Style
Catalog
‘‘The Night Piece: To Julia’’ is essentially a cata-
log, or a list. In it, the poet enumerates the
positive phenomena he invokes to accompany
Julia, the object of his desire, on her walk to
visit him at night as well as the harmful phenom-
ena he wishes to preclude. He lists the glow-
worm, the stars and shooting stars, and elves as
desired companions and the will-o’-the-wisp, the
snake, the slowworm, and ghosts as forces he
banishes in his poem.
Rhyme Scheme
‘‘The Night Piece: To Julia’’ is written in a verse
whose pastoral innocence belies its more sophis-
ticated, seductive purpose. It has a sing-song lilt
in large measure achieved by theaabbarhyme
scheme in each of its stanzas. The repetitions of
the rhymes are not confined to each stanza indi-
vidually, either. The longesound dominates the
rhyming in all but the third stanza. In the last
stanza, all five lines end in words with a longe
sound, including the third and fourth lines,
which are otherwise given a variant rhyme.
The pattern of Herrick’s verse was given by
Ben Jonson in a song, ‘‘The Faery Beam upon
You’’ from his 1621 masque,The Gypsies Meta-
morphosed. Like Jonson’s lyric, ‘‘The Night Piece:
To Julia’’ presents a five line stanza with an
a,a,b,b,a rhyme.
Iambic Feet
Like Jonson’s lyric, ‘‘The Night Piece: To Julia’’
is composed in verses typically of four essentially
iambic feet, with the last truncated, in the first
and second lines; three such feet, with one trun-
cated, in the third and fourth lines; and four
complete feet in the fifth line. (An iambic foot
is a measure of two beats, the first unaccented,
the second accented. A truncated foot is one with
only one beat; the second beat is cut off, or
truncated.) Thus, the first two lines have seven
syllables, most often arranged in a pattern where
the first syllable is unaccented, the second
accented, the third unaccented, and so forth,
until the line ends with an incomplete foot, that
is, with only an unaccented syllable. The third
and fourth lines follow a similar pattern but are
one foot shorter. The last line of each stanza is a
full four-foot line: there are eight beats and the
last foot is complete, giving a sense of resolution.
Historical Context
Cavalier Poetry and Metaphysical
Poetry
Essentially, two genres, differing considerably
from each other, defined what poetry could be
during the seventeenth century. Metaphysical
poetry, represented most typically by the poetry
of John Donne (1572–1631), is a poetry charac-
terized by its intricacy and difficulty, by its psy-
chological depth, and by the complexity of its
images and metaphors. Donne, in one of his
sonnets, for example, presents the jarring image
of the round earth—a recently discovered geo-
graphical fact that replaced the idea of a flat
earth—along with the older idea of the earth
having corners, which can only be imagined,
for a globe has no corners.
Cavalier poetry, on the other hand, written
by various cavalier poets, of whom Herrick was
one of the foremost, attempted to appear to be a
casual, even offhand poetry dedicated to celebrat-
ing worldly pleasure and elegance in its form and
content. The cavalier poets were often courtiers,
although Herrick was not, and royalists, or sup-
porters of the monarchy, which Herrick was.
They opposed the moral strictness of Puritanism
and the Puritan call for political and ecclesiastical
reform or even revolution. Cavalier poetry, cele-
brating the delights of the present world and not
sacrificing them for the rewards of a forthcoming
existence, is noted for its lyricism, simplicity, and
for its concern for easy pleasure and its delight in
elegance. Herrick, for example, wrote a gracefully
elegant lyric about the graceful elegance and
captivating liquidity of Julia’s clothes. As the
metaphysical poets followed John Donne, the
cavalier poets followed Ben Jonson. Donne’s is
an abstruse and complex poetry of disputation;
Jonson’s, a poetry of luminosity and songfulness.The English Civil War
The English Civil War was fought between Roy-
alists, or Cavaliers, those who supported the Eng-
lish monarchy and the Anglican Church, and
Parliamentarians, those who supported ecclesias-
tical reform and the English Parliament in its
power struggle with the king; Parliamentarians
were also called Roundheads because of their
close-cropped haircuts, which distinguished
them from the long-haired Cavaliers. The first
battles of the war were fought between 1642 and
1646; the second set of battles, in 1648 and 1649;
and the third set, between 1649 and 1651, endingThe Night Piece: To Julia