Material texts can be exciting, powerful, resonant things. That tension can also offer a readers, especially 21st century readers, a more optimistic view. Herrick’s shape poem therefore presents a curious paradox–a pillar of poetry whose supposed immortality is defined in the language of temporal earthly structures: “set,” “foundation,” “pillar.” Poetry is more commonly placed in opposition to architectural structures, something poignantly expressed by Antonio’s lines in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1614): “But all things have their end / Churches and cities, which have diseases like to men / Must have like death that we have” (5.3.19-21). While the poem itself, as verse, will “out-dure” earthly materials like marble and jet, it nonetheless conceives of itself as a physical structure–a pillar. Such a conceit is deeply ironic–not least its incarnation in a shape poem (and in the the original Quarto printing the layout much more visibly resembles a pillar). Poetry is often accorded an abstract immortality, but in the final poem of Hesperides, it appears as a physical structure: “Repullulation” is the continual re-budding of a plant in a roundabout way, Herrick’s image oddly and grotesquely presages the millions of lost lives whom we now commemorate through “poppies” (and John McRae’s “In Flanders Fields,” one of the most quoted and memorised war poems, “perpetuates” the dead through the image of the flowering plant). The poets who conveyed that suffering are undoubtedly “perpetuated” by their verse.
Poetry from the First World War remains one of our most powerful reminders of the atrocity of battle and its waste of human life. The eternality of verse is a common poetic conceit (one only need think of Shakespeare’s sonnets), but in light of the collection’s implicit war weariness, it speaks to the poets we now most popularly associate with war–Great War writers like Sassoon, Owen, Graves, Rosenberg, Brooke, all of whom are studied in schools and whose harrowing verse, once read, is rarely forgotten. Herrick frequently insists that inevitable and possibly imminent doom, death, and destruction can be offset by poetry. The maypoles, blossoms, and birds of Hesperides mark it as a collection that brims with eroticism and love of the natural world as much as with politics, religion, and war. The dedication to Gladys on the eve of the First World War offers a sad and haunting inversion of this couplet, with England’s “Peace” soon to end again. We pray ‘gainst Warre, yet we enjoy no Peace ĭesire deferr’d is, that it may encrease. The couplet “Things of choice” breaks the bucolic mood to acknowledge directly the horrors of Civil War experienced in the previous years and to pray for a more joyous future: While most of the poems remain undatable, the collection was first published in 1648, and Herrick offers a number of rejoinders to the “festival” sentiment.
The carpe diem sentiments sometimes belie a desire for withdrawal from the day’s all-encompassing political and military conflict while remaining defiantly anti-puritan: Festival and Mayday celebrations were politically charged in the seventeenth century, and very broadly speaking they are a reaction against puritan opposition to old English customs as poetic themes they are generally associated with “Cavalier” royalist politics (albeit a broad and possibly unhelpful term).
Herrick was a former Anglican clergyman in Devon, but parliamentary success in a largely royalist county eventually swept him from office. Yet the collection is born out of the English Civil War. I write of Youth, of Love, and have Accesseīy these, to sing of cleanly- Wantonnesse. Of Bride-grooms, Brides, and of their Bridall-cakes. I sing of May-poles, Hock-carts, Wassails, Wakes, Of April, May, of June, and July-Flowers. I sing of Brooks, of Blossomes, Birdes, and Bowers: Herrick’s Hesperides itself is a form of “war poetry.” It’s often praised for its lyricism and the poems are partly concerned with holiday and tradition and a distorted nostalgia for “merry old England.” It contains much celebration of ritual, ceremony, and festival:
0 kommentar(er)
