Robert Herrick.
I deal with a clergyman again; but there are clergymen—and clergymen.
Robert Herrick[41] was the son of a London goldsmith, born on Cheapside, not far away from that Mermaid Tavern of which mention has been made; and it is very likely that the young Robert, as a boy, may have stood before the Tavern windows on tiptoe, listening to the drinking songs that came pealing forth when Ben Jonson and the rest were in their first lusty manhood. He studied at Cambridge, receiving, may be, some scant help from his rich uncle, Sir William Herrick, who had won his title by giving good jewel bargains to King James. He would seem to have made a long stay in Cambridge; and only in 1620, when our Pilgrims were beating toward Plymouth shores, do we hear of him domiciled in London—learning the town, favored by Ben Jonson and his fellows, perhaps apprenticed to the goldsmith craft, certainly putting jewels into fine settings of verse even then; some of them with coarse flaws in them, but full of a glitter and sparkle that have not left them yet. Nine years later, after such town experiences as we cannot trace, he gets, somehow, appointment to a church living down in Devonshire at Dean Prior. His parish was on the southeastern edge of that great heathery stretch of wilderness called Dartmoor Forest: out of this, and from under cool shadows of the Tors, ran brooks which in the cleared valleys were caught by rude weirs and shot out in irrigating skeins of water upon the grassland. Yet it was far away from any echo of the Mermaid; old traditions were cherished there; old ways were reckoned good ways; and the ploughs of that region are still the clumsiest to be found in England. There Robert Herrick lived, preaching and writing poems, through those eighteen troublous years which went before the execution of Charles I. What the goldsmith-vicar’s sermons were we can only conjecture: what the poems were he writ, we can easily guess from the flowers that enjewel them, or the rarer “noble numbers” which take hold on religious sanctities. This preacher-poet twists the lilies and roses into bright little garlands, that blush and droop in his pretty couplets, as they did in the vicar’s garden of Devon. The daffodils and the violets give out their odors to him, if he only writes their names.
Hear what he says to Phyllis, and how the numbers flow:
“The soft, sweet moss shall be thy bed,
With crawling woodbine overspread:
By which the silver-shedding streams
Shall gently melt thee into dreams.
Thy clothing next, shall be a gown
Made of the fleeces’ purest down.
The tongues of kids shall be thy meat;
Their milk thy drink; and thou shalt eat
The paste of filberts for thy bread,
With cream of cowslips butterèd:
Thy feasting table shall be hills
With daisies spread and daffodils;
Where thou shalt sit, and Red-breast by,
For meat, shall give thee melody.”
Then again, see how in his soberer and meditative moods, he can turn the rich and resonant Litany of the Anglican Church into measures of sweet sound:
“In the hour of my distress,
When temptations me oppress,
And when I my sins confess,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!
“When I lie within my bed,
Sick in heart, and sick in head,
And with doubts discomforted,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!
“When the house doth sigh and weep,
And the world is drown’d in sleep,
Yet mine eyes the watch do keep,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!
“When the passing bell doth toll,
And the furies in a shoal
Come, to fright a parting soul,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!
“When the judgment is reveal’d,
And that opened which was seal’d,
When to thee I have appeal’d,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me!”
Now, in reading these two poems of such opposite tone, and yet of agreeing verbal harmonies, one would say—here is a singer, serene, devout, of delicate mould, loving all beautiful things in heaven and on earth. One would look for a man saintly of aspect, deep-eyed, tranquil, too ethereal for earth.
Well, I must tell the truth in these talks, so far as I can find it, no matter what cherished images may break down. This Robert Herrick was a ponderous, earthy-looking man, with huge double chin, drooping cheeks, a great Roman nose, prominent glassy eyes, that showed around them the red lines begotten of strong potions of Canary, and the whole set upon a massive neck which might have been that of Heliogabalus.[42] It was such a figure as the artists would make typical of a man who loves the grossest pleasures.
The poet kept a pet goose at the vicarage, and also a pet pig, which he taught to drink beer out of his own tankard; and an old parishioner, for whose story Anthony à Wood is sponsor, tells us that on one occasion when his little Devon congregation would not listen to him as he thought they ought to listen, he dashed his sermon on the floor, and marched with tremendous stride out of church—home to fondle his pet pig.
When Charles I. came to grief, and when the Puritans began to sift the churches, this Royalist poet proved a clinker that was caught in the meshes and thrown aside. This is not surprising. It was after his enforced return to London, and in the year 1648 (one year before Charles’ execution at Whitehall), that the first authoritative publication was made of the Hesperides, or Works, both Humane and Divine, of Robert Herrick, Esq.—his clerical title dropped.
There were those critics and admirers who saw in Herrick an allegiance to the methods of Catullus; others who smacked in his epigrams the verbal felicities of Martial; but surely there is no need, in that fresh spontaneity of the Devon poet, to hunt for classic parallels; nature made him one of her own singers, and by instincts born with him he fashioned words and fancies into jewelled shapes. The “more’s the pity” for those gross indelicacies which smirch so many pages; things unreadable; things which should have been unthinkable and unwritable by a clergyman of the Church of England. To what period of his life belonged his looser verses it is hard to say; perhaps to those early days when, fresh from Cambridge, Ben Jonson patted him on the shoulder approvingly; perhaps to those later years when, soured by his ejection from the Church, he dropped his Reverend, and may have capped verses with such as Davenant or Lovelace, and others, whose antagonism of Puritanism provoked wantonness of speech.
At the restoration of Charles II., Herrick was reinstated in his old parish in Devonshire, and died there, among the meadows and the daffodils, at the ripe age of eighty-four. And as we part with this charming singer, we cannot forbear giving place to this bit of his penitential verse:
“For these my unbaptizèd rhymes
Writ in my wild unhallowed times,
For every sentence, clause, and word
That’s not inlaid with thee, O Lord;
Forgive me, God, and blot each line
Out of my book, that is not thine!”