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

Herrick’s Church of Earthly Delights 177
Wantonnesse’. (6) That this phrase is used to describe the actions of youth and love is of
the utmost importance. Throughout the Hesperides, there is the sense that carnal is not
sinful 13 when acted upon within certain situations involving the festive, the carnival, and it
is within the carnival that physical love leads back to the purifying aspects of nature, the
rain and dew, to bring life; the perfumes and oils to heal and cover the smells of disease or
death. The reader is then reminded of the transitory nature of life and ‘Times transshifting’,
also the constant changes in nature with the transition of roses to red and lilies to
white. The world is in change and unstable, and with the movement to twilight, fairies,
death, and the afterlife, Avon Jack Murphy sees an indication in the poem of the inability
to ‘have everything in [Herrick’s] poetic universe under absolute control’. 14
Furthermore,
Deneef points out that this movement through creation and the supernatural presents
Herrick as implying ‘that the volume which this poem indexes is a world complete in
itself’. 15
This then is how to approach Hesperides. Herrick tells us that he wants his book
to be read as a complete work, and yet, while complete and concrete in its construction,
there is a constant reminder of change and loss, which is what he is trying to overcome
with his Hesperides. In fact, T. G. S. Cain sees the concept of ‘Times trans-shifting’ and
its connection to death to be the great subject of the book. 16
Although there is a constant
reminder of death and decay throughout the work (another aspect of ‘Times transshifting’),
17 this reminder helps the reader to realise the necessity of salvation, and the
book is consumed with a physical salvation and a physical paradise that is achieved
13 Douglas Bush points out that even in the ‘Noble Numbers the Christian’s sense of sin in not very acute’.
English Literature in the Early Seventeenth Century: 1600-1660, 2 nd edn., revised, (London, 1962), p. 119.
14 Avon Jack Murphy, ‘Robert Herrick: The Self-Conscious Critic in Hesperides’, in Roger B. Rollin and J.
Max Patrick (eds.), “Trust to Good Verses” (London, 1978), p. 54.
15 “This Poetic Liturgie”, p. 8.
16 T. G. S. Cain, ‘“Times trans-shifting”: Herrick in Meditation’, in Roger B. Rollin and J. Max Patrick
(eds.), “Trust to Good Verses” (London, 1978), pp. 103-23.
17 George Walton Scott, Robert Herrick, 1591-1674 (London, 1974), p. 116.