Quick Review

Poetical Works of Robert Herrick by Robert Herrick

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The gentleman has to be the most wildly, delightfully uneven writer ever published in such austere company as the Oxford Standard Authors. "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" may well be all the average American reader may know of him (and that only if the poem survives in whatever edition Norton Anthology happened by.)  You know it:

    Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
    Old Time is still a-flying;
    And this same flower that smiles today,
    Tomorrow will be dying.

That one does speak to both the good clergyman's good nature and his preference for female company; the two most likely aspects of nearly all his secular verse.  It's also representative of both his style and taste for uncomplicated forms.  Even his sermons, for the most part, as here, are charming. (Perhaps less so in his actual "Noble Numbers," aka his sacred poems, but that's as may be, I should think.)

Reading the whole of him, as I've just done here, what is most surprising is casual and consistent disinterest in anything like organizing themes and or curiosity as to form.  Seems to me at least he wrote just as needed according to the size of his thoughts, prayers, and notions, frankly.  Not much of a theologian for instance -- thank God.  No.  Instead what's here is a sometimes artful, sometimes artless hodgepodge of observations, mostly, on girls, God and good meals.  Very much a Restoration fellow in this, even if in orders.  His "monometers" are now it seems much fussed about as being somehow unique or modern, but with a very few, truly clever exceptions, what these very short little rhymes read as are just so many rather insipid saws, seldom rising above the level of grandma's sampler as to either ideas or verse, though some few of his aphorisms may well be worth quoting, just as some of his dirtier lyrics might be worth a blush and a giggle from  a pretty girl still.

What he is though is less dependent on his being exceptional than on being so wonderfully, unexpectedly common.  He loves, often -- he never married -- and he loves to sing: "I will confess /With cheerfulness / Love is a thing so likes me."  He likes company and keeping company where he can: "We'll venture, if we can, at wit" he says, and venture he does, and further suggesting "While the milder fates consent / Let's enjoy our merriment" and clearly he did, as do we in his company.

There is that whole other book of prayer, tucked up for the sake of rightness at the end of "Hesperides," almost like a Sunday morning after a Saturday night.  I haven't much patience with repentance.  Still, if church one must, there's many a worse one than the Reverend Mr. Herrick's, may I say?

But go to.  Let's have just one more little toot:

A Mean in Our Means

Though frankincense the deities require,
We must not give all to the hallow'd fire.
Such be our gifts, and such be our expense,
As for ourselves to leave some frankince.



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