significance, suggesting, therefore, a latent tension
apparently absent or ignored in the manifest com-
munication. The poet is not merely or really telling
the lady about the natural world but is addressing
her conscience. The manifest content must rein-
force the latent message of the poem: take the
present pleasure. The journey will not imperil the
lady, and neither will itspurpose. Through refer-
ence to the flesh, the poet animadverts to the spirit;
but he returns to the fleshhavingplacatedthe
spirit. His song has also become a dance, and the
graceful and perfect metrics of his poem suggest
the balance he maintains when he enters the
realms of passion. He woos formally. He keeps
the passion out of his poem, saving it for the lady
in the encounter he imagines in the last three lines
of his verse.
In his construction of the landscape that
Julia must traverse to reach him, the poet mixes
light and dark as well as nature and folklore. The
glowworm’s eyes, the eyes that meet the reader’s
eyes at the first encounter with the text and that
the poet wishes to bestow on Julia for her jour-
ney to him, have since at least as long ago as
William Shakespeare’s time been associated with
erotic attraction. In act 3, scene 1, line 171 ofA
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Titania instructs her
attendant fairies how to tend the peasant weaver,
Bottom, upon whom she dotes. She tells her
minions to light the waxy thighs of bees at the
glowworm’s eyes and use them as candles to
guide her ‘‘love to bed.’’ What natural scientists
later ascertained, that glowworms signal each
other for mating through bioluminescence, was
previously intuited in folk knowledge. The glow-
worm’s eyes, the shooting stars, the elves with
their glowing eyes, all suggest the romance of the
erotic dance of courtship and the intensity of a
passion, like a shooting star, that by its nature
blazes gloriously and dissolves in its own incan-
descence. Elves suggest the friendly forces that
are the agencies of achieving wish fulfillment. As
much as all these bright phenomena symbolize
the evanescent light of passion, they also suggest
a counterforce to darkness. Thus these symbols
are charged with contrasting but mutually sup-
porting properties: the accumulated, hidden
light of passion and the open, flowing light that
eases the journey toward the fulfillment of
desire. The poet conjures an environment con-
ducive to the escapade he seeks and treats the
tryst as an escapade indeed, not as a transgres-
sion. Yet it is to take place on a moonless night,
cloaked, thereby, despite the stars, in darkness.
As the counter-imagery set beside the
images of light suggests, the poet seems to be
aware of the element of transgression. In the
second stanza, Herrick presents a catalog of
quite a different sort from the beneficent one he
conjures in the first. In his recapitulation of the
phenomena that he wishes to be absent when she
makes her way through the night to an assigna-
tion with him, the poet lists forces that not only
suggest the dangers one may encounter crossing
the fields at night but also are emblems of
sin and sinfulness. Slowworms replace glow-
worms, snakes usurp elves, will-o’-the-wisps
trump shooting stars, and ghosts can haunt the
night, even if only in the thoughts of a silly girl,
as the poet implies by the teasing tone that he
uses in mentioning ghosts and their absence. In
his prayer, all these phenomena are banished,
but in the consciousness of the poem’s reader,
they are present in their absence by their being
named. The things one may be relieved from
worrying about are, of course, the things that
are the sources of concern. As you come to me,
the poet assures his mistress, there will be no
phantom light to confuse you on your nocturnal
path, nor will there be the risk of snake bite or
night fright. These assurances of bodily safety
suggest spiritual dangers at the same time as they
do corporal ones. While a shooting star may
suggest the evanescence of passion, with its
flare-up and fade-out, the will-o’-the-wisp sug-
gests deception, a light from hell leading the soul
in the wrong direction. But sinfulness is not what
their liaison is about, the poet thus indirectly
assures Julia. The snake itself is the archetypal
emblem of diabolical presence and influence,
rooted as the snake is in the account of the fall
from grace in Eden. Thus the poem addresses
and attempts to allay the latent concerns that
would be aroused by such a meeting as the poet
is beseeching—not anxiety about a tortuous
nightscape but anxiety about succumbing to
sin. The poet banishes the emblems of sin from
their rendezvous.
The irony latent in the poet’s overtly focus-
ing on the corporal dangers in his wooing, while
apparently overlooking the spiritual ones, is
given a final turn in the concluding three lines.
The poet pictures himself at Julia’s feet, there to
perform in reverence to her an act of worship
suggesting submission to a deity. Thus his lady is
his deity, and by her permission to let him pour
his spirit into her, she strips his desire, or its
enactment, of any taint of the sin of theThe Night Piece: To Julia