomy of Puck (London, 1959). Brooks, Cleanth, The Well Wrought Urn (New York, 1947). Bush, Douglas, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry, new revised edition (New York, 1963). -, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600-1660. 2nd edition, revised (Oxford, 1962). Candelaria, F. S., 'The Carpe Diem Motif in Early Seventeenth Century Lyric Poetry with Particular Reference to Robert Herrick", Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Missouri, 1959. Cartari, Vincenzo, Le Imagini colla Sposizione degli dei degli Antichi, (Lyon, 1581). The Fountain of Ancient Fiction, translated by Richard Linche (London, 1599). Cassirer, Ernst, " 'Spirit' and 'Life' in Contemporary Philosophy", translated by Robert W. Bretall & Paul A. Schilpp in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, edited Paul A. Schilpp (Evanston, Illinois, 1949). Catullus, Gaius Valerius, Catullus, Julius & Pervigilium Veneris, translated by F. W. Cornish (Cambridge, 1962). Chute, Marchette, Two Gentle Men (New York, 1959). . Conti, Natale, Mythologiae, sive Explications Fabularum, Libri Decern (Geneva, 1620). Costello, William T., The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958). Cox, Harvey, The Feast of Fools (Cambridge, Mass., 1969). Delattre, Floris, Robert Herrick (Paris, 1912). D'Ewes, Sir Simonds, The Autobiography and Correspondence of..., edited by James O. Halliwell, 2 vols. (London, 1945).

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 169 Dionysius Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, edited and.translated by Earnest Cary, 7 vols. (Cambridge, 1937-1950). Dundes, Alan, 'The Study of Folklore in Literature and Culture: Identification and Interpretation", Journal of American Folklore, bcxviii (1965), 136-142. The Editors, Explicator I (1943), item 2. Eliot, T. S., 'Tradition and the Individual Talent", Selected Essays (New York, 1950). Emperor, John B., The Catullan Influence in English Lyric Poetry, c. 1600-1650 (Columbia, Missouri, 1928). Empson, William, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London, 1930). Fogle, Richard H., Hawthorne's Fiction (Norman, Oklahoma, 1952). Fowler, W. Warde, The Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic (London, 1899). The Religious Experience of the Roman People (London, 1911). Giraldi, Lilio Gregori, Opera Omnia, edited by Joannes Jensius (Lugduni, 1696). Godwin, Thomas, Romanae Historiae anthologia, An Exposition of the Roman Antiquities (Oxford, 1614). Gordon, D. J. 'The Imagery of Ben Jonson's 'The Masque of Blacknesse' and The Masque of Beautie' ", Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes, vi (1943), 122-141. - , " 'Hymenaei': Ben Jonson's Masque of Union", Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes, viii (1945), 107-145. - , "Chapman's 'Hero and Leander' ", English Miscellany, ν (1954), 41-94. Haight, Elizabeth H., "Robert Herrick: The English Horace", Classical Weekly, Iv (1911), 178-181, 186-189. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Complete Works of.... Vol 1 (New York, 1882). Herbert, George, The Works of..., edited by F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941). Herrick, Robert, The Poetical Works of..., edited by F. W. Moorman (Oxford, 1915). The Poetical Works of.... edited by L. C. Martin (Oxford, 1956). -, Herrick, edited by William Jay Smith (New York, 1962). The Complete Works of..., edited by J. Max Patrick (New York, 1963). Hibbard, G. R., "The Country House Poem of the Seventeenth Century", Journal of the Warburg & Courtauld Institutes, xix (1956), 159-174. Hierurgia Anglicana, edited by Vernon Staley, 3 vols. (London, 1902-1904). Higham, Florence, Lancelot Andrewes (London, 1952). Hoffman, Daniel F., "Folklore in Literature: A Symposium", Journal of American Folklore, lxx (March, 1957), 19-21. Form and Fable in American Fiction (New York, 1961). Holden, William P., Anti-Puritan Satire, 1572-1642 (New Haven, 1954). Hooker, Richard, The Works, edited by J. Keble, R. W. Church, F. Paget (Oxford, 1888).

Horace, The Odes and Epodes, translated by C. E. Bennett (Cambridge, 1927). Hughes, Richard E., "Herrick's 'Hock Cart': Companion Piece to 'Corinna's Going Α-Maying' ", College English, xxvii (February, 1966), 420-422. Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens (New York, 1955). Jonson, Ben, The Works of..., edited by C. H. Herford, Percy & Evelyn M. Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925-1952). Knowlton, E. C., 'The Allegorical Figure Genius", Classical Philology, xv (1920), 380-384. - , "Genius as an Allegorical Figure", Modern Language Notes, xxxix (1924), 89-95. - , "The Genii of Spenser", Studies in Philology, xxv (1928), 439-456. Krieger, Murray, "The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry; Or Laokoön Revisited", in his The Play and Place of Criticism (Baltimore, 1967). Leavis, F. R., Revaluations (London, 1936). Leavis, Q. D., "Hawthorne as Poet [I]", Sewanee Review, lix (1951), 185-195. Levi-Strauss, Claude, Mythologiques: Le Cru et Le Cuit (Paris, 1964).

170 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY Lewis, C. S., The Allegory of Love (Oxford, 1936). Loughy, Robert, "Robert Herrick's 'The Hock-Cart, or Harvest Home', 51-55", Explicator, xxiii (October, 1964), item 13. Lovejoy, A. O., " 'Nature' as Aesthetic Norm", Modem Language Notes, xlii (1927), 444-450. McEuen, Kathryn Α., Classical Influence Upon the Tribe of Ben (Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1939). Macleod, Malcolm L., A Concordance to the Poems of Robert Herrick (London, 1936). McPeek, James A. S., Catullus in Strange and Distant Britain (Cambridge, Mass., 1939). Mahood, Μ. M., Poetry and Humanism (London, 1950). Martz, Louis L., The Poetry of Meditation, revised edition (New Haven, 1962). Moorman, F. W., Robert Herrick (London, 1910). Musgrove, Sydney, The Universe of Robert Herrick (Auckland, 1950). New, John F. H„ Anglican and Puritan (Stanford, 1964). Orians, G. H., "Hawthorne and T h e Maypole of Merry-Mount' ", Modem Language Notes, liii (March, 1938), 159-167. Ovid, Fastorum Libri Sex, edited and translated by James G. Frazer, 5 vols. (London, 1929). Panofsky, Erwin and F. Saxl, "Classical Mythology in Medieval Art", Metropolitan Museum Studies, iv (March, 1933), 266-268. Plutarch, "Numa" in Plutarch's Lives, translated by Bernadotte Perrin, 10 vols. (London, 1914). Quaestiones Romanes, edited by H. J. Rose (Oxford, 1924). Poulet, Georges, The Metamorphosis of the Circle (Baltimore, 1967). Press, John, Herrick (London, 1961). Propertius, Elegies, translated by Η. E. Butler (Cambridge, 1912). Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie, edited by Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936). Rea, J., "Persephone in 'Corinna's Going Α-Maying'", College English, xxvi (April, 1965), 544-546. Reed, Mark L., "Herrick Among the Maypoles: Dean Prior and the Hesperides", Studies in English Literature, ν (1965), 133-150. Rollin, Roger Β., Robert Herrick (New York, 1966). - , "Missing 'The Hock-Cart'", Seventeenth-Century News, xxix (Autumn, 1966), 39-40. Rosinus, Iohannis, Antiquitatum Romanarum corpus absohttissimum (Amsterdam, 1743). Ross, Malcolm M., Poetry and Dogma (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1954). Ross, Richard J., " Ά Wilde Civility': Robert Herrick's Poetic Solution of the Paradox of Art and Nature", Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1958. - , "Herrick's Julia in Silks", Essays in Criticism,xv (April, 1965), 171-180. Saxl, Fritz, "Pagan Sacrifice in the Italian Renaissance", Journal of the Warburg ά CourtauldInstitutes, ii (1939), 346-367. Seznec, Jean, La Survivance des dieux antiques, translated by Barbara F. Sessions (New York, 1953). Smith, Horatio, Festivals, Games, and Amusements, Ancient and Modem (New York, 1958). Southwell, Robert, The Poems of..., edited by James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown (Oxford, 1967). Spitzer, Leo, "Herrick's 'Delight in Disorder'", Modem Language Notes, bcxvi (1961), 209-214. Starkman, Miriam K., "Noble Numbers and the Poetry of Devotion", in Reason and The Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600-1800, edited by J. A.

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171

Mazzeo (New York, 1962). Starnes, D. T., "The Figure Genius in the Renaissance", Studies in the Renaissance, xi (1964), 234-244. and E. R. Talbert. Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries (Chapel Hill, 1955). Staudt, Victor P., "Horace and Herrick on Carpe Diem", Classical Bulletin, xxxiii (March, 1957), 55-56. Stroup, Thomas, Religious Rite and Ceremony in Milton's Poetry (Lexington, Kentucky, 1968). Swardson, H. R., Poetry and the Fountain of Light (London, 1962). Tannenbaum, Samuel A. and Dorothy R., Robert Herrick: A Concise Bibliography (New York, 1949). Tayler, Edward W., Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature (New York, 1964). Tillyard, E. M. W. and C. S. Lewis, The Personal Heresy (Oxford, 1939). Türe, Rosemond, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery (Chicago, 1947). A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago, 1952). Vaughan, Henry, The Works of..., edited by L. C. Martin (Oxford, 1957). Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, translated by H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1935). Wamke, Frank, "Play and Metamorphosis in Marrell's Poetry", Studies in English Literature, ν (1965), 23-30. - , "Sacred Play: Baroque Poetic Style", Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism, xxii (Summer, 1964), 455-465. Wasserman, Earl, The Finer Tone (Baltimore, 1953). Watson, Foster, The English Grammar Schools to 1660 (Cambridge, 1908). Whipple, Τ. K., Martial and the English Epigram (Berkeley, 1925). Whitaker, T. R., "Herrick and the Fruits of the Garden", English Literary History, xxii (1955), 16-33. Wilson, Harold S., "Some Meanings of 'Nature' in Renaissance Literary Theory", Journal of the History of Ideas, ii (1941), 430-448. Wind, Edgar, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London, 1958). Woodward, Daniel H., "Herrick's Oberon Poems", Journal of English & Germanic Philology, lxi* (1965), 276-279.

INDEX

Abrains, Μ. Η., 28, 58 Adams, J. Q., 73 Addleshaw, G. W. O., 86, 87 agonistic fiction, 20, 49 Aiken, Pauline, 23 Alexandro, Alexander ab, 128 Allen, D. C., 7, 76 Anacreon, 34 Anglican ceremony, 85, 86 Anglican liturgical controversy, 87-89 Anglican liturgy, 134, 142 antiquities, handbooks of, 24, 47 Art, 9, 10, 12, 29, 31-36 (and Nature), 40,47-57, 58-59 "art/ceremony" principle, 33, 35-40, 47, 51, 55-56, 61, 115-116, 148 artistic vision, 10, 12, 60, 61, 83, 85 Augustine, Saint, 46 Bailey, Cyril, 109, 110 Baldwin, T. W., 23 Baroque, 9, 52, 59, 60, 70, 79, 82, 83, 84, 85, 132, 139, 155-156 Bateson, F. W., 37 Berger, Harry, 13, 30, 58 Bolgar, R. R., 23 Brand, John, 135, 138, 140, 141 Bray, Anna E. S., 149 Briggs, Katherine, 79, 81, 86, 158 Brisson, Barnabe, 128 Brooks, Cleanth, 37, 48, 50, 56 Brown, Carleton, 72 Brown, Nancy P., 71 Browne, Sir Thomas, 114 Browne, William, 79 Burke, Kenneth, 11, 31 Burton, Robert, 99 Bush, Douglas, 29, 115, 136

Candelaria, F. H., 155 Carew, Thomas, 150

carpe diem, 30, 40, 41-46, 53-54, 155, 161, 1 6 2

Cartari, Vincenzo, 24, 25, 61, 62,64 Cassirer, Ernst, 19, 58 Catullus, 23, 114, 129, 130 "ceremonial decorum," 61,97-98 ceremonial mode, 9, 10, 12, 17, 18, 19 ceremonies: of country, 19; of fairy, 19; of love, 89-98; of marriage ( e pithalamium), 127-134; of play, 19; of ritual, 19; of romance, 19; of "the second world," 19 ceremony, 9, 17, 29 ceremony, artistic, 9, 10, 17, 20, 47-57, 60 ceremony, classical, 20, 22,47-57 ceremony, natural, 19, 20, 47-57, 58-59 ceremony, proper ("propriety"), 22, 26, 47,61,62, 112-115, 117, 121 Chapman, George, 21 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 108 Christian ceremony, 17, 20, 22, 67f Christianity, 9, 10, 27-28 classicism, 10-12 "cleanly wantonnesse," 40, 53, 54, 55, 60, 121

Conti, Natale, 25, 61, 62, 64 Cosin, John, 87 Costello, William, .24 Cox, Harvey, 11, 98 Crashaw, Richard, 52, 70, 79, 84, 94, 139 Cross, Frank, 86 Dante, 28 "death-rite poetry," 99-126 Delattre, Floris, 28 Dempster, Thomas, 25, 61 devotional poetry, 66-79 D'Ewes, Simonds, 24 Donne, John, 26, 33, 79, 102, 103, 104, 132

INDEX Drayton, Michael, 79 Dundes, Alan, 158 "ecphrastic principle," 36-38,47, 55-56, 101 Eliot, T. S., 21 Emperor, John B., 23 Empson, William, 50, 51, 77, 115 Erasmus, 23 expansion, 9 experience, 12 Fairclough, Η. R., 95 fairy, 19, 60 fairy poetry, 79-89 Fitz-Geoffrey, Charles, 110 Floras, 24 Fogle, Richard H., 161, 163 Fowler, W. Warde, 62, 117, 136, 147 Gardner, Helen, 104 Gellius, Aulus, 24, 26, 40 Genius, 18, 63-66 Giraldi (Girddus), Lilio Gregori, 25, 61, 62, 63, 64 God, 10, 22 god of love, 89 gods, the, 10, 61-66 Godwin, Thomas, 24, 25, 61, 62, 88, 93 Goethe, 19, 31 Gordon, D. J., 20, 21, 128 Gosse, Edmund, 28 Gower, John, 108 Greek Anthology, 17 Grosart, A. B., 28 Haight, Elizabeth, 23 Halicarnassus, Dionysius, 135 Halliwell, James O., 24 Harris, Howard, 140, 141 Harris, Victor, 99 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 157, 159 Herbert, George, 67, 68, 72, 77, 78, 87, 103,104,110-111,139 Herford, C. H., 25, 62 Herrick, Robert, poetry: "all young men that love, T o , " 42; "Another New-Yeeres G i f t , " 69-74; "Another New-Yeeres G i f t , " 75; "Another, The Virgin Mary," 110; "Anthea, T o " 65; "Anthea, T o , " 133-134; "Anthea (ii), T o , " 134-135; "Apollo, A Short Hymne, T o , " 62; "Argument of his Book, T h e , " 40, 59f., 98, 99, 116, 119; " A r t above Nature," 39;

173 "Bad Princes pill their People," 97; "Bad Season makes the poet sad, T h e , " 19, 65; "Best to be Merry," 42, 65; "Biancha, T o , " 118; "Blossoms, T o , " 100; "Ceremonies for Candlemasse day," 140; "Ceremonies for Candlemasse Eve," 141; "Ceremonies for Christmasse," 140; "Ceremony upon Candlemas Eve," 141; "Cheerfulnesse in Charitie," 96; "Christmas Carroll, A , " 39; "Christmasse Eve," 140; "Christmas-Eve, Another," 141; "Christs Birth," 110; "Christs Incarnation," 72; "Corinna's going a-Maying," 30, 47-57, 59, 75, 89, 146, 157; "Country Life, A , " 150-151; "Country Life, T h e , " 150, 151-153; "Dean-Bourne," 19, 143; "Delight in Disorder," 34, 36-40, 60; "Dianeme, T o , " 137-138; "Dirge of Jephthah's Daughter," 108-110; "Dirge upon the Death of the Right Valiant Lord, B. Stuart," 120; "Discontents in Devon," 19; Electra, T o , " 95; "Entertainment, T h e , " 133; "Epitaph upon a Child, A n , " 114, 117; "Epithalamia to Sir Thomas Southwell and His Ladie, A n , " 128-131; "Evensong," 55, 136; "Fairie Temple, T h e , " 68, 80, 81, 87-89; "Flowers, T o , " 114; "Frankincense, The," 94; "Funerall Rites of the Rose," 50, 85-89; " G o d , T o (viii)," 69; " G o d , his good will, T o , " 69; " G o d on his sicknesse, T o , " 103; " G o o d Friday," 76; "Groves, T o , " 124-125; "His A g e , " 64; "His Anthem to Christ on the Crosse," 78; "His charge to Julia at his death," 117, 118; "His confession," 66; "His content in the Country," 19; "his Honoured Kinsman, Sir Richard Stone, T o , " 123; "his kinswoman, Mrs. Penelope Wheeler, T o , " 124; "His Letanie," 106-108; "His Meditation upon Death," 104-106; "his peculiar friend Master Thomas Shapcott, T o , " 80, 122-123; "His poetrie his Pillar," 47; "His Prayer for Absolution," 66; "His Prayer to Ben Jonson," 123; "His returne to London," 18, 19, 64, 143; "His Sailing from Julia," 63; "his Saviour, T o , " 73; "His Saviour, a child, T o , " 73; "his Saviours Sepul-

174

INDEX eher, To," 79; "His Saviours Words," Mrs. M. S.," 114; "Upon Julias 110; "his sweet Saviour, To," Clothes," 39-40; "Upon Linnit," 34; 103-104; "His Words to Christ," 77; "Upon Man," 32-33; "Upon Prudence "his worthy friend, M. Tho. Falcon· Baldwin," 62; "Upon Shark," 34; birge, To," 65; "his worthy Kinsman, "Upon Skrew," 34; "Upon the death Mr. Stephen Soame, To," 123-124; of his Sparrow," 114; "Virgin Mary," "Hock-Cart, The," 48, 147-149; 110; "Vow to Mars, A," 62; "Vow to "Hymne to Bacchus (i), A," 62; Venus, A," 61; "Wake, The," 145; "Hymne to Bacchus (ii), A," 62; "Wassaile, The," 146; "What kind of "Hymne to Juno, A," 62; "Hymne to Mistresse he would have," 22; "When Lares, An," 95; "Hymne to the Lares, he would have his verses read," 43; A," 63, 119; "Widdowes Teares: or, Dirge of Dorcas," 40; Willow Garland, The," "Jocond his Muse," 29; "Julia, To," 27. 92-93, 114; "Julia, To," 94-95; "Julia, Hesperides, 9, 13 To (iv)," 120-121; "Julia, in the Hibbard, G. R., 150,153 Temple, To," 93-94; "Julia, The Hirsch, Ε. D., 11 Flaminica Dialis, To," 90; "Julias "historical and cultural vision," 79, Churching," 137; "Keep a true Lent, To," 138-139; "Larr, To," 63, 119; 129-157 "Larr's Portion," 63; "Leprosie in historical continuum, 10 houses," 65; "live Freely, To," 40; "historical distance," 19, 86, 125-126 "live merrily, To," 43, 47, 62; "Love historical past, use of, 10, 17, 55-57, Perfumes all Parts," 94; "Lyrick to 81-82, 85-89, 148, 158-167 Mirth, A," 62; "Mattens," 68, 92; historical scene, 10, 141 "May-Pole, The," 146; "Mean in our Hobbes, Thomas, 79 Means, A," 97; "Meditation for his Hoffman, Daniel G., 158, 159, 160, 161 Mistresse, A," 101; "Meat without Holden, William P., 142 Mirth," 18, 20; "New-Yeares Gift," Hone, William, 159 73-74; "NuptiaU Song, A," 131-133; Hooker, Richard, 21, 63 "Oberons Feast," 22, 80, 82, 83; Hopkins, Gerard Manly, 56 "Oberons Palace," 83-85; "Ode of the Horace, 17, 23, 26,40, 150 Birth of our Saviour, An," 70, 73; Hughes, Richard E., 48 "Painting sometimes permitted," 34; Huizinga, Johan, 29, 30, 49, 59 "Panegerick, A," 150; "Parasceve, Hutchinson, F. E., 68, 77, 87 The," 67-68, 72; "Perenna, To," 120; "Perfume, The," 94; "Perilla, To," irony, 9, 11, 17, 19,55,60 116-117, 120; "Primitiae to Parents, The," 63; "Sacrifice, The," 25-27; Jensius, Joannes, 25, 62 "Saint Distaffs day," 145; "Short Jonson, Ben, 23, 24, 25, 36, 62, 64, 75, Hymne to Larr, A," 63; "Short 95-96, 109, 123-124, 127, 128, 129, Hymne to Venus, A," 61; "Sir John 133, 150 Berkley, To," 65; "Smell of the SacriJuvenal, 34 fice, The," 96; "Star-Song, The," 70, 139f.; "Steame in Sacrifice," 96; Keats, John, 38, 101 "Sweetness in Sacrifice." 96; Kermode, Frank, 24 "Thanksgiving to God, for his House, Knowlton, E. C., 64 A," 109; "To be merry," 41; "To the Krieger, Murray, 12, 38, 39, 165 Genius of his house," 64; "To the King," 65, 96-97; "To the Maids," Laud, William, 86, 87, 88, 89 133; "To the Queene," 59, 132; "To Lawes, Henry, 139 the reverend Shade of his religious Leach, Edmund, 32 Father," 118-120; "To the Virgins," Leavis, F. R„ 113 41, 43, 45f.; "To Youth," 41; Leavis, Q. D., 161 "Twelfe night," 146; "Upon a Child," Levi-Strauss, Claude, 32 83; "Upon a Maid," 133; "Upon Lewis, C. S., 39, 98 Doll," 34; "Upon his Kinswoman, Linche, Richard, 62

INDEX Loughy, Robert, 147 love, 10 "love-sacrifice," 27-28, 89-98 Lovejoy, Arthur O., 33 Loyola, St. Ignatius, 103f. McDonald, James H., 71 McEuen, Kathryn Α., 23 McPeek, James Α. Α., 23 Macrobius, 24 Marino, 79, 84-85 Marlowe, Christopher, 44 Martial, 23, 34,44, 150 Martin, L. C., 23, 24, 36, 42, 72, 90, 99, 128 Martz, Louis L., 71, 103 Marvell, Andrew, 30, 31, 35,44,46, 52, 66, 84, 97, 102, 114, 120, 150, 158, 164-165 meditation, use of, 103f. Milton, John, 28, 64, 112, 115 miniature, 9, 12 minuteness, 9, 60, 79-89 Moorman, F. W., 24 More, Paul Elmer, 86 Musgrove, Sydney, 28, 54, 113 Nature, 9, 31-36 (and Art), 47-57 (and art-Art), 59, 83, 99-102 New, John F. H., 88 Noble Numbers, 66-79, 103-112 (deathrite poems), 138-141 (seasonal feasts) "Order," 12, 20, 21, 27, 29, 58-61, 67 Orians, G. H., 159 Ovid, 17, 26,44, 90, 114, 117, 122, 147 pagan spirit, 18 "paganism," 9, 10, 17, 18, 22-29, 40, 48-50, 89-92, 109, 113, 115, 120, 124, 141, 158f. paradox, 9, 12 pastoral, 11, 17, 100, 108, 115, 142-145, 151 Patrick, J. Max, 7, 53 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 56 Plato, 44 "Play," 9, 11, 12, 29-31, 40, 59-60, 66, 76, 98, 100, 105, 106 plenitude, 19, 22 Plutarch, 26, 90, 119, 129, 135 poetic context, 10 poetic eschatology, 122 poetic strategy, 10 Poggioli, Renato, 143 Poulet, Georges, 80, 82, 85

175 Press, John, 35, 90 Propertius, 26, 86, 114, 116 Prynne, William, 86, 88 Puritanism, 10, 21, 37, 48, 57, 87, 141-142, 146, 147, 153, 156-157 Puttenham, George, 49

Ralegh, Walter, 44 Rea, J., 48 "reduction-expansion," 80, 82 Reed, Mark L., 47 ritual, 9, 12, 17 Robinson, James E., 31 Rollin, Roger, 9, 40, 45, 46, 92, 100, 104, 145, 147, 149, 151 Rose, H. J., 119, 129 Rosinus, Iohannis, 25, 61 Ross, Malcolm M., 68 Ross, Richard J., 32, 33, 35 Rudenstine, Neil L., 30 "sacrifice," 20, 89-98 Saxl, Fritz, 98, 160 Scott, Nathan Α., 28 "second self," 10 self-consciousness, 9, 11, 12 Servius, 62, 64, 90, 91, 114 Shakespeare, William, 23, 41, 43,44, 79, 105, 119 Shelley, Percy, 45 Sidney, Philip, 19, 30, 155 Simpson, Percy, 25, 62 Smart, Peter, 87 Smith, Horatio, 135, 142 Southwell, Robert, 71-72, 139 Spenser, Edmund, 64, 127 Spitzer, Leo, 37 Staley, Vernon, 87 Starkman, Miriam, 66,67,70, 76,107 Starnes, D. T., 24, 62 Staudt, Victor E„ 45, 46 Steward, Simon, 79 Stroup, Thomas, 112 Strutt, Joseph, 159 Swardson, H. R., 18, 56, 61, 113, 124, 158 Talbert, E. W., 24 Taylor, John, 141, 142 "thematic," 12, 35 Tibullus, 17, 116, 147 Tillyard, E. M. W., 39 Toliver, Harold E., 31 Traherne, Thomas, 31 Tuve, Rosemond, 77

176 Vaughan, Henry, 72-73, 84, 106, 110 Virgil, 26, 90, 95, 107, 109, 119, 150 "vision," 12, 13 Warnke, Frank, 31, 49, 52 Warren, Robert Penn, 37

INDEX Wasserman, Earl, 12, 39 Watson, Foster, 24 Whipple, Τ. K., 23 Whitaker, Τ. H., 51, 91, 113 "wilde civility," 12, 34, 39, 55, 60 Wilson, Harold S., 33 Woodward, Daniel H., 86, 89