His references to Julia, to the other mistresses, to
his muse, his epithalamium poems, his occasional
poems addressing both noble and common
women, work together to question accepted
norms. Trying to understandHerrick’s poetry deal-
ing with women without recognizing this subver-
sive, parodic element only leads one into a pathless
quagmire as far as interpretation goes. Herrick
defies the limits of standard interpretation in his
presentation of gender. Thesubtle directions in his
discourse on the matter open up the social text and
suggest new possibilities as far as the manner in
which women in his time were regarded, going far
beyond the limits of poetic traditions, using text
and language, using poetic liturgy, as a means by
which accepted injustices might be mollified and
eventually perhaps even corrected.
Source:David Landrum, ‘‘Robert Herrick and the Ambi-
guities of Gender,’’ inTexas Studies in Literature and
Language, Vol. 49, No. 2, Summer 2007, pp. 181–207.
Marchette Chute
In the following excerpt, Chute traces the influ-
ence that the English poet Ben Jonson had on
Herrick’s ‘‘The Night Piece: To Julia.’’
...Herrick had admired and imitated Ben
Jonson since the days when he was a goldsmith’s
apprentice, and he knew very well what a priv-
ilege it was to be in the great man’s company.
Herrick did not possess either Jonson’s
intellectual vigor or his scholarship, and since
he was a wise man he did not try to change
himself into something he was not. Herrick
gave thanks in the only way a good poet can,
by entering the door Jonson had opened to him
and making the territory beyond it his own.
For instance, Jonson had once written a
song for one of his plays in which he praised
the art of ‘‘sweet neglect’’ in a woman’s attire.
Herrick borrowed both the idea and the metre,
and the result is his own brilliantly original lyric,
‘‘Delight in Disorder.’’ For Jonson’s moral
approach he substituted his own pagan sense of
play, and he let his imagination flow over the
details of a woman’s dress with a most affec-
tionate eye for detail.
A winning wave (deserving note)
In the tempestuous petticoat...
was duly noted by Herrick, who was not
only well informed on petticoats but knew how
to link them to the most accurate of adjectives.
Once again, some years later, Jonson wrote
another poem that Herrick used as the model for
a small masterpiece. Jonson wrote some verses
on magic and the moon for one of his court
masques and used a curious but effective five-
line stanza. His good friend Richard Corbet bor-
rowed the metre and in his hands it became
doggerel; but when Herrick used it the result
was the famous ‘‘Night-Piece to Julia.’’
...Herrick reverenced the art of poetry—
what he called ‘‘the holy incantation of a
verse’’—and he reverenced equally the man
who had helped him to enter that sacred ground.
In Herrick’s eyes, Jonson was both priest and
saint in an ancient and enchanted land, and he
wrote a set of verses that he called ‘‘His Prayer to
Ben Jonson.’’
Close as the two men were in their devotion
to poetry, there is nothing to indicate that there
was a similar closeness in their lives. Herrick was
not one of the young prote ́ge ́s whom Jonson
took formally under his wing and he was never
‘‘sealed of the Tribe of Ben.’’
...Next to wine and song, Herrick’s chief
delight was, of course, women, those lovely
ladies who flit so amorously through his verses.
When he was grey-haired he was still writing
about his ‘‘fresh and fragrant mistresses,’’ and
they fill his poetry with their white arms and
their pretty ways—Perilla and Electra, Anthea
and Diamene, Lucia, Perenna and over and over
again his beloved Julia.
Never were mistresses better suited to a
poet, and whether they bore any resemblance
to the women Herrick encountered in real life it
is impossible to say. With the exception of some
young ladies with whom he went junketing up
the Thames, none of them seems to exist in Lon-
don or even in English air. ‘‘My girls,’’ as he calls
them, were as fragrant as roses and as lovely as
daffodils; but none of them is rooted in earth and
men seldom encounter such thoroughly satisfac-
tory mistresses except in their dreams.
On the other hand, when Herrick wrote
songs to demonstrably real women the tone is
not unlike his addresses to Julia. He calls Susan
Herrick his ‘‘dearest’’ and compares her to flow-
ers, and when he addresses three poems to his
uncle Robert’s daughter, Elizabeth Wheeler, she
is his ‘‘dearest love’’ and they kiss in the flowery
meads. His Valentine to Margaret Falconbrige is
also to ‘‘my dearest,’’ and the reader would have
no way of guessing that Margaret was at the time
less than nine years old.The Night Piece: To Julia