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

Herrick’s Church of Earthly Delights 203
Christ for a kind of salvation. The poem begins with a short stanza setting the terms for
the exchange:
THat little prettie bleeding part
Of Foreskin send to me:
And Ile returne a bleeding Heart,
For New-yeers gift to thee.
The very physical imagery of a bleeding foreskin and a bleeding heart, while symbolising
the redemption of the soul, also seems to allow for a somewhat literal reading. The
second, and final, stanza bears this out when Herrick writes that ,
Rich is the Jemme that thou did’st send,
Mine’s faulty too, and small:
But yet this Gift Thou wilt commend,
Because I send thee all.
The ‘prettie bleeding part’ is now a ‘Jemme’, but in the next line the reader is presented
with the fact that it is ‘faulty too’, just like Herrick’s heart. A part of the body of God
incarnate is ‘faulty’, and yet it can still be exchanged for salvation. Herrick looks to the
one part of Jesus’s body that is cut off and cast away, his foreskin, as the proper sacrifice
for healing his heart. There is no discussion of Good Friday or Easter, instead the
circumcision is enough. And then Herrick ends the stanza with what might be one of the
most peculiar endings to a devotional poem, and while it can come across as a ‘pleasant