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

Herrick’s Church of Earthly Delights 186
Come, my Corinna, come, let’s goe a Maying. (63-70)
Each May Day is the marking of another year passed and another year aged. To skip the
carnival is to miss celebrating life, and as this life is the only assured life, to not celebrate
is to waste God’s gift of temporal existence. As Deming says of the poem, ‘it is the fullest
statement of his ceremonial vision of the relation between Nature and Art, between
external and poetic contexts, and between Time and Space’, 44 or as Rollin puts it, ‘here as
elsewhere in Hesperides he acknowledges that love is a means of easing, not resolving, the
tension between existence and extinction’. 45
‘The Hock-cart, or Harvest Home: To the Right Honourable, Mildmay, Earle of
Westmorland’ (H-250) contains similar themes as ‘Corinna’. There is feasting and
celebration; there are lusty youths and maids, and there is food and drink: ‘Mutton, Veale |
And Bacon’, (30-1) ‘here a Custard, there a Pie’, (33) ‘If smirking Wine be wanting here, |
There’s that, which drowns all care, stout Beere’. (36-7) Once again the reader is greeted
with great carnival and revelry, and once again there is the reminder at the end of the poem
that all of this will pass. Although ‘Corinna’ celebrates with the thought of the
inevitability of mortality, ‘The Hock-cart’ reminds the reader that this day of pleasure
exists as a release from the daily strife that will come again as work and routine resume. 46
Herrick ends the poem with the lines:
And that this pleasure is like raine,
Not sent ye for to drowne your paine,
But for to make it spring againe.
44 Robert H. Deming, Ceremony and Art (Paris, 1974), p. 56.
45 Robert Herrick, p. 90.
46 Robert Herrick, p. 51.