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Selection from the Lyrical Poems of Robert Herrick

Robert Herrick

Robert Herrick had been apprenticed to a goldsmith before entering holy orders. This early training has been credited with influencing his metrical precision and his success with short poems. A still more important influence was Ben Jonson, for he was a member of the "sons of Ben," the coterie of younger poets that surrounded that great dramatist, Shakespeare's rival and friend. He even addresses a poem to Jonson addressing him as his "saint." As a country parson, far from the bustle of London and his poetic peers, Herrick found inspiration in the beauties of nature, but loneliness may have skewed his perception toward the melancholy lessons taught by the changing seasons. Still, he remained a social poet, his verses always seeming to require an audience, usually a jolly one; inward meditations are not his style. Herrick has been called pagan in spite of his religious calling, and heaven does always rank as an afterthought in his poetry, while daydreams of the maidens that populate the Latin poets' verses provide him with a rich and sensuous fantasy life. In his lifetime he was seen as an anachronism, a perfect representative of the Elizabethan versifier, highly skilled but not to be taken seriously because, though admittedly as perfect as if they were to be inscribed in marble, his lines lack the arch tone and puzzling wit of the new age. (Summary by Thomas A. Copeland)