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

Herrick’s Church of Earthly Delights 181
two people becoming one flesh in marriage, 35 but he also writes ‘Upon Scobble. Epigram’
(H-126)
SCobble for Whoredome whips his wife; and cryes,
He’ll slit her nose; But blubb’ring, she replyes,
Good Sir, make no more cuts i’th’outward skin,
One slit’s enough to let Adultry in.
Herrick does not naively see the world as a place replete with beauty. He acknowledges,
and more significantly condemns, the vile while also working in it. There is a realism in
Herrick’s world that is often overlooked or ignored by critics. The ‘mocking epigrams’ 36
seem so severe that they shock, but this is what is needed when the poems of the beautiful
can appear so artificial. He writes in extremes. He longs for the ideal, but he
acknowledges that the ideal is not the every day world. And, as will be shown, it is
through a combination of the beautiful found in the carnal, carnival, and carnivorous that
Herrick presents his readers with the possibility of brief encounters with the ideal. The
‘mocking epigrams’ balance the book and remind the readers of a need to escape the
everyday, but at the same time, Herrick offers no ultimate assurance of a true and lasting
existence in the ideal.
As the reader begins to look at Herrick’s use of the carnal, it will be observed that
he does not just direct his focus toward women but also toward nature. As Herrick states
in ‘His Argument’, he sings of plants and flowers, and often in these poems of nature, the
reader is met with eroticised tales in which plants enact metaphors or metamorphoses
whereby they are the carnal or are changed by the carnal. ‘The Vine’ is a poem in which
35 Mark 10.7-9. William Aldis Wright (ed.), The Authorized Version of the English Bible, 1611, 5 vols.,
(Cambridge, 1909), all quotations from the Bible are from this edition.
36 A title used by Coiro in her Hesperides and the Epigram Book Tradition, p. 155 and following.