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

Herrick’s Church of Earthly Delights 184
celebrations. The narrator in the poem is pushing Corinna out of bed and her house so that
she does not oversleep and miss the festivities. He censures her for sleeping late.
Nay! not so much as out of bed?
When all the Birds have Mattens seyd,
And sung their thankfull Hymnes: ‘tis sin,
Nay, profanation to keep in
Nature has performed its sanctifying duties and is now ready to partake in the day. Nature
is pure and is participating in the festival; Corinna is in sin because she sleeps. 39
Deneef
takes this further and states that ‘She is out of accord with the rest of nature’, and by these
actions ‘She desecrates herself and the rite by not appearing’. 40
The narrator instructs,
‘Wash, dresse, be briefe in praying: | Few Beads are best, when once we goe a Maying’.
She need not tarry long in her religious preparation for the day as nature and the festival
are already sanctified, and since it is sin to not join in the celebration, then long prayers
keep her in sin, for ‘nature is alive with personality, alive with worship’. 41
Herrick argues
that rushing through traditional devotional acts are to be commended because partaking in
May Day is an act of devotion in and of itself, as ‘there is a sense of organic union with
nature and a collapsing of any distinctions between what is natural, what is pleasurable,
and what is worshipful’. 42
Outside, the festivities are described in religious terms.
. . . see how
Philology 76.1 (1979), 65; George Walton Scott, Robert Herrick, 1591-1674 (London, 1974), p. 127; Joseph
H. Summers, The Heirs of Donne and Jonson (London, 1970), p. 60.
39 Leah S. Marcus, Politics of Mirth (London, 1986), p. 159; Robert Herrick, p. 86.
40 “This Poetic Liturgy”, p. 58.
41 Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, ‘Herrick and the Cleansing of Perception’, in Roger B. Rollin and J. Max
Patrick (eds.), “Trust to Good Verses” (London, 1978), p. 199.
42 ‘Herrick and the Cleansing of Perception’, p. 202