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

Herrick’s Church of Earthly Delights 199
the supernatural action of Jesus’s birth is not the heavenly focus on the work of the Divine,
but an entirely earthly action of changing Winter to Spring, or as Roger B. Rollin states,
‘the Nativity actually accomplishes what the myth of pastoral has always promised – to
create a springtime world’. 74
The poem is a song sung by different singers holding a
conversation regarding the miraculous spring-like weather that has appeared in December.
They ask ‘wherefore all things here | Seem like the Spring-time of the yeere?’ and
Why do’s the chilling Winters morne
Smile, like a field beset with corne?
Or smell, like to a Meade new-shorne,
Thus, on the sudden?’
These singers are answered by another singer who states that it is Christ’s birth that has
brought about the changes in nature. The Chorus then sings that
We see Him come, and know him ours,
Who, with His Sun-shine, and His showers,
Turnes all the patient ground to flowers.
The birth of Jesus brings forth Spring. He causes flowers to grow in the middle of
winter. In fact there is more a sense of Christmas resembling Easter, with the celebration
of nature reborn; however, earlier in the poem, the reader finds that it is not Easter to
which Herrick is referring, rather he hints at the fact that Christ brings forth the carnival of
74 Robert Herrick, p. 142. Leah Marcus also makes this point in ‘Herrick’s Noble Numbers and the Politics of
Playfulness, p. 120.