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

Herrick’s Church of Earthly Delights 201
a setting reminiscent of May. While Christ is not presented as being in a garden-like
nativity, the star does tell them where to look, and it says ‘No, this ye need not do; | But
only come, and see Him rest | A Princely Babe in’s Mothers Brest.’ So the reader is
moved from the festival settings of Spring and May Day to Mary’s breast and then back
out to the carnival as one character declares after seeing Jesus that they should ‘bring |
Unto [their] prettie Twelfth-Tide King, | Each one his severall offering’. He is declared a
king of Twelfth Night, and would then be the reason behind the revelry. To further
emphasise this, Herrick then has the Chorus declare that ‘when night comes, wee’l give
Him wassailing’. In this song, the reader is presented with the idea that the correct
response to finding Christ is to then join in the carnival activity of wassailing. The
response to the Incarnation is not sombre, it is not to stay and worship, instead the reader is
called to revelry and festivities.
But it is not just the birth of Christ that Herrick uses in order to find a return to the
Spring, or the carnival of fertility and life. In one of the poems celebrating the festival of
the Circumcision of Jesus 76 there is a bizarre image of the life that springs from the act of
circumcision. While the importance of the circumcision of Jesus had long been noted by
the Church, it takes on new importance with Herrick. Traditionally the importance of the
circumcision was that it was the first blood shed by Christ in the redemption of humanity,
because if he was to be a perfect sacrifice, then he must be perfectly Jewish in all rites. He
must fulfil the law of the Old Testament in order to usher in the redefined relationship
between God and humanity found in the New Testament. Jim Ellis has noted that ‘the
body of Christ in seventeenth-century religious poetry is often a site of both aesthetic and
theological difficulty, but perhaps nowhere is this so acute as in poems on the topos of
76 ‘The New-yeeres Gift, or Circumcisions Song, sung to the King in the Presence at White-Hall’ (N-97).