The Language of Gaze Robert Herrick's Hesperides

in 

The Language of Gaze 

Robert Herrick's Hesperides 

Mukesh Williams 

Robert Herrick's visual metaphors are the most powerful and yet the weakest. He 

attempts to capture the perspective of the subject but forever misses that position, 

as it is impossible to occupy the position of the subject and yet represent the 

subject through a gaze. In Hesperides, the lover's visual perception of the female 

form and his gaze of the beloved contradict each other creating not only an 

emotional tension but a psychological lure that escapes linguistic assimilation. The 

poet creates a persona who instead of expressing his satisfaction in his union with 

the beloved reveals his yearning for an unattainable ideal. In Hesperides the poet's 

gaze acts as an objet a, showing what the persona will always lack not what he can 

acquire in the foreseeabel future. The beloved is always moving along the 

emotional and visual meridian symbolizing a lack of all those attributes in the 

persona that she possesses. The persona's gaze functions as an unconscious 

invocation to the beloved to satisfy his desire with the full knowledge that between 

his gaze and what we actually sees is an illusion a lure that only dazzles the 

senses. This lure cannot be contained within the institution of marriage. And 

obviously both the perception and the gaze in Hesperides are intrinsically 

connected to Herrick's own understanding of the Anglican values, the 

representation of women, the reinterpretation of the mannerist tradition in poetry 

and his allegiance to the pollitical ideology of the times. 

— 53 —

Implicity Hesperides argues that the persona "hopes to have it after all;" hopes to 

procure the golden apples of marriage, perhaps, by marrying any one of the four 

African sister nymphs Aegle, Arethusa, Erythia and Hesperia. But acording to 

the Greek legend a dreadful hundred-headed dragon, Ladon, guards the beautiful 

garden where the nymphs frolic. No one has ever succeeded at getting the apples 

except Heracles who tricked Atlas to get some for him. The legend suggests a lure 

and a trick. It also implies a hope that tantalizes in its proximity but like the dragon 

presents the dread and confusion of a hundred perspectives. Perhaps this could be 

one reason why the argument of the book ends with the following lines: 

I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall) 

Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.' 

The perspective gets more complicated as the persona sings of a time, which is 

"trans -shifting" or moving beyond comprehension both intellictually and 

emotionally. And trans-shifting gets limked to the problem of perception, othering, 

gaze and linguistic anxiety. To find both the muse, and mistress amongst the "Mad 

maiden(s)" who "roeme" but do not "stay at home" would be rather difficult.2 

Hesperides attempts to unravel if not resolve this difficulty. 

Herrick's reputation as a royalist and a randy bachelor who frequented London 

taverns fantasizing about women in his poems remained unchanged till the late 

1970s. During the last three decades literary scholarship has gradually begun to 

reassess his works. This reassessment has to do in large measure with the changed 

literary climate that debunked the methodology of New Criticism and introduced 

Foucauldian dialectics, deconstructionist, feminist and new historicist practices in 

the understanding of literature. Today more and more critics see Herrick's works, 

like the Hesperides, as ideologically motivated and representative of the political 

—54 —

turmoil of the 1640s. Claude J. Summers argues that Herrick's epigrams, verses 

and poems all express his "extreme royalist attitude."' Critics such as Leah H. 

Marcus see Herrick's poems about rural festivity as expressive of a Laudian 

Anglican "cultural revival." Marcus contends that the communal holidays within 

Herrick's poems function more as "extensions of sacramental worship" reinforcing 

the authority of the church and the King and less as innocent moments of 

communal relaxation.4 Many critics such as Ann Baynes Coiro see Herrick 

moving beyond the royalist ideology to question the "Stuart ideals" of patrimony, 

social hierarchy and matrimony.' Herrick's poems are no longer seen as just 

cloyingly erotic or politically conservative but as artifacts negotiating issues of 

ideology, hegemony and marginal subjects.6 However the restoration of Herrick's 

poetic reputation has not provided a balanced understanding of his treatment or 

representation of women. 

Recent evaluation of Herrick's works either employ a post-Freudian paradigm or 

use a feminist critique, forgetting to locate him in the historical context of 

seventeenth century Stuart England of which he was very much a part. Gordon 

Baker on the one hard, believes that the presence of an "obstructed desire" and 

"prepubescent sexuality" are the twin psychological factors responsible for a 

profligate eroticism in Herrick's presentation of women.' On the other hand most 

feminist analyses of Herrick's poetry seem rather critical of his patriarchal values. 

Feminist critics like Moira P. Baker and Bronwen Price have explored "the .cultural 

repression of women" in the erotic presentation of the female body.8 Price 

employs a Foucauldian argument to suggest that Herrick's fetishistic and 

voyeuristic treatment of women was closely tied up with "a sexual politics bound 

up within an emerging bourgeois economy and discourse of subjectivity."' 

Evidently most feminist critics ignore the religious, political, personal and totemic 

dimensions of Stuart England within which these poems were composed. 

—55 —

Heather Dubrow's brilliant study of the tumultuous seventeenth century England 

highlights the significant role marriage played in strengthening social cohesion. 

During this period, the institution of marriage was seen as a "source and a symbol 

of an orderly and harmonious society" as English poets increasingly depended on 

the epithalamium genre celebrating marriage as a proper mode to ally fears of 

social instability.10 Interestingly, Herrick in his epithalamia introduces reluctant 

brides who balk at the suggestion of sexual consummation thus destabilizing the 

ideology of the marriage poems.11 By destabilizing the institution of marriage, 

which reinforced male dominance, Herrick questions the gender politics within 

Stuart culture. In "Upon some women" he despises those women who cannot love: 

Thou who wilt not love, doe this; 

Learne of me what Woman is. 

Something made of thred and thrumme; 

A mere Botch of all and some. 

Pieces, patches, ropes of haire; 

In-laid Garbage ev'ry where.12 

Elsewhere he finds women the best of God's creature and worthy of praise: 

O Jupiter, sho'd I speake ill 

Of woman-kind, first die I will; 

Since that I know, 'mong all the rest 

Of creatures, woman is the best.13 

It was widely believed in the Stuart period that the institution of marriage 

contributed in large measure to social order. Divinely ordained, marriage 

reinforced patriarchy. Since women were represented as sexually insatiable and 

—56 —

gullible they had to be restrained and guided by fathers and husbands. The social 

value of women was determined by pre-marital virginity and post-marital fidelity. 

It was argued that without female chastity it would be rather difficult to establish 

the legitimacy of heirs.14 

Matrimony for women was seen as role fulfilling and natural. Both promiscuous 

and unmarried women were perceived as threats to society as they attempted to 

destabilize the social system.15 On the contrary men were allowed their 

bachelorhood without threatening the system.14 Herrick himself remained a 

bachelor by choice throughout his life. In "No Spouse but a Sister," Herrick 

confesses that he has remained a bachelor to enjoy freedom and escape marital 

problems: 

A bachelour I will 

Live as I have liv'd still, 

And never take a wife 

To crucife my life (1s.1-4):17 

Strangely he chooses a sister, 

incestuous relations: 

Which I will keep embrac'd, 

And kisse, but yet be chaste (1s.9-10). 

instead of a wife, with whom he would not have 

The tantalizing thought of incest indulged in a denial stretches the limits of 

permissible behavior without transgressing the forbidden. This sentiment was quite 

revolutionary in those times. Though Herrick's male personae can escape marriage, 

his female personae are not granted this freedom. In Hesperides Herrick exhorts 

—57 —

women . to look forward to getting married and not to think of delaying marriage or 

leading a promiscuous life.18 

Herrick's own life has an important bearing on his writing. Though his mistresses 

are exotic, they are almost always imagined. In "Upon the losse of his Mistresses" 

Herrick complains how he has lost most of his "dainty" mistresses — Julia, Sapho, 

Anthea, Electra, Myrha, Corinna and Perilla. He leads a lonely life after "All are 

gone;" and he concludes: 

For to number sorrow by 

Their departures hence, and die. "19 

Interestingly his housekeeper was named Prudence whom he prudently avoids in 

his poems. Herrick approves of the working class culture but reaffirms social 

hierarchy.20 He socialized a lot and occasionally drank to excess but did not lead a 

dissolute life. In his poems he reflects a belief in the abiding quality of love. In 

"Love what it is ." he states: 

Love is a circle that doth restlesse move 

In the same sweet eternity of love.21 

A hedonist by temper but a parson by profession, he could quite easily combine a 

classical paganism with Christian folk tradition in his writing. In his Julia poems 

he is able to synthesize elements of classical yearning and formality with Anglican 

rituals of gratification and control. 

Herrick saw the evanescence of life but did not become elegiac like Mathew 

Arnold. He always sought ways to defeat the transience of life through his carpe 

—58 -

diem poems. The idea of carpe diem or seize the day in such poems as "Corinna's 

going a Maying," "To the Virgins" and "To Make Much of Time," temperamentally 

suited a man who frequented taverns where he forget his worries in drink and the 

company of men.22 When Herrick articulates his yearning or desire for a woman 

or her loss he is dealing with an imaginary-psychological construct where 

yearning, desiring or losing the "Other" becomes a pleasure in its own right.23 He 

wishes to die before his beloved to escape the pain of bereavement. In "To Julia" 

he conveys this felling succinctly: 

Julia, when thy Herrick dies, 

Close thou up thy Poets eyes: 

And his last breath, let it be 

Taken in by none but Thee.24 

And again in "His Last request to Julia" Herrick writes: 

My Fates are ended; when thy Herrick dyes, 

Claspe thou his Book, then close thou up his Eyes.25 

From a Lacanian perspective Herrick's poems enjoy the opposition between 

"articulated content" and "position of articulation ." Though he rejects promiscuity 

and social deviance in his articulated content, he might just endorse them as a 

position of articulation. This line of thought may be somewhat plausible if we see 

the interconnection between the representation of the female body in poetry and 

painting. 

The representations of the female body in English poetry and painting in the late 

sixteenth and early seventeenth century derived their cue from a common aesthetic 

— 59 —

that Herrick understood quite well. Many critics have seen a correlation between 

Herrick's method of presenting the manner of bodies in motion and the limning 

style of Elizabethan miniature painters. It is now believed that Herrick's ability to 

beautify and objectify the female form followed the aesthetic practice of the 

English limners and the mannerist aesthetic of Nicholas Hillard, Edward Norgate, 

Henry Peacham, and the former goldsmith William Herrick.26 Herrick's penchant 

for detail, the presence of fine filigree work in his poems, could be derived from 

his experience as an apprentice to his goldsmith uncle Sir William Herrick, while 

his understanding of larger social movements like the Civil War would perhaps be 

a consequence of his study of law at St. John's College, Cambridge. 

It is possible to see the goldsmith's craft and the sculptor's vision in Herrick's 

finely crafted poems. Critics believe that his poetic style involves grace (grazia), 

invention (invenzione), technical precision (praecisio), resolution of artistic 

difficulty-simplicity formula (difficulta/facilita formula) and high manner (high 

maniera) which were seemingly techniques employed in sculpting the human 

form27 Benvenuto Cellini's advice about sculpting is a good example of the 

mannerist tradition. Cellini observes that the human form can best be represented 

in sculpture if the artist follows life closely in parts and whole.28 It is possible to 

distill from Cellini's words the following mannerist tenet: demonstrate your artistic 

judgment by following the best of life closely and perfect nature in the whole and 

in parts by artificio. When nature is imitated precisely art triumphs. 

Though Herrick's applies Cellini's advice to his poetic construction there are 

inherent problems in the medium Herrick uses. He tries to freeze the moment 

through the medium of language, which refuses to be frozen. In his poem, "To 

Perenna" Herrick observes the harmony and perfection of his mistress's body and 

finds variety in her "faire, and unfamiliar excellence" (1s.3-4). He attempts to 

— 60 —

capture this harmony and perfection in words. The miniature world is tarnished by 

darkness and shadows, which also symbolize falsehood and wickedness. Herrick 

however does not fail altogether. 

The clarity and freshness of portraits in Herrick's poems dazzle the eye. He 

attempts to catch the delicate and rarified aspect of life, trying to arrest life in its 

eternal movements, imagining himself as a painter creating a miniature painting. 

The presence of grazia, the stylistic principle of miniaturist aesthetic, places 

Herrick within the tradition of English limners. Their art invariably gave the 

illusion of motion in the human body and the way such motion reveals internal 

passion or evokes passion in the observer. This is hard enough to capture in stone 

and well nigh impossible in words; but Herrick intriguingly tries to represent the 

effect of clothes over the human form through words. 

The relevance of elegant drapery over the human form, the conception of an artist's 

gaze on this form and the problem of representing this gaze, fascinated both 

Raphael and Herrick. In poems such as "To his Mistresse," "Julia's Petticoat," 

"Delight in Disorder ," "Art Above Nature," "To Julia," and "Upon Julia's Clothes" 

he suggests his mistress to dress in silk and become a "jewel set on fire."29 "Julia's 

Petticoat" gives such ecstatic delight to the poet that he nearly swoons to death 

with pleasure -- "Down'd in Delights; but co'd not die."30 In "Art above Nature, to 

Julia" Herrick is once more allured by Julia's "airie silks" (lines 15-16) and 

confesses that "mine eye and heart/Dotes less on Nature, than on Art."31 However 

he fears that if Julia banishes him from her sight he would destroy all art: 

" ... I will live alone 

There, where no language ever yet was known.32 

— 61 --

Alan Rudrum in "Royalist lyric" suggests that by imagining women who are free 

to dress as they please, Herrick is not indulging in male fantasy but empowering 

women.33 Gail S. Weinberg points out that Julia's loose-fitting garments were the 

new style at the English court imported from the Continent. And the poet's 

response to their effect on him is partly "a response to a specific new 

phenomenon."34 Herrick is not just topical or up-to-date but seriously goes about 

overcoming the problem of an artist's gaze and the representation of drapery over 

human form. 

The preoccupation with the female form and problem of representing its 

sensuousness in words stimulated Herrick's poetic talents. The softness of the 

female form and drapery hiding and yet revealing this form seemed to have 

preoccupied his thoughts. Dalliance can be fraught with danger but if the intention 

is matrimony it may not cause any harm. "The silken Snake" is one such example. 

Herrick, startled by Julia's sudden flinging of her silken lace upon his face, calms 

himself by reasoning that the silken lace was not a snake as it did not bite him. By 

fusing the swift and threatening movement of the snake with the soft and harmless 

motion of silk the poet takes away the danger of the bite ("But though it scar'd, it 

did not bite.") diluting the potency of the metaphor.35 The sudden action of the 

snake enveloped in the softness of silk gives both immediacy and grace to the 

poem. Julia's bodily movements are silk-like and harmless and therefore graceful. 

The physical motion of the clothes animated by physical movement and a gentle 

breeze give a distinctive quality to the personal manner of Herrick's style. In the 

midst of this dalliance holy matrimony is envisaged: 

Holy waters hither bring 

For the sacred sparkling: 

Baptize me and thee, and so 

62 —

Let us to the Alter go. 

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.36 

In the context of marriage even erotic delights may be permitted. J. G. O. 

Whitehead suggests that in some Julia poems such as "Upon the Nipples of Julia's 

Breast" the reference to her breasts as "strawberries" and "creame" allude to the 

Tudor rose, which combined the red rose of the house of York and the white rose 

of the house of Lancaster and ushered in a time of peace.37 The political undertones 

may seem far-fetched but suggestions to matrimony and social stability are 

plausible. The coming together of the red rose and white rose ended the long 

period of social turmoil in England and established the Tudor dynasty. 

Obviously the poems about Julia are about different parts of her body that hides 

the woman behind it. But Herrick wants us to believe that their love will last 

forever: 

An endless prove; 

And pure as Gold for ever.38 

And after his death she will be reflected in his eyes forever. 

Herrick employs language to eroticize different parts of Julia's body and make them 

into a fetish. In the poem "Julia's Churching, or Purification" the poet makes Julia 

go through a ritual of purification after giving birth; her hymen becomes a fetish.39 

This strange fictional purification is called "churching," a play upon the Anglican 

— 63 —

itual of thanksgiving for "safe deliverance" of a woman during "childebirth."40 

The Book of Common Prayer reaffirms that the Lord will protect a woman from 

evil if she "both faithfully live, and walke in her vocation."41 If a woman fulfills 

her wifely duties she will be protected from adultery and will continue to bear 

more children in future. This promise firmly enforces patriarchal authority of the 

state, church and husband.42 Herrick's churching ceremony reinforces the 

patriarchal paradigm by allowing the man to dominate the woman in marriage. 

After undergoing the churching ceremony of purification Julia can return home as 

a virgin bride to her husband — "to the breaking of a Bride-Cake) home / Where 

ceremonious Hymen shall for thee / Provide a second Epithalamie"(lines 10-12). 

Urging Julia to be faithful to her husband the poet plays God by restoring her 

broken hymen through the power of language so that she can return to her husband 

as a virgin bride once again: 

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. (lines 13-16) 

So it seems that Julia will need must suffer the pain of ritual defloration as now 

she has been bestowed with "many a Maiden-head." This is undoubtedly a 

function of an eternal domination and control of female sexuality and pleasure. 

Language not only tries to control the other but also turn back time, restoring the 

loss of virginity. 

In a poem such as "Delight in Disorder" 

even in the absence of a the female body: 

A Sweet disorder in the dresse 

-- 64 -- 

Herrick imagines a wanton sensuousness

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 

I see a wilde civility: 

Doe more bewitch me, then when Art 

Is too precise in every part.43 

The poet has overcome the difficulty of finding an appropriate method to express 

his gaze of the draped female form even in the absence of that form. It is a 

theoretical celebration of an aesthetic philosophy. An apparent carelessness in 

dress gives the female form its erotic quality but the poet records the details quite 

precisely — an "erring Lace," a "Cuffe neglectfull," the "tempestuous petticote" 

and a "carelesse shooe-string." The "tempestuous petticote" becomes the graceful 

and seductive movement of the girl, the drapery itself and a mirror of the amorous 

gaze of the observer. This kind of poetic representation gives the clothes a wanton, 

erring, winning, careless and bewitching quality. The apparent carelessness 

creates a calculated seduction, which is prolonged eternally as it is frozen in time. 

The clothes both restrain and seduce the gaze of the male poet eternally. The grace 

enhances the beauty of the clothes and bewitches the observer. The poem leaves 

much to the imagination to construe. Herrick's language provokes the mind to run 

free along many erotic possibilities. 

– 65

In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis Jacques Lacan pointed out 

that Wiederholen (repeating) though related to Erinnerung (remembering) is not 

Reproduzieren (reproduction).45 Remembering obliges events to `yield' 

themselves creating a sort of center. It is at such moments that the subject resists 

the remembered center and in resisting repeats the action.46 Norman Bryson makes 

a subtle distinction between the gaze and the glance in Western art. The gaze 

masterfully repeats an act and perseveres to "confine what is always on the point 

of escaping or slipping out of bounds"; and in so doing does "a certain violence 

(penetrating, piercing fixing)."47 Freud argues that the gaze is a phallic activity 

linked to the desire to control the object.4$ The object of desire is invariably cast 

as passive, feminine victim.° It is possible to see Herrick's representation of the 

female body as an attempt to manipulate female sexuality through language and 

text, a self-fashioning strategy of Renaissance poets to delight the male reader by 

fetishizing and repressing the female form.5° 

II 

Herrick's poem "Upon Julia's Clothes" provides an excellent example of the 

figurative use of language to create a mood, feeling and an emotion. At the same 

time it stretches itself beyond its linguistic confines and organizes itself as part of 

the unconscious. 

Upon Julia's Clothes 

Whenas in silks my Julia goes, 

Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows 

That liquefaction of her clothes. 

— 66 —

Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see 

That brave vibration, each way free, 

0, how that glittering taketh me 151 

In the first stanza, the visual image of Julia in silks quickly gets transformed , into a 

metaphor through the use of the words "flows" and "liquefaction." Her silks 

melting into liquid taking the form of her body has the appeal of a metaphor. The 

process of liquefaction takes place at high temperatures when solid substance 

become liquid and are then fused with other metals to form an alloy. The 

suggestive eroticism of her silks melting into liquid taking the form of her body, 

clinging to her and revealing what they cover has the combined sensuality of 

dress/undress. 

The erotic metaphor of the first stanza expands to include a kinetic image of 

vibration. The mesmeric almost sexually conscious quality of her movement is 

suggested by the word "brave." She defies the speaker's gaze, almost taking 

pleasure in arousing his desire.52 The vibration of her body or her clothes is left 

deliberately ambiguous so both the speaker and reader can revel in the luscious 

and delectable moment. The gaze locked at the movement is both uninhibited and 

mutual. The blurring of focus between gaze and movement apart from its 

ambiguity is also an attempt to reach a nonverbal experience through the verbal. 

Both the sexual intention of gaze and physical space of movement collapses in the 

kinetic image of vibration. She is "free" of restrictive underclothing and the 

translucence of this suggestive revelation vibrating through the gaze gather 

momentum, as is the tendency of all vibrations, into the "glittering" moment of 

ecstasy. The vibrating blur of Julia in her silks glitters in the proximity of the gaze, 

touched and touchable. The overload of sensation spills into the tactile image of 

the phrase "taketh me" or takes possession of me by force or skill. The trap of the 

-~67 —

gaze, the ensnarement of the suggestive vibration of the body for a moment, 

releases the poem from the confines of the seventeenth century modesty into the 

complex metaphors of magical sexual fantasy. But we should not forget that the 

seventeenth century is structured within the unconscious deeper layers of the 

language that organizes the poem. 

Even before human relations develop, nature organizes them with its own 

structures, what Claude Levi-Strauss calls the totemic function of language. Lacan 

believes that "the unconscious is structured like a language" prior to "experience," 

"individual deduction 

," "collective experience," or "social needs."53 When viewed 

from a totemic perspective issues of virginity, marriage, child-bearing, churching 

become inscribed within their own lines of force that help in continuing life and 

sustaining social cohesion. The allure that Julia exercises over the persona 

activates themes of matrimony, sexual bonding and procreation. It is also true that 

seventeenth century Europe harnessed these issues to create hegemony and 

disempower women. 

It is possible to argue like the new historicists that the personae doubles up as an 

Anglican priest who witnesses the movement of a divine being in Julia. In 

observing the social ritual of a woman walking in a silk dress revealing her 

sensuous form stretches the limits of social conformity and yet does not transgress. 

The persona's gaze captured in the poem reasserts the traditional role of women as 

desirable outside marriage and the imperative but transgressive gesture. In 

"Corinna's going a Maying" the persona 

, who functions both as a lover and a 

priest, encourages women to pray and participate in the May Day celebrations. The 

lover here too doubles up as a priest to encourage Corianna to choose her own man 

after some dalliance. This social ritual will after all provide a husband and a happy 

marriage to her. The gaze of beauty that Herrick presents is "profoundly 

- 68 —

unsatisfying" in a Lacanian sense. It never fulfils but excites desire, which can be 

realized only in marriage. 

Introducing the dialectic of the eye and the gaze Lacan points out that both do not 

compliment but contradict each other. The gaze, instead of creating love generates 

a lure, which does not satisfy. Lacan suggests that a lover is forever dissatisfied 

because he is missing the same position and perspective enjoyed by his beloved — 

"You never look at me from the place from which I see you ."54 Julia's image is 

forever "glittering" or dazzling the senses; she is "a mere dialectic of appearance," 

an objet a, from whom the persona had separated physically to reconstitute 

himself. Apart from other things Julia presents herself as a symbol of a lack. Here 

we see no demand but a desire of the other, an invocation of the unconscious. 

Between the gaze and what we finally see is a lure. The poet presents the persona 

as someone other than who he is. The poet shows the persona an aspect of Julia, 

which is not what he wants to see. The persona perhaps wants to get married to her 

not show his desire or yearn for her. But the eye of the poet functions as an objet a, 

showing what the persona lacks not what he can get.55 In "The Transformation" 

after the poet's death Julia sits on a "refulgent thronelet." The "immortal" poet now 

looks at her radiant beauty that shines more brightly in "thy counterfeit?" 56 In 

Herrick the visual image is most powerful, as the poet believes that amongst the 

sense the eyes are vanquished first. The visual image is most powerful in love and 

war: 

`Tis a known principle in War 

The eies be first, that conquer'd are.57 

. 

In most anthologies of cavalier poets of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth 

centuries Herrick is summarily dismissed as a minor poet. In fact many of his 

— 69 —

poems, which were written before the Civil War, did not find honorable mention 

until after the Restoration. Though he is seen as one of the least political of the 

Cavalier poets, Herrick suffered immensely from the conflict losing his living as a 

clergyman. A thorough reading of Hesperides and "Noble Numbers: Or, His Pious 

Pieces" reveal a remarkably talented poet who could dexterously handle diverse 

themes ranging from religious sacraments and marriage to the Civil War and 

kingship.58 His treatment of women might offend some of our modern-day 

feminist but it must be noted that Herrick, though tainted by the prejudices and 

values of his age, saw men and women functioning within the hierarchical social 

structure of Stuarts, fulfilling their roles within marriage as both procreators and 

preservers of the social order. Perhaps because he never married, Herrick's attitude 

towards women was more of a potential marriage partner and therefore courtship 

and dalliance become the dominant modes in his poems. The constant yearning, 

never to be realized in blissful matrimony, creates a constant tension in his poems 

between the subjective eye, which attempts to capture the objective "other" and the 

object that escapes capture. Read within the Lacanian and historical context 

Herrick's poems seem both palpable and multifaceted. 

NOTES 

' L . C. Martin ed., The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, rpt., 1968, (Oxford; The Clarendon Press, 1956), 

p. 5. All future references are from this edition. 

2 The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick , ibid., p. 5. 

3 Claude J . Summers, "Herrick's Political Poetry: The Strategies of His Art," in Roger B. Rollin and J. 

Max Patrick, eds., "Trust to Good Verses": Herrick Tercentenary Essays, (Pittsburgh: University of 

Pittsburgh Press, 1978), p.172. For further readings on Herrick's royalism, also see Roger B. Rollin, 

Robert Herrick, rev. ed. (New York: Twayne, 1992), pp.154-58; and Summers, "Herrick's Political 

Counterplots," SEL 25 (1985), pp.165-82. 

4 Leah S . Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday 

Pastimes, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pages 145 and 17. The Anglican Church under 

—70

Archbishop William Laud's program of religious reformation rejected the doctrine of predestination and 

emphasized the use of sacraments, church ceremony and holiday pastimes advocated in the Book of 

Sports. This Laudian agenda of the Anglican Church was aimed at providing greater political, 

intellectual, spiritual and economic power to the clergy. For an analysis of Laudianism in the Anglican 

Church see Andrew Foster, "Church Policies of the 1630s," in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, eds., 

Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603-1642, (New York: Longman, 

1989), pp. 193-223; and Nicholas Tyacke, "Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-Revolution," in 

Conrad Russell, ed., The Origins of the English Civil War, (London: Macmillan, 1973), pp.119-43. 

Studies of the Laudian elements in Hesperides include Leah S. Marcus, "Herrick's Hesperides and the 

`Proclamation made for May ,"' SP 76 (1979), pp. 49-74; Achsah Guibbory, "The Temple of Hesperides 

and Anglican-Puritan Controversy," in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds., The Muses 

Common-Weale: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century, (Missouri: University of Missouri 

Press, 1988), pp.135-62; Guibbory, "Enlarging the Limits of the `Religious Lyric': The Case of Herrick's 

Hesperides," in John R. Roberts, ed., New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century English Religious 

Lyric, (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1994), pp. 28-45; and Peter Stallybrass, "`Wee feaste in 

our Defense': Patrician Carnival in Early Modern England and Robert Herrick's Hesperides," English 

Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), pp. 234-52. 

5 Ann Baynes Coiro , Robert Herrick's "Hesperides" and the Epigram Book Tradition, (Baltimore: Johns 

Hopkins L. Press, 1988), p.9. Assessments of Herrick's political ambivalence include Coiro, "Herrick's 

Hesperides: The Name and the Frame," ELH 52 (1985) pp. 311-36; Janie Caves McCauley, "On the 

`Childhood of the Yeare': Herrick's Hesperides New Year's Poems ," George Herbert Journal 14 

(1990-91), pp.72-96; Jonathan F. S. Post, "Robert Herrick: A Minority Report," George Herbert Journal 

14 (1990-91), pages, 1-20, esp. 11-18; and Katharine Wallingford, "'Corinna,' Carlomaria, the Book of 

Sports, and the Death of Epithalamium on the Field of Genre," George Herbert Journal 14 (1990-91) 

pp. 97-112. 

6 Don Allen Cameron , Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry, rev. ed. 

(Baltimoer: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968). Cameron saw the poem as a "bale of butterflies." 

(p.138). 

Gordon Braden, The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven: Yale U. 

Press, 1978), 223; William Kerrigan, "Kiss Fancies in Robert Herrick," George Herbert Journal 14 

(1990-91): 155; Roger B. Rollin, "Robert Herrick and the Erotics of Criticism," in Claude J. Summers 

and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds., Renaissance Discourses of Desire (Missouri; University of Missouri 

Press, 1993), p.134. See also Lillian Schanfield, "`Tickled with Desire': A View of Eroticism in Herrick's 

Poetry," Literature and Psychology 39 (1993), pp. 63-83. 

8 Moira P . Baker "`The Uncanny Stranger on Display': The Female Body in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth- 

Century Love Poetry," South Atlantic Review, 56 (1991), p.22; 

Bronwen Price, "The Fractured Body — Censorship and Desire in Herrick's Poetry," Literature and 

History, 3rd ser., 2 (1993), p.24. See also Sarah Gilead's painstaking analysis of "To the Virgins, to Make 

Much of Time," in which she argues that Herrick uses the carpe diem tradition to replace sexuality with 

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textuality ("Ungathering `Gather ye Rosebuds': Herrick's Misreading of Carpe Diem," Criticism 

27(1985), pp.133-53. Also see Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism; Four Essays, (Princeton: Princeton 

University Press, 1957), pp. 299-301. 

10 Heather Dubrow , A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium, (Ithaca: Cornell 

University Press, 1990), p.49. 

11 Dubrow , Eden, pages, 85-86 and 248. 

12 The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick , ibid., p. 76. 

13 Poetical Works , ibid., "In praise of women," p.250. 

14 On issues relating to sex and gender see S . D. Amussen, "Gender, Family and the Social Order, 

1560-1725," in Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder in Early Modern 

England, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp.196-217; Peter Stallybrass, "Patriarchal 

Territories: The Body Enclosed," in Margaret W. Ferguson et al., eds., Rewriting the Renaissance: The 

Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 

pp.123-42; and D. E. Underdown, "The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority 

in Early Modern England," in Fletcher and Stevenson, eds., Order and Disorder, pp.116-36. 

15 Bridget Hill , "A Refuge from Men: The Idea of a Protestant Nunnery," Past and Present, 117 (1987), p. 

119. The historian Bridget Hill gives a possible reason why spinsterhood was perceived as a threat to 

society in seventeenth century England; she writes, "Spinsterhood, because it escaped male authority 

within marriage, was seen as a latent threat against the whole structure of domestic authority" (p.119). 

16 The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution , N. H. Keeble, ed., (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 2001). Alan Rudrum in an essay entitled, "Royalist lyric," points out that 

the publication of Hesperides in 1648 was a political act not just a literary one. "Herrick present the 

`halcyon days' of Charles I's `personal rule' in the 1630's as a time of innocent mirth and merrymaking , 

which must have seemed appealing to those already wearied of the Rule of the Saints. The late 1640s in 

fact saw a number of rebellions against the Puritan prescription of just such festivities as Herrick 

celebrated" (p.182). 

17 Poetical Works , ibid., p.13. 

18 Poetical Works , ibid., pp.14-15. "How the Wall flower came first, and why so called." 

19 Poetical Works , ibid, pp.15-16. 

20 Raymond Williams , The Country And The City, (London: Chatto & Windus 1973), pp. 33-34, Quoted in 

Anthony Low, "New Science and the Georgic Revolution in Seventeenth-Century English Literature," 

Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance, Arthur F. Kinney and Dan S. 

Collins ed., (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), p.323 Williams points out that 

though Herrick admires the sweaty English laborers in "The Hock-cart" he quickly puts them back in 

their proper places. 


22 Garry Hogg , The Second Book of Inns and Villages of England, (New York: Arco Publishing Company 

Inc., 1967); Fran C. Chalfant, Ben Jonson's London: A Jacobean Placename Dictionary, (Athens: 

University of Georgia Press, 1978); Alexandra M. Birnbaum ed., Great Britain, (New York: Harper- 

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Perennial, 1995). 

23 Slavoj Zizek , The Plague of Fantasies, rpt., 1999, (London: Verso, 1997). In the chapter, "Love Thy 

Neighbour? No, Thanks!" Zizek states that, "Poetry, the specific poetic jouissance, emerges when the 

very symbolic articulation of this Loss gives rise to a pleasure of its own" (p.4-7). 



26 Definitions of continental Mannerism , maniera, and high Maniera can be found in John Shearman, 

"Maniera as an Aesthetic Ideal ," in The Renaissance and Mannerism, Studies in Western Art 2, ed. 

Millard Meiss (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1963), pp.200-21; Shearman, Mannerism, Style and 

Civilization, (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967); S. J. Freedberg, "Observations on the Painting of 

the Maniera," Art Bulletin 47 (June 1965), pp.18'7-97; and S. J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 15D0-1600, 

(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971). On Hilliard's Mannerism, see John Pope-Hennessy, "Nicholas 

Hilliard and Mannerist Art Theory," JWC I6 (1943), pp. 89-100; and idem, A Lecture on Nicholas 

Hilliard (London: Home and Van Thal, 1949). Refer to the following texts: Nicholas Hilliard's Art of 

Limning, ed. Arthur E Kinney and Linda Bradley Salamon (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1983); 

Edward Norgate, Miniatura or The Art of Limning, ed. Martin Hardie, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1919); 

and Henry Peacham, The Art of Drawing with the Pen (1606; facs. The English EXperience 230 

[Amsterdam and New York: Da Capo Press, 1970]). Refer to continental manuals: The Treatises of 

Benvenuto Cellini on Goldsmithing and Sculpture, trans. C. R. Ashbee (1568; New York: Dover, 1967); 

and Lodovico Dolce's Dialogo della pittura intitolato l'Aretino, in Dolce's "Aretino" and Venetian Art 

Theory of the Cinquecento, trans. Mark W. Roskill (1557; New York: New York University Press, 1968). 

27 For a discussion of high Maniera and Herrick's religious verse , see L. E. Semler, "Robert Herrick's God: 

Visual Aesthetics in Noble Numbers," Parergon n.s. 12, 1 (June 1994). Quoted by John Peacock, "Inigo 

Jones as a Figurative Artist," in Renaissance Bodies: The Human. Figure in English Culture c. 

1540-1660, ed. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion, 1990), pgs. 154-79, 157. 

26 The treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on goldsmithing and sculpture , translated from the Italian by C. R. 

Ashbee, (New York : Dover Publications, 1967). In his Treatise on Sculpture, Cellini offers the following 

advice on the disegno of the human form which is generally applicable to all his art, whether minuteria 

or grosseria: 

[A] ll the really great masters have followed life, but the point is that you must have a fine judgment to 

know how the best of life is to be put into your work, you must always be on the look out for beautiful 

human beings, and from among them choose the most beautiful, and not only so, you must from among 

even these choose the most beautiful parts, and so shall your whole composition become an abstraction 

of what is beautiful. So alone may work be created, that shall be evident at once as the labour of men 

both exquisite in judgment and humble in study. (Treatises, p.14-0) 


3° Poetical Works , ibid., p.67. 



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33 The Cambridge Companion to Writing of The English Revolution , ibid., Alan Rudrum, "Royalist lyric." 

Rudrum writes, "In imagining women with the freedom to dress as they pleased, Herrick is not merely 

indulging make fantasy, but, as Shakespeare did, demonstrating the possibility of a world in which 

women need not be entirely at the mercy of a male-dominated social and religious establishment. The 

'dishevelled woman' of Cavalier verse is consciously set , against Puritan values" (p.184). 

34 Gail S . Weinberg, "Herrick's `Upon Julia's Clothes," Explicator, 27 (October, Item 12). 

35 Poetical Works 

, ibid., p.116. 


, ibid., p.303. 

37 J 

. G. O. Whitehead, "The Tudor Rose, Coat of Arms, London 10 (July) pp.110-15. Whitehead argues that 

whether Herrick's mistress was real or imagined the fact remains that her breasts "were the Tudor rose 

with its ideals personified; and that rose stood for ...a return to the Golden Age" somehow lost by the 

Stuarts. Also see Poetical Works, ibid., p.164. 

38 Poetical Works, ibid., p.66. 

39 Poetical Works , ibid., p. 286. 

4° The Booke of Common Prayer and the Administration of the Sacraments and other Rites of the Church 

of England, (London: Robert Barker, 1640. STC 16421). ,D3v 

41 Booke of Common Prayer D3v 

42 Stone , Lawrence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, (New York: Harper, 1977). As 

Lawrence Stone suggests, the seventeenth century saw a reinforcement of patriarchy in England as the 

monarchy began more forcefully to assert its authoritarian prerogatives (Chapter 5). "Authoritarian 

monarchy and domestic patriarchy," he argues, "form a congruent and mutually supportive complex of 

ideas and social systems" (p. 152). ). In seventeenth century England, patriarchy was reinforced by the 

state, Stone contends, "in the ... form of authoritarian dominance by the husband and father over the 

woman and children within the nuclear family" (p. 153). 


44 "The Uncanny Stranger on Display": The Female Body in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Love 

Poetry, The South-Atlantic Review 56.2 (1991): 7-25. 

45 Jacques Lacan 

, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, (London: Vintage Press, 1998), 

Trans., Alan Sheridan. Chapter 4, "Of the Network of Signifiers," pp.49-50. 

46 Lacan 

, ibid. Lacan writes, "Lastly — in these first stages of the experience in which remembering is 

gradually substituted for itself and approaches ever nearer to a sort of focus, or centre, in which every 

event seems to under an obligation to yield itself—precisely at this moment, we see manifest itself what 

I will also call— in inverted commas, for one must also change the meaning of the three words that I am 

going to say, one must change it completely in order to give it its full scope— the resistance of the 

subject, which become at that moment repetition in act" (p.51). 

47 Bryson , Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 

1983), p. 93. 

48 Irigaray , Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, (Ithaca: Cornell 

UP, 1985). French feminist theorist Luce Irigaray finds the logic of this gaze which has dominated 

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Western culture "foreign to female eroticism" (p. 25). Her argument supports Nancy Vicker's contention 

that traditional descriptions of the female body are devised by the male imagination for the consumption 

of the male imagination ("`This Heraldry' 207). Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete 

Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. 24 vols., (London: Hogarth, 

1955); Freud, "Medusa's Head." SE. Vol.18, pp. 273-74; Freud, "The Uncanny." SE. Vol.17, pp.219-52. 

49 Fredric Jameson , The Political Unconscious, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). As Fredric 

Jameson suggests, the literary text may be seen as a "rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or 

ideological subtext" (p.81). Paradoxically, according to Jameson, the literary work is at once constituted 

and constituting, structured and structuring: "the literary work, ... as though for the first time, brings into 

being that very situation to which it is also, at one and the same time, a reaction" (p.82). As Louis 

Montrose states it, a text "restructures [its] ideological subtext" (p. 87). In other words, a text restructures 

within itself a culture's ideological assumptions about gender, power, class, and so forth. In the 

introduction to her superb collection of contemporary essays on the female body in Western culture, 

Susan Rubin Suleiman suggests that the cultural significance of the body is not primarily its flesh-and- 

blood solidity, but its function as a "symbolic construct." All that a culture perceives and knows about 

the body exists in some form of discourse, which is never unmediated, free of interpretation or politically 

"innocent" (p .2). It is possible to see Renaissance poetry as a discursive practice situated within the 

larger sexual discourse of the time in order to see how the symbolic construction of the female body is 

shaped by, and in turn shapes, specific assumptions about gender and power. 

5° Derrida , Jacques, Positions, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Derrida argues that the 

"classical philosophical opposition" is never a "peaceful coexistence ," but a "violent hierarchy" in which 

"one of the two terms governs the other" (Positions 41) . Among these hierarchies, Derrida includes 

"male/female" or "masculine/feminine ." 


, ibid., p.261. 

52 Gene Montague 

, "Herrick's `Upon Julia's Clothes," Explicator, 36 (Spring 1978), pp. 21-22. Montague 

observes that "the central angling image" in the poems links up Julia and the narrator as "fisherman, bait, 

and prey. The question is, Who is angling for whom nd with what?" 

s3 Lacan , ibid., p.20. 

54 Lacan , ibid., Lacan writes: "From the outset, we see, in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze, that there is 

no coincidence, but, on the contrary, a lure. When, in love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly 

unsatisfying and always missing is that — You never look at me from the place from which I see you" (p. 

103). 

55 Lacan , ibid., "Generally speaking, " Lacan concludes, "the relation between the gaze and what one 

wishes to see involves a lure. The subject is presented as other than he is, and what one shows him is not 

what he wishes to see. It is in this way that the eye may function as objet a, that is to say, at the level of 

the lack (-0)" (p.104). 

56 Poetical Works, ibid 

., p.270. 


, ibid., p.118. 

58 M Whitcomb Hess 

. "Herrick's Golden Apples: The 'Hesperides': 1648," Catholic World, 167 (May 

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1948), pp.140-45. Hess believes that the picture of merry England that Herrick created influenced 

eighteenthe and nineteenth century poets — "almost concomitantly with the growth of imperialist, 

commercialist England, her pastoral lyrist gave his nation a dream to be possessed by ... That bright 

arcadian landscape whiere in her medows sits eternal May made perfect propoganda material for the 

empire builders." 

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The Language of Gaze Robert Herrick's Hesperides

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