THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

actions for which we have received a general amnesty as a favour from the victor’, the volume contains some
contentious material, notably the series of intellectually and lexically clumsy ‘Pindaric Odes’ (amongst which the
address to ‘Brutus’ manages to fudge the issue of both Roman politics and Cromwellian parallels). The 1656 volume
also contains Cowley’s contrasting tributes to dead friends: the diffuse and rambling ‘On the Death of Mr William
Hervey’ and the tenser, lusher, and more expressive appreciation of Crashaw (‘Poet and Saint! To thee alone are
given | The two most sacred Names of Earth and Heaven’). To a distinctly non-ecumenical age this latter poem
proclaims both a need for a continuing reformation of English poetry by purging its pagan elements according to
Christian principles and a tolerant admiration for Crashaw’s example (‘For even in Error sure no Danger is | When
joyn’d with so much Piety as His’).
Hesperides: or the Works both Humane & Divine of Robert Herrick Esq. of 1648 is divided into two: the first part,
Hesperides proper, contains some of the most titillatingly erotic and overtly pagan verse in English; its second part,
His Noble Numbers, has its own title-page and is separately paginated in order to mark off a series of religious poems
from the ‘unbaptized Rhimes’ of the secular body of the volume. Despite their baptism, the poems in His Noble
Numbers suggest that their author’s imaginative engagement in expressions of literary piety was occasional rather
than consistent. Herrick (1591-1674) was a well-educated parish priest from rural Devonshire who was ejected from
his living in 1647 as a man assertively loyal to the old order in Church and State. Although, as far as we know, he
had neither sought nor been offered the opportunity of serving his King as either a courtier or a soldier, his verse
proves him to be the most expressively ‘cavalier’ of the seventeenth-century love-poets. He woos and flatters,
philanders and warns, observes and compares, with little cerebration and even rarer earnestness. As a whole,
Hesperides side-steps the confessional and political divisions of contemporary England. Its opening ‘Argument’
proclaims that its poet will ‘sing’ of brooks and blossoms, of spring and summer, of wooing and wedding; his court
will be that of the Fairy King and Queen and his creed will be based on a somewhat indistinct hope of heaven. Its
most weighty ‘political’ statement lies in its generous, tolerant, and profoundly anti-Puritan, treatment of sexuality.
Herrick’s most effective religious verse expresses a childlike acceptance of faith and divine providence, though its
innocence is quite distinct from the wondering mysticism of Vaughan. His ‘A Thanksgiving to God, for his House’
gratefully lists the simple comforts and rural blessings of a retired life, but it never attempts, as Herbert might have
done, to move from the everyday to the theological. When Herrick speaks of heaven in ‘The White Island: or place of
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the Bles’, he imagines it as a floating island of happy blankness free of the ‘teares and terrors’ of this life, but neither
here nor in his prayers for comfort in the ‘Letanie, to the Holy Spirit’ is there any suggestion of a quivering fear of
judgement akin to Donne’s. His evident delight in a white vision of a heaven characterized by candour and sincerity
is, however, reflected in the air of innocent celebration that haunts much of his secular verse. The pleasures of the
flesh as they are both spelled out and lovingly alluded to in Hesperides are threatened not by prurience or moral
disapproval but by the cold winds of time and death. Young lovers, like the transient blossoms, the rosebuds, the
tulips, or the daffodils of his best-known lyrics, need to ‘make much of Time’ in order to seize the brief moment of
pleasure. The only immortality available on this side of heaven lies in the survival of poetry, as Herrick persistently
reminds the Antheas and Julias to whom individual poems are addressed. Despite his resentment of a ‘long and
irksome banishment’ in the ‘dull confines of the drooping West’, Herrick particularly relishes describing those rural
ceremonies, such as May Day and Harvest Home, that uncomplicatedly link human and natural fertility, procreation,
and fulfilment. This is not simply because he recognizes their pagan roots, or because he sees them as reflections of
Greek and Roman pastorals, but because he allows them to be ‘country matters’ in the truest sense of the term. When
Corinna goes a-Maying in the poem of that name, when the village girls dance ‘like a Spring, | with Honysuckles
crown’d’ in ‘To Meddows’, or when the Earl of Westmorland is reminded of his obligation to extend hospitality to his
harvesters in ‘The Hock-Cart’, Herrick celebrates expressions of unity which are part innocent ceremony, part
knowing physical enactment. In his richly allusive marriage poem, ‘A Nuptiall Song, or Epithalamie, on Sir Clipseby
Crew and his Lady’, he brings ‘the youthfull Bridegroom, and the fragrant Bride’ together at their ‘proud | Plumpe
Bed’
... swelling like a cloud
Tempting the too too modest; can
You see it brusle like a Swan,
And you be cold
To meet it, when it woo’s and seemes to fold
The Armes to hugge you? throw, throw
Your selves into the mighty over-flow
Of that white Pride, and Drowne