Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Herrick’s Church of Earthly Delights 174
presented in ‘His Noble Numbers’ to be ‘unconvincing’ due to the simplicity of the
sentiments and verse forms found there, 3 the reader must remember that the Christianity
presented in ‘His Noble Numbers’ is in communion with the secular volume. The carpe
diem poet often found in ‘Hesperides’ still exists in ‘His Noble Numbers’ and it is this
which makes ‘His Noble Numbers’ a collection that both deserves more attention and
rewards the reader with a richer understanding of the whole, for we find when reading
Hesperides as a whole that the body/soul dilemma is almost entirely focussed on the body,
with the soul being seldom present. Herrick is a priest of the world, and his incarnational
understanding is one in which creation is not simply justified, but lifted up and found to be
capable of Edenic innocence in the here and now. Herrick becomes a sort of christ,
leading the way to the redemption of the present and physical world.
While the majority of Herrick’s sacred verse is found in ‘His Noble Numbers’, he
created the two sections to be read together and his book to be considered in its entirety,
and so a discussion of his incarnational understanding of the world must begin in the
‘Hesperides’. That Herrick meant for his book to be read as a whole has been
convincingly argued by many, and while T. S. Eliot famously called Herrick a ‘minor
poet’ because he was unable to find an over-arching theme in his work, 4 others since, most
especially Ann Baynes Coiro and Roger B. Rollin, 5 have found that there is an overall
theme to the poems, and that it is not just a collection of beautiful lyrics with some funny
or disgusting epigrams unfortunately or mistakenly tossed in. When Hesperides is
considered as a whole, the reader begins to see patterns of thought emerge from the more
than 1,400 poems, many of which are epigrams. As Rollin says, ‘his is not a book meant
3 Joseph H. Summers, The Heirs of Donne and Jonson (London, 1970), p. 57.
4 On Poetry and Poets (London, 1957), p 46.
5 Ann Baynes Coiro, Robert Herrick’s Hesperides and the Epigram Book Tradition (London, 1988); Roger
B. Rollin Robert Herrick, revised edn., (Oxford, 1992) and ‘Witty by Design: Robert Herrick’s Hesperides’,
in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), The Wit of Seventeenth-Century Poetry (London,
1995), pp. 135-50.