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

Herrick’s Church of Earthly Delights 178
through the combining of the carnal, carnival, and carnivorous to incarnate, if only briefly,
a heaven on earth.
The movement in ‘His Argument’ from ‘Brooks’ to a desired afterlife in heaven
embodies much of the incarnational understanding of Herrick. The Latin root of
incarnation, ‘carn’, is also the root of carnal, carnival, and carnivore, which Herrick seems
to have in mind when negotiating his conflict of body and soul, or sacred and profane. He
is the priest who, in creating his Hesperides, is creating his own book of life that will bring
forth immortality for himself, and for those he includes. With his fear of the possible nonexistence
of the afterlife, Herrick uses Hesperides to celebrate the temporal, to create a
heaven on earth. While Donne looks to the Incarnation as a means to negotiate with God a
means for guaranteed salvation, Herrick tries to guarantee his salvation with or without
God. Where Lanyer uses the incarnational paradox of the high becoming low and the low
being raised up to justify a radically altered society based upon virtue, rather than on
gender or birth, Herrick sees the Incarnation justifying the physical to the extent that he
almost sees no need to rise above it.
That Herrick is a poet of the carnal is easy to see, and the varied critical reception
of such carnal verses from a priest has been well summarised by Roger B. Rollin. 18
‘Hesperides’ is replete with poems to imaginary women, named and not. These women
are eroticised, as in ‘The Vine’ (H-41), anatomised, such as in ‘Upon Julia’s Breasts’ (H-
230) and ‘Upon the Nipples of Julia’s Breast’ (H-440), and ogled, such as in ‘Upon Julia’s
Clothes’ (H-779). This is clearly not a normal subject for a country parson, yet Herrick
presents these verses, and many, many more besides, to his readers as part of his ‘cleanly-
Wantonnesse’. 19
The carnal of the incarnate is celebrated with little censure, and as
William Kerrigan has successfully argued, Herrick indeed manages to be ‘jocund’ and
18 Roger B. Rollin, ‘Robert Herrick and the Erotics of Criticism’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry
Pebworth (eds.), Renaissance Discourses of Desire (London, 1993), 130-42.
19 ‘The Argument of his Book’ (H-1), line 6.