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

Herrick’s Church of Earthly Delights 197
of our souls, if a peece of dry flesh at my table be more unpleasant to me, then
some fish there, certainly eat the flesh, and not the fish, is to keep the fasting day
naturally. 70
Here Herbert can be seen arguing that the task of the fast is to eat something ‘unpleasant’
thereby remembering through suffering. Herrick may not agree with Herbert’s emphasis
on suffering in fasting, but there is a similar acknowledgment that the rules governing
fasting are not completely binding, and that there may be instances when one must eat
flesh in order to keep a true Lent. Herrick then is quick to point out the absurdity of
proclaiming a fast from meat that still allows fish. Although fish may not have been
understood as meat in his time, it is clear that Herrick sees that one can still indulge in
great quantities of food even while ‘fasting’. And those keeping such a Lent clearly still
crave the meat because they ‘fill | The platter high with Fish’. They claim to be eating in
such a way as to deprive themselves out of devotion, yet they are gorging themselves.
Herrick makes sure that his readers realise that abstaining from eating is not a way to
worship God, instead they should ‘sterve th[eir] sin, | Not Bin; | And that’s to keep th[eir]
Lent’. It is how one lives one’s life, not how one eats, that constitutes worship and
devotion, or ‘that ritual practices are valuable only where the spirit gives life to the literal
observance’. 71
God enjoys the carnivorous, and Herrick shows this again in ‘To God’ (N-66).
Here the reader finds that God of Christianity supplies his people with meat. Herrick
states that
70 A Priest to the Temple or, The Country Parson, in F. E. Hurchinson (ed), The Works of George Herbert
(Oxford: 1941), p. 242.
71 Achsah Guibbory, ‘Temple of Hesperides and Anglican-Puritan Controversy’, in Claude J. Summers and
Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), “The Muses Commonweale” (Cambridge, 1988), p. 140.