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

Herrick’s Church of Earthly Delights 187
These lines then are a reminder, once again, of the temporary nature of the festival, and
‘the ceremonial escape is artistic communion with the realm of death, transfiguration, and
rebirth, in order to cause an analogous renewal within the spirit of the participator’. 47
Though there has been some debate regarding how to read the final two lines of the poem,
they cannot be explained away, 48 and perhaps Mary Thomas Crane states it best when she
says ‘That this poem is difficult to place ideologically’. 49 Ultimately, it is not a poem of
political ideology (though Claude J. Summers is correct to see a ‘paternalistic rather than
an egalitarian attitude’ 50 in the poems of festival and country life), rather it is one about life
and its processes, and in this it fits perfectly within Hesperides. This is a book of the
passing of all things, and so the appreciation of all things as they pass, even while desiring
and striving to hold on to them as long as humanly and artistically possible.
Herrick’s is not a call to live every day as carnival, but to experience the carnival to
the utmost, to celebrate it with all of one’s being, as a temporary stay against mortality and
toil. In Herrick’s temporal Christianity, in his flesh-centred incarnational view of the
world, there is never a naïve view that all of life is celebration, but that celebration exists
to give greater meaning to life. The carnal and the carnival meet as the celebrants
experience nature, in plants, animals, food, and each other, and find in those days of
festivity a sanctified and redeemed world which, for at least a little while, is edenic in its
pleasures and innocence, and as Marcus states of ‘The Hock-cart’, ‘if either the Lord or his
laborers refuse to play the parts that the poem sets out for them . . ., the festival and its
magic will fail’. 51
The Lord and the workers must play their roles in this spiritual
excercise, just as Corinna cannot be left to sleep the day away. The incarnational and
47 Thomas R. Whitaker, ‘Herrick and the Fruits of the Garden’, ELH 22.1 (1955), 23.
48 Ceremony and Art, p. 147.
49 Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Herrick’s Cultural Materialism’, George Herbert Journal 14.1&2 (1991), 43.
50 Claude J. Summers, ‘Herrick’s Political Poetry: The Strategies of His Art’, in Roger B. Rollin and J. Max
Patrick (eds.), “Trust to Good Verses” (London, 1978), p. 173.
51 Politics of Mirth, p. 149.