The poems to Julia are more erotic than
these, and yet there is no fundamental difference
in tone. Herrick is a poet of surfaces, and all
beautiful surfaces had a certain resemblance for
him. The whiteness of a woman’s thigh could stir
him to poetry, but so could the sheen of a petti-
coat or a bough of whitethorn in May, and they
all have a kind of innocence that Herrick some-
how retains even in his most mischievous verse.
If there is a real woman beneath the petticoats he
gives no indication of it, and certainly Herrick
was no Catullus to report in agonizing reality the
progress of an actual love affair.
Herrick’s mistresses belong to the light-
hearted tradition of Horace with his Chloe and
his Lydia, or of Anacreon whose troops of ladies
were (he says) as numerous as the waves of the
sea. As a poet Herrick was equally willing to
bestow his affections wholesale, and he cele-
brated the pretty things with the same affection-
ate skill he lavished on violets and primroses.
The ladies had reason to be equally grateful to
him in return; and the least they could have
done, as Herrick once suggested, was to make a
yearly pilgrimage to his tomb so that he could
cast on his ‘‘girls’’ a final affectionate eye.
Source:Marchette Chute, ‘‘Chapter Nineteen,’’ inTwo
Gentle Men: The Lives of George Herbert and Robert
Herrick, Secker & Warburg, 1960, pp. 184–91.
Sources
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, ‘‘Question 118,’’ in Summa
Theologica, http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1118.htm
(accessed February 8, 2008).
DeNeef, A. Leigh,‘‘This Poetick Liturgie’’: Robert Her-
rick’s Ceremonial Mode, Duke University Press, 1974,
p. 109.
Herrick, Robert, ‘‘The Night Piece: To Julia,’’ inSeven-
teenth-Century Prose and Poetry, 2nd ed., edited by
Alexander M. Witherspoon and Frank Warnke, Har-
court, Brace & World, 1963, p. 820.
Jonson, Ben, ‘‘The Faery Beam upon You,’’ inA Masque
of the Metamorphosed Gypsies,inBen Jonson: Selected
Masques, edited by Stephen Orgel, Yale University Press,
1975, pp. 211–12.
Musgrove, S.,The Universe of Robert Herrick, Folcroft
Library Editions, 1971, p. 3.
Rollin, Roger B.,Robert Herrick, Twayne Publishers,
1966, p 207.
Rollin, Roger B., and J. Max Patrick, eds.,‘‘Trust to Good
Verses’’: Herrick Tercentenary Essays, University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1978, pp. 244, 246, 265.
Shakespeare, William,A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
edited by Wolfgang Clemen, New American Library,
1963, p. 77.
Further Reading
Chute, Marchette,Two Gentlemen: The Lives of George
Herbert and Robert Herrick, Dutton, 1959.
A historically illuminating biography of both
Herrick and his contemporary George Her-
bert. Like Herrick, Herbert was a rural
clergyman, but unlike Herrick, he produced
verse of greater complexity predominantly
concerned with his intensely felt relationship
with God.
Herbert, George, ‘‘The Agony,’’ inThe Temple,inSeven-
teenth-Century Prose and Poetry, 2nd ed., edited by
Alexander M. Witherspoon and Frank Warnke, Har-
court, Brace & World, 1963, p. 847.
One of the poems in Herbert’s collection The
Temple (1633), ‘‘The Agony,’’ is about sin and
love. But as Herrick’s poem to Julia about sin
and love is a smooth dismissal of the agoniz-
ing aspects of both, Herbert’s poem penetrates
the depth of Christian agony, the suffering of
the crucified Christ, as it defines the experi-
ence of both terms.
Milton, John,Comus: A Masque; Presented at Ludlow
Castle,inJohn Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose,
edited by Merritt Y. Hughes, Odyssey Press, 1957, pp.
90–114.
Milton explores the forces of love and the
struggle between sin and virtue. Unlike
Herrick’s simple and elegant lyric, Comus
(1634) is a complex, baroque drama.
Starkman, Miriam K., ‘‘Noble Numbers and the Poetry
of Devotion,’’ inReason and the Imagination: Studies in
the History of Ideas, 1600–1800, edited by Joseph A.
Mazzeo, Columbia University Press, 1962, pp. 1–27.
Professor Starkman argues that Herrick’s
verse is actually devotional poetry, a poetry
of divine prayer and worship, framed in a
domestic and humanistic context.
The Night Piece: To Julia
