seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (when
hardly any critical attention was paid to Herrick)
and into the nineteenth. In fact, a few of Her-
rick’s poems were reintroduced to readers by
John Nichols in hisGentleman’s Magazinein
1796 and 1797, and though they were admired
and repeatedly anthologized because of the
graceful lyricism of their verse, they were dis-
missed for the limitations of their subject. A.
Leigh DeNeef, in‘‘This Poetick Liturgie’’: Rob-
ert Herrick’s Ceremonial Mode, cites a particu-
larly virulent attack upon Herrick by the English
poet and critic Robert Southey in his 1830 work
An Introductory Essay on the Lives and Works of
Our Uneducated Poets. Southey declares, ‘‘We
have lately seen the whole of Herrick’s poems
republished, a coarse-minded and beastly writer,
whose dunghill, when the few flowers that grew
therein had been transplanted, ought never to
have been disturbed.’’ Roger B. Rollin notes in
Robert Herrickthat the famed nineteenth-cen-
tury critic Edmund Gosse (writing inCornhill
Magazinein 1875) recognized Herrick’s ‘‘won-
derful art and skill’’ but found in the poetry an
‘‘easy-going callousness of soul’’ that ‘‘makes it
impossible for him to feel very deeply.’’ Further-
more, F. R. Leavis, in his essay ‘‘English Poetry
in the 17th Century,’’ published in 1935 inScru-
tiny(as cited by Rollin in‘‘Trust to Good Verses’’:
Herrick Tercentenary Essays), is less cruel in his
rhetoric than Southey or Gosse, calling Her-
rick’s verse ‘‘trivially charming.’’
In spite of these criticisms, Herrick has sur-
vived his detractors, andhis command of language
and meter has long been recognized. Writing in
1804, Nathan Drake, whose ‘‘On the Life, Writings
and Genius of Robert Herrick’’ is cited in‘‘Trust to
Good Verses,’’offers one of the earliest serious
considerations of Herrick’s poetry. Drake calls
attention to the unevenness of Herrick’s output
and to his mastery of the poet’s craft. Indeed,
Herrick’s verse is now admired both by lay readers
and by scholars. Rollin, in his introduction to
‘‘Trust to Good Verses,’’calls Herrick ‘‘a serious
and significant artist rather than a minor if skillful
craftsman; ...hisHesperidesis an encyclopedic
and ultimately coherent work rather than a mis-
cellany of charming but trivial poems.’’ Rollin con-
cludes that ‘‘many of those poems exhibit patterns
of intellectual significance and emotional depth
beneath their polished and seemingly simple
surfaces.’’CRITICISMNeil Heims
Heims is a writer and teacher living in Paris. In the
following essay, Heims examines the latent content
suggestedbytheimageryin‘‘TheNightPiece:To
Julia.’’
Robert Herrick’s ‘‘The Night Piece: To
Julia,’’ simple as it appears—simple as it really
is—contains twenty lines that hardly seem to
present any difficulty to a lay reader. The ele-
ments of riddle, learning, and song are casually,
elegantly, and effortlessly combined to form
verse that suggests both poetry and music. (The
English composer Roger Quilter [1877–1953], in
fact, did set the poem to music.) Because of its
hybrid condition, and despite its easily grasped
meaning as a verse designed to woo the lady
whom the poet desires to visit his chamber at
night, there is meaning resonant beneath the sur-
face. Ambiguity arising from a suppressed senseIllustrated version of Herrick’s poem(William L.
Clements Library, University of Michigan)
The Night Piece: To Julia