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

Herrick’s Church of Earthly Delights 191
is interesting for this discussion is that power improperly wielded and bad religion are both
expressed in terms that keep people from being able to physically experience and enjoy
their sacrifices. The eating of the meat provides people with strength and sustenance. A
proper relationship with the deity must express itself in such a way that the gods enjoy
watching their worshippers prepare and consume the sacrifice. The gods are immaterial,
and so it is the immaterial that must be their portion of devotional acts. People are
physical beings; therefore, they express their devotion through dedicating and enjoying
physical acts. When religious devotions and beliefs require their followers to make do
with the immaterial, they are ‘infernall’ and will starve the devout who require the physical
sustenance to survive. In Herrick’s conception of religion then, we see a world that is holy
because it is physical, and the acts of redemption and devotion that the gods require are for
the people to properly enjoy and partake in this physical creation. Any neo-platonic view
of Christianity that denies the world, any sect of Christianity that seeks to keep people
from pleasurably interacting with creation, which denies the carnal, the carnival, the
carnivorous, is ‘infernall’.
With the importance that Herrick places on the physical world, it is of little surprise
that these same ideas are carried over to his sacred verse in ‘His Noble Numbers’, and
while some critics have argued that the festival and ceremony in both parts of Hesperides
show Herrick’s commitment to the Laudian Church of England, 59 this does not entirely
explain the unsettling religion that is presented in the book. No one now doubts the
Christianity of Archbishop Laud, but no one is certain of Herrick’s religious conviction, so
a simple Laudian versus Puritan reading of Hesperides is incomplete when the reader
acknowledges that much of the ceremonial and festival in the poems is just as pagan as
Christian and Herrick is certainly closer to Rome than to Geneva, but it is the Rome of
59 Leah S. Marcus, ‘Herricks Noble Numbers and the Poetics of Playfulness’, English Literary Renaissance
7.1 (1977), 108-126; Claude J. Summers, ‘Tears for Herrick’s Church’, George Herbert Journal 14.1&2
(1991), 51-71.