Herrick, Robert: A Cavalier Poet

ROBERT HERRICK:

(1591-1674)

English poet Robert Herrick was born in 1591 was the 7th child and 4th son of a goldsmith, Nicholas Herrick, and Julian (or Juliana or Julia) Stone Herrick. When he was 14 months old his father anonymously committed suicide falling from an upper story window of his house in Cheapside on November 9, 1592.  He was an abashed sensualist although a parson by profession. He was not a profound thinker but had a perfect mastery of lyric meter. He was among the half dozen finest lyric poets in English.

Herrick started his career as an apprentice to his rich goldsmith uncle. He worked in this capacity for about 10 years. He then joined Cambridge University in 1613 and graduated in 1617 and in 1623 he took Holy Orders. He became parson of Dean Prior in Devon in 1629 but lost his living in 1647 for refusing to subscribe to the Solemn League and Covenant. He then lived in London until 1662, when Dean Prior was restored to him.

Herrick published his secular poetry in 1648 which contains 1,200 poems. His religious verse entitled 'Noble Numbers' does not compare in-depth or strength with that of John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and other contemporaries. Herrick delighted in the warmth and color of life, in the texture of things, in rich silks and jewels, in fruits and flowers, in cream, and not least in ladies' legs. He is one of the very few English poets indeed of whom it can be said that he produced many perfect poems, however small. He died a poor country parson, whom no fellow poet seems to have commemorated with a verse-epitaph, much less an elegy. He may have been antagonized by his fate as a poet, and as a man, but one doubts it. Herrick was at once a realist about art and life and an optimist, who knew all about careless readers and carping critics but who could still hope for a favorable judgment from time. That hope, of course, has been realized. Just as he predicted, Herrick’s tombstone has vanished, but in the last one hundred years at least, his better monument, his poetry, has led to his becoming more widely loved and more profoundly respected than even he, dreaming of literary immortality in remotest Devonshire, might have imagined.

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