I sing of brookes, of blossomes, birds and Bowers:
Of April, May, of June and July-flowers.
I sing of May-poles, Hock-carts, Wassails, Wakes,
Of Bride-grooms, Brides, and of their Bridall-cakes.
Thus Robert Herrick proclaimed in the "Argument of his Book". The book, Hesperides (1648), was his life's work: a picture in poetry of the years he spent as a clergyman in Dean priory, in that garden of the west, Devon. The goldsmith's son from Cheapside may not have been entirely happy with rustic life, but he was its tirelessly keen observer. The inventory in this opening poem shows him to some degree conventional in his poetic subjects, but also suggests his responsiveness to specific and down-to-earth detail, the quality that allows him endlessly to refresh convention.
Herrick lived in turbulent times, but the smoothness of his music and temper seem to rest undisturbed. The knotted, tortuous intellectual intricacies of the metaphysical poets are absent from his lines. These poets were in the ascendant at the time, and Herrick would have seemed a shade reactionary to his mid-17th-century readers. But his work endures to this day, and his absence from any canonical anthology of English verse would be as unthinkable as the omission of Herbert, Donne or Marvell. And if modern heads still contain remembered lines of poetry, I rather think these are likely to be lines of Herrick. At least, I fondly remember a Dublin taxi driver, who claimed to be an ex-Provie, reciting To Daffodils to me on the way to the airport.
Herrick has little ambition to be intellectually profound, or display his effortlessly worn classical learning. The best poems are songlike and short – but not as short as all that. His numerous two-line epigrams are unremarkable, and rarely generate a memorable turn of phrase; "Nothing hard or harsh can prove/ unto those that truly love" is fairly typical. His curses and comic squibs (the smelly and the toothless are favourite butts) are not much better: "Of four teeth only Bridget was possess't; /Two she spat out; a cough forc't out the rest."
The lack of technical ambition may be one of the very reasons Herrick excels as a love-poet. His simplicity implies candour. The voice is fluent and persuasive, but not self-admiring. These poems are different from the enthusiastic exhortations to matrimony that the unmarried clergyman often addressed to friends' girlfriends, and, of course, his encouragements "to Virgins, to make much of Time". His skill is to write conversationally, and to seem to address one particular woman. Such poems, of course, belong to a particular genre: they are classical imitations (or imitations of classical imitations) and designed to be overheard. But they charm us and convince us of their psychological authenticity because they are so rarely the occasion of any technical bravura.
Many of Herrick's works name their addressee, but the recipient of this week's choice – To his Mistress, Objecting to him neither Toying or Talking – is unidentified. I have no proof that it's Julia, rather than Corinna, Anthea or any of his other "mistresses", but somehow it has what I think of as his "Julia" voice.
Julia, moth-like, flickers in and out of Herrick's work, providing a tenuous narrative subtext. She has not been identified, but it seems likely that a real woman lurks behind the name. There is a poem called Julia's Churching, which suggests she had a child (churching was the purification ceremony that women underwent a month after confinement). At other times, like the conventional mistress, she is warm and frosty, accessible and inaccessible by turn.
Sometimes, Julia also seems to play a spiritual role. In another poem set in a church, she and the speaker entwine their rosaries, as if, while symbolically coupling, they are helping each other heavenwards. She becomes, almost, a homelier version of Laura or Beatrice in her role in her poet-lover's spiritual quest.
It's interesting that Herrick personifies Love in this week's poem as female. See also the following epigram: "When words we want, Love teacheth to endite;/ And what we blush to speake, she bids us write."
To his Mistress, Objecting … is a masculine apologia of the sort heard more often in everyday life than poetry. That's why it's tempting to read it autobiographically. At the same time, it involves Herrick in a little exercise in the kind of conceit that rarely interested him. He makes the most of it, with his various aquatic metaphors, only the first of which is accurate (full casks make no sound, but deep water may be just as noisy as shallow). As for the "chiding streams", this could be read as a rebuke to the woman who has accused him of not loving her – a harsh one, if so.
The poem concludes with a declaration of love so plain it seems flat-footed. Does this imply sincerity or its opposite? Whatever is or is not happening in the poem, sexual anxiety is present, signalled most obviously in the repetition of the suffix "-less".
The poem's most memorable image is "those Babies in your eyes" – an endearing picture of merry innocence, complicated by the notion that the speaker might also be seeing his own reflection(s). Possibly, of course, an (unshared?) desire for babies might also be suggested. The poem perhaps never achieves anything quite so hauntingly expressive again. But it is surely redeemed because of that achievement. You say I love not, 'cause I doe not play
To his Mistress, Objecting to him neither Toying or Talking
Still with your curles, and kisse the time away.
You blame me too, because I cann't devise
Some sport, to please those Babies in your eyes:
By Loves Religion, I must here confesse it,
The most I love, when I the least expresse it.
Small griefs find tongues: Full Casques are ever found
To give (if any, yet) but little sound.
Deep waters noyse-less are; And this we know,
That chiding streams betray small depth below.
So when Love speechless is, she doth expresse
A depth in love, and that depth bottomlesse.
Now since my love is tongue-less, know me such,
Who speak but little, 'cause I love so much.