![]() But his reputation as a West Country poet can be overstated. There are Devonian touches in poems written after 1630: several of his epigrams about dodgy low-life characters give them names found among families in the South Hams. Herrick laments the death of his spaniel Tracy, and bewails the loss of a finger. Some of it evokes provincial intimacies rather than courtly self-display. Some of his writing reflects the interests of literary coteries and clubs in the London of the 1620s. A period as a chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham followed, and then 16 years of what he seems to have found positively boring peace at Dean Prior in ‘this dull Devon- shire’ or ‘lothed Devonshire’ or ‘the loathed West’, until the New Model Army rapped on the door in 1646.ĭespite Herrick’s reputation as a typical Cavalier poet, many of his poems were written well before the men with their wide hats and curly moustachios took to their horses and charged into battle for King Charles. In 1623, aged over thirty, he took holy orders. He studied law and acquired expensive friends, many of whom he retained throughout his life. He later moved to Trinity Hall, where he complained to his rich uncle that he had ‘runn somewhat deepe into my Tailours debt’. That career didn’t take, and once Herrick came of age and could spend his own money he went to the flashiest college in Cambridge, St John’s. Herrick was brought up by his uncle, who took charge (more or less benignly) of his inheritance and set him up as an apprentice to his father’s trade. His father died after falling out of a window in 1592, when the child was only 15 months old. Herrick was the son of a wealthy London goldsmith. It remained as a monument to the rapid fluctuations of its times. By then Hesperides – which might partly have been designed as a bid for favour within that renewed royal household – was in press. Negotiations broke down, and in November the king fled. One of its latest datable poems was written in August that year, when Charles I was negotiating to make peace with Parliament and was reconstructing a household of musicians and courtiers at Hampton Court. Hesperides may have been put together in a spirit as much of fragile hope as defiance or despair. Many of Herrick’s best poems appear to have been written before 1630 either at Cambridge or in London. This view of Hesperides now seems both reductive and inaccurate. Lines like ‘the worse, and worst/Times, still succeed the former’ were taken as direct allusions to the darkening end of the 1640s. As Herrick urged his mistresses to gather rosebuds, and rejoiced in maypoles and hock-carts and harvest homes, it was argued, he was implicitly sticking up for the ornamented forms of worship and popular ritual that had been defended by Archbishop Laud in the 1630s and suppressed by Parliament in 1643. In the heady historicist days of the 1980s Hesperides was seen as a defiant and despairing gesture of royalism. So Hesperides did amount to, as it said on the title page, The Works both Human and Divine of Robert Herrick, his life’s work, and Herrick’s pride in his achievement is marked by the fact that this is the first volume in England to refer to a collection of lyric poems as ‘works’. After 1648 Herrick printed only one further poem. The publication may have been a way of supplementing his drastically reduced income: if he presented copies to those praised within it he might expect a little something in return. Herrick fled to London, which he had always regarded as home, and in 1648 published his only book of poems, a double volume containing Hesperides and His Noble Numbers or Pious Pieces. On their way they seem to have ejected Herrick from his relatively wealthy living, which had brought him £100 a year. The interruption began in or around January 1646, when the New Model Army marched along the predecessor of the A38 to relieve Plymouth. ![]() ![]() R oughly thirty miles southwest of Exeter the A38 rips along the edge of the churchyard of Dean Prior, where Robert Herrick, with one period of interruption, was rector between 1630 and his death in 1674. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |