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

Herrick’s Church of Earthly Delights 195
And as one reads through ‘His Noble Numbers’, one sees a continuance of the themes of
carnivorous, carnival, and carnal. In fact, Herrick’s use of the various aspects of ‘carn’
meets the incarnational God in the ‘Noble Numbers’ in such a way that what has seemed
pagan in the preceding section of his book becomes a means to approach God in Christ,
even to the point that we find a poem in which the carnal of Christ is exchanged for
Herrick’s heart as an act of salvation, and these bizarre acts of devotion, which include the
final poem implying that Jesus may have failed to ascend to Heaven in the resurrection,
and may in fact still be in Hell, 68 makes it difficult to agree with the standard view of ‘His
Noble Numbers’ which sees the poems as ‘a collection of rather dull poems on
conventionally Christian devotional topics’. 69
Herrick continues with the emphasis on the carnivorous with the poem ‘To keep a
true Lent’ (N-228) in which he instructs his readers to realise that observing Lent does not
mean to abstain from meat or ‘Flesh’, but
It is to fast from strife,
From old debate,
And hate;
To circumcise thy life’. (17-20)
Forgoing meat is not an act of devotion, rather how a person lives is true devotion. If the
gods are pleased by the scent of our meals, then to forgo meat is a contradictory act of
worship. It deprives the worshipers and the worshipped from the sacrifice that is supposed
to be given. Herrick asks
68 ‘His Coming to the Sepulchre’
69 ‘Enlarging the Limits of the “Religious Lyric”’, p. 28.