A short life of the author
Robert Herrick (baptised 24 August 1591 – buried 15 October 1674) was an English lyric poet of the seventeenth century whose collection Hesperides (1648) — published in a single volume with its companion collection of religious verse, Noble Numbers — contains some of the most accomplished, elegant, and sensuous short poems in the English language. His poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” (“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”) is one of the best-known poems in English, and his work as a whole represents the finest achievement of the Cavalier lyric tradition.
Life
Herrick was born in London, the seventh child of Nicholas Herrick, a prosperous goldsmith who fell to his death from a fourth-floor window when Robert was an infant — an apparent suicide that cast a shadow over the family. Young Robert was apprenticed to his uncle, also a goldsmith, before entering St John’s College, Cambridge, as a mature student at twenty-two. He took his BA in 1617 and his MA in 1620.
In London during the 1620s, Herrick became part of the literary circle surrounding Ben Jonson — the “Sons of Ben” or “Tribe of Ben” — and absorbed Jonson’s classical values: precision, craftsmanship, compression, and the emulation of Latin lyric poets, particularly Catullus, Horace, and Martial. Jonson’s influence, combined with Herrick’s own native gift for melody and his responsiveness to the English countryside, produced a style that is at once classical and spontaneous.
In 1629, Herrick was appointed vicar of Dean Prior, a remote parish in Devon, where he spent most of the rest of his life — interrupted only by his ejection during the Puritan Commonwealth (he was restored after the Restoration in 1660). His feelings about Devon were mixed: he complained about its rusticity but found in its landscape, its customs, and its natural beauty the material for some of his finest poems.
Hesperides (1648)
Herrick published virtually all his poetry in a single volume, Hesperides: or, the Works both Humane & Divine of Robert Herrick Esq. (1648), which contains 1,130 secular poems followed by Noble Numbers, a collection of 272 religious poems. The volume appeared at the worst possible moment — in the year that King Charles I was defeated and the Puritan Commonwealth was about to begin — and it attracted almost no attention.
The secular poems range across an extraordinary variety of subjects and modes: pastoral celebrations of the English countryside, erotic verse addressed to a succession of fictitious mistresses (Julia, Anthea, Corinna, Electra), drinking songs, epigrams, epitaphs, poems about flowers and seasons, meditations on time and mortality, and addresses to friends and patrons.
The Carpe Diem Poems
Herrick is the supreme English poet of carpe diem — the injunction to seize the day because youth and beauty are fleeting. “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” is the most famous expression of this theme in English:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying.
But the carpe diem theme runs throughout Hesperides, intertwined with Herrick’s acute sensitivity to the transience of natural beauty. His flower poems — “To Daffodils,” “To Blossoms,” “The Funeral Rites of the Rose” — are not merely decorative exercises but meditations on mortality, and their lightness of tone makes their underlying sadness more, not less, affecting.
The Julia Poems and Erotic Verse
Herrick’s poems to Julia — his most fully imagined fictitious mistress — are among the finest erotic lyrics in the language. “Upon Julia’s Clothes” (“Whenas in silks my Julia goes”) is a perfect six-line poem about the relationship between clothing, movement, and desire; “Delight in Disorder” celebrates the eroticism of imperfection (“A sweet disorder in the dress / Kindles in clothes a wantonness”). These poems are playful, precise, and deeply sensuous.
Noble Numbers
The religious poems of Noble Numbers are less celebrated than the secular verse but include several fine pieces, particularly “His Litany to the Holy Spirit” and “A Thanksgiving to God for His House.” The devotional poems share the secular poems’ craftsmanship and their preoccupation with the passage of time.
Neglect and Rediscovery
Hesperides was ignored in its own time and for nearly two centuries afterward. Herrick was virtually unknown during the Augustan age and the Romantic period. His rediscovery began in the early nineteenth century, when editors and anthologists recognised the quality of his best lyrics, and by the late Victorian period he was established as a major English poet — a position he has held ever since.
Legacy
Herrick’s achievement is the perfection of the English lyric in its shortest, most concentrated forms. No other English poet has written so many flawless short poems. His influence is felt less in specific imitations than in the general tradition of English lyric craft — the belief that a poem of six or eight lines can be as fully achieved as a sonnet or an ode.
Collecting Herrick
The first edition of Hesperides (1648) is a significant seventeenth-century literary collectible, valued at £3,000–£15,000 depending on condition and binding. Important later editions include the Muses’ Library edition (1891) and the Oxford English Texts edition. Herrick’s book was printed in modest numbers and genuine first editions are scarce.