A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick
F >>
Francis Turner Palgrave >> A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick
Arranged with introduction by Francis Turner Palgrave
PREFACE
ROBERT HERRICK - Born 1591 : Died 1674
Those who most admire the Poet from whose many pieces a selection
only is here offered, will, it is probable, feel most strongly
(with the Editor) that excuse is needed for an attempt of an
obviously presumptuous nature. The choice made by any selector
invites challenge: the admission, perhaps, of some poems, the
absence of more, will be censured:--Whilst others may wholly
condemn the process, in virtue of an argument not unfrequently
advanced of late, that a writer's judgment on his own work is to
be considered final. And his book to be taken as he left it, or
left altogether; a literal reproduction of the original text
being occasionally included in this requirement.
If poetry were composed solely for her faithful band of true
lovers and true students, such a facsimile as that last indicated
would have claims irresistible; but if the first and last object
of this, as of the other Fine Arts, may be defined in language
borrowed from a different range of thought, as 'the greatest
pleasure of the greatest number,' it is certain that less
stringent forms of reproduction are required and justified. The
great majority of readers cannot bring either leisure or taste,
or information sufficient to take them through a large mass (at
any rate) of ancient verse, not even if it be Spenser's or
Milton's. Manners and modes of speech, again, have changed; and
much that was admissible centuries since, or at least sought
admission, has now, by a law against which protest is idle,
lapsed into the indecorous. Even unaccustomed forms of spelling
are an effort to the eye;--a kind of friction, which diminishes
the ease and enjoyment of the reader.
These hindrances and clogs, of very diverse nature, cannot be
disregarded by Poetry. In common with everything which aims at
human benefit, she must work not only for the 'faithful': she
has also the duty of 'conversion.' Like a messenger from heaven,
it is hers to inspire, to console, to elevate: to convert the
world, in a word, to herself. Every rough place that slackens
her footsteps must be made smooth; nor, in this Art, need there
be fear that the way will ever be vulgarized by too much ease,
nor that she will be loved less by the elect, for being loved
more widely.
Passing from these general considerations, it is true that a
selection framed in conformity with them, especially if one of
our older poets be concerned, parts with a certain portion of the
pleasure which poetry may confer. A writer is most thoroughly to
be judged by the whole of what he printed. A selector inevitably
holds too despotic a position over his author. The frankness of
speech which we have abandoned is an interesting evidence how the
tone of manners changes. The poet's own spelling and punctuation
bear, or may bear, a gleam of his personality. But such last
drops of pleasure are the reward of fully-formed taste; and
fully-formed taste cannot be reached without full knowledge.
This, we have noticed, most readers cannot bring. Hence, despite
all drawbacks, an anthology may have its place. A book which
tempts many to read a little, will guide some to that more
profound and loving study of which the result is, the full
accomplishment of the poet's mission.
We have, probably, no poet to whom the reasons here advanced to
justify the invidious task of selection apply more fully and
forcibly than to Herrick. Highly as he is to be rated among our
lyrists, no one who reads through his fourteen hundred pieces can
reasonably doubt that whatever may have been the influences,
--wholly unknown to us,--which determined the contents of his
volume, severe taste was not one of them. PECAT FORTITER:--his
exquisite directness and simplicity of speech repeatedly take
such form that the book cannot be offered to a very large number
of those readers who would most enjoy it. The spelling is at
once arbitrary and obsolete. Lastly, the complete reproduction
of the original text, with explanatory notes, edited by Mr
Grosart, supplies materials equally full and interesting for
those who may, haply, be allured by this little book to master
one of our most attractive poets in his integrity.
In Herrick's single own edition of HESPERIDES and NOBLE NUMBERS,
but little arrangement is traceable: nor have we more than a few
internal signs of date in composition. It would hence be unwise
to attempt grouping the poems on a strict plan: and the
divisions under which they are here ranged must be regarded
rather as progressive aspects of a landscape than as territorial
demarcations. Pieces bearing on the poet as such are placed
first; then, those vaguely definable as of idyllic character,
'his girls,' epigrams, poems on natural objects, on character and
life; lastly, a few in his religious vein. For the text,
although reference has been made to the original of 1647-8, Mr
Grosart's excellent reprint has been mainly followed. And to
that edition this book is indebted for many valuable exegetical
notes, kindly placed at the Editor's disposal. But for much
fuller elucidation both of words and allusions, and of the
persons mentioned, readers are referred to Mr Grosart's volumes,
which (like the same scholar's 'Sidney' and 'Donne'), for the
first time give Herrick a place among books not printed only, but
edited.
Robert Herrick's personal fate is in one point like
Shakespeare's. We know or seem to know them both, through their
works, with singular intimacy. But with this our knowledge
substantially ends. No private letter of Shakespeare, no record
of his conversation, no account of the circumstances in which his
writings were published, remains: hardly any statement how his
greatest contemporaries ranked him. A group of Herrick's
youthful letters on business has, indeed, been preserved; of his
life and studies, of his reputation during his own time, almost
nothing. For whatever facts affectionate diligence could now
gather. Readers are referred to Mr Grosart's 'Introduction.'
But if, to supplement the picture, inevitably imperfect, which
this gives, we turn to Herrick's own book, we learn little,
biographically, except the names of a few friends,--that his
general sympathies were with the Royal cause,--and that he
wearied in Devonshire for London. So far as is known, he
published but this one volume, and that, when not far from his
sixtieth year. Some pieces may be traced in earlier collections;
some few carry ascertainable dates; the rest lie over a period of
near forty years, during a great portion of which we have no
distinct account where Herrick lived, or what were his
employments. We know that he shone with Ben Jonson and the wits
at the nights and suppers of those gods of our glorious early
literature: we may fancy him at Beaumanor, or Houghton, with his
uncle and cousins, keeping a Leicestershire Christmas in the
Manor-house: or, again, in some sweet southern county with Julia
and Anthea, Corinna and Dianeme by his side (familiar then by
other names now never to be remembered), sitting merry, but with
just the sadness of one who hears sweet music, in some meadow
among his favourite flowers of spring-time;--there, or 'where the
rose lingers latest.' .... But 'the dream, the fancy,' is all
that Time has spared us. And if it be curious that his
contemporaries should have left so little record of this
delightful poet and (as we should infer from the book) genial-
hearted man, it is not less so that the single first edition
should have satisfied the seventeenth century, and that, before
the present, notices of Herrick should be of the rarest
occurrence.
The artist's 'claim to exist' is, however, always far less to be
looked for in his life, than in his art, upon the secret of which
the fullest biography can tell us little--as little, perhaps, as
criticism can analyse its charm. But there are few of our poets
who stand less in need than Herrick of commentaries of this
description,--in which too often we find little more than a dull
or florid prose version of what the author has given us admirably
in verse. Apart from obsolete words or allusions, Herrick is the
best commentator upon Herrick. A few lines only need therefore
here be added, aiming rather to set forth his place in the
sequence of English poets, and especially in regard to those near
his own time, than to point out in detail beauties which he
unveils in his own way, and so most durably and delightfully.
When our Muses, silent or sick for a century and more after
Chaucer's death, during the years of war and revolution,
reappeared, they brought with them foreign modes of art, ancient
and contemporary, in the forms of which they began to set to
music the new material which the age supplied. At the very
outset, indeed, the moralizing philosophy which has
characterized the English from the beginning of our national
history, appears in the writers of the troubled times lying
between the last regnal years of Henry VIII and the first of his
great daughter. But with the happier hopes of Elizabeth's
accession, poetry was once more distinctly followed, not only as
a means of conveying thought, but as a Fine Art. And hence
something constrained and artificial blends with the freshness of
the Elizabethan literature. For its great underlying elements it
necessarily reverts to those embodied in our own earlier poets,
Chaucer above all, to whom, after barely one hundred and fifty
years, men looked up as a father of song: but in points of style
and treatment, the poets of the sixteenth century lie under a
double external influence--that of the poets of Greece and Rome
(known either in their own tongues or by translation), and that
of the modern literatures which had themselves undergone the same
classical impulse. Italy was the source most regarded during the
more strictly Elizabethan period; whence its lyrical poetry and
the dramatic in a less degree, are coloured much less by pure and
severe classicalism with its closeness to reality, than by the
allegorical and elaborate style, fancy and fact curiously
blended, which had been generated in Italy under the peculiar and
local circumstances of her pilgrimage in literature and art from
the age of Dante onwards. Whilst that influence lasted, such
brilliant pictures of actual life, such directness, movement, and
simplicity in style, as Chaucer often shows, were not yet again
attainable: and although satire, narrative, the poetry of
reflection, were meanwhile not wholly unknown, yet they only
appear in force at the close of this period. And then also the
pressure of political and religious strife, veiled in poetry
during the greater part of Elizabeth's actual reign under the
forms of pastoral and allegory, again imperiously breaks in upon
the gracious but somewhat slender and artificial fashions of
England's Helicon: the DIVOM NUMEN, SEDESQUE QUIETAE which, in
some degree the Elizabethan poets offer, disappear; until filling
the central years of the seventeenth century we reach an age as
barren for inspiration of new song as the Wars of the Roses;
although the great survivors from earlier years mask this
sterility;--masking also the revolution in poetical manner and
matter which we can see secretly preparing in the later
'Cavalier' poets, but which was not clearly recognised before the
time of Dryden's culmination.
In the period here briefly sketched, what is Herrick's portion?
His verse is eminent for sweet and gracious fluency; this is a
real note of the 'Elizabethan' poets. His subjects are
frequently pastoral, with a classical tinge, more or less slight,
infused; his language, though not free from exaggeration, is
generally free from intellectual conceits and distortion, and is
eminent throughout for a youthful NAIVETE. Such, also, are
qualities of the latter sixteenth century literature. But if
these characteristics might lead us to call Herrick 'the last of
the Elizabethans,' born out of due time, the differences between
him and them are not less marked. Herrick's directness of speech
is accompanied by an equally clear and simple presentment of his
thought; we have, perhaps, no poet who writes more consistently
and earnestly with his eye upon his subject. An allegorical or
mystical treatment is alien from him: he handles awkwardly the
few traditional fables which he introduces. He is also wholly
free from Italianizing tendencies: his classicalism even is that
of an English student,--of a schoolboy, indeed, if he be compared
with a Jonson or a Milton. Herrick's personal eulogies on his
friends and others, further, witness to the extension of the
field of poetry after Elizabeth's age;--in which his enthusiastic
geniality, his quick and easy transitions of subject, have also
little precedent.
If, again, we compare Herrick's book with those of his fellow-
poets for a hundred years before, very few are the traces which
he gives of imitation, or even of study. During the long
interval between Herrick's entrance on his Cambridge and his
clerical careers (an interval all but wholly obscure to us), it
is natural to suppose that he read, at any rate, his Elizabethan
predecessors: yet (beyond those general similarities already
noticed) the Editor can find no positive proof of familiarity.
Compare Herrick with Marlowe, Greene, Breton, Drayton, or other
pretty pastoralists of the HELICON--his general and radical
unlikeness is what strikes us; whilst he is even more remote from
the passionate intensity of Sidney and Shakespeare, the Italian
graces of Spenser, the pensive beauty of PARTHENOPHIL, of DIELLA,
of FIDESSA, of the HECATOMPATHIA and the TEARS OF FANCY.
Nor is Herrick's resemblance nearer to many of the contemporaries
who have been often grouped with him. He has little in common
with the courtly elegance, the learned polish, which too rarely
redeem commonplace and conceits in Carew, Habington, Lovelace,
Cowley, or Waller. Herrick has his CONCETTI also: but they are
in him generally true plays of fancy; he writes throughout far
more naturally than these lyrists, who, on the other hand, in
their unfrequent successes reach a more complete and classical
form of expression. Thus, when Carew speaks of an aged fair one
When beauty, youth, and all sweets leave her,
Love may return, but lovers never!
Cowley, of his mistress--
Love in her sunny eyes does basking play,
Love walks the pleasant mazes of her hair:
or take Lovelace, 'To Lucasta,' Waller, in his 'Go, lovely
rose,'--we have a finish and condensation which Herrick hardly
attains; a literary quality alien from his 'woodnotes wild,'
which may help us to understand the very small appreciation he
met from his age. He had 'a pretty pastoral gale of fancy,' said
Phillips, cursorily dismissing Herrick in his THEATRUM: not
suspecting how inevitably artifice and mannerism, if fashionable
for awhile, pass into forgetfulness, whilst the simple cry of
Nature partake in her permanence.
Donne and Marvell, stronger men, leave also no mark on our poet.
The elaborate thought, the metrical harshness of the first, could
find no counterpart in Herrick; whilst Marvell, beyond him in
imaginative power, though twisting it too often into contortion
and excess, appears to have been little known as a lyrist then:--
as, indeed, his great merits have never reached anything like
due popular recognition. Yet Marvell's natural description is
nearer Herrick's in felicity and insight than any of the poets
named above. Nor, again, do we trace anything of Herbert or
Vaughan in Herrick's NOBLE NUMBERS, which, though unfairly judged
if held insincere, are obviously far distant from the intense
conviction, the depth and inner fervour of his high-toned
contemporaries.
It is among the great dramatists of this age that we find the
only English influences palpably operative on this singularly
original writer. The greatest, in truth, is wholly absent: and
it is remarkable that although Herrick may have joined in the
wit-contests and genialities of the literary clubs in London soon
after Shakespeare's death, and certainly lived in friendship with
some who had known him, yet his name is never mentioned in the
poetical commemorations of the HESPERIDES. In Herrick, echoes
from Fletcher's idyllic pieces in the FAITHFUL SHEPHERDESS are
faintly traceable; from his songs, 'Hear what Love can do,' and
'The lusty Spring,' more distinctly. But to Ben Jonson, whom
Herrick addresses as his patron saint in song, and ranks on the
highest list of his friends, his obligations are much more
perceptible. In fact, Jonson's non-dramatic poetry,--the EPIGRAMS
and FOREST of 1616, the UNDERWOODS of 1641, (he died in 1637),--
supply models, generally admirable in point of art, though of
very unequal merit in their execution and contents, of the
principal forms under which we may range Herrick's HESPERIDES.
The graceful love-song, the celebration of feasts and wit, the
encomia of friends, the epigram as then understood, are all here
represented: even Herrick's vein in natural description is
prefigured in the odes to Penshurst and Sir Robert Wroth, of
1616. And it is in the religious pieces of the NOBLE NUMBERS,
for which Jonson afforded the least copious precedents, that, as
a rule, Herrick is least successful.
Even if we had not the verses on his own book, (the most
noteworthy of which are here printed as PREFATORY,) in proof that
Herrick was no careless singer, but a true artist, working with
conscious knowledge of his art, we might have inferred the fact
from the choice of Jonson as his model. That great poet, as
Clarendon justly remarked, had 'judgment to order and govern
fancy, rather than excess of fancy: his productions being slow
and upon deliberation.' No writer could be better fitted for the
guidance of one so fancy-free as Herrick; to whom the curb, in
the old phrase, was more needful than the spur, and whose
invention, more fertile and varied than Jonson's, was ready at
once to fill up the moulds of form provided. He does this with a
lively facility, contrasting much with the evidence of labour in
his master's work. Slowness and deliberation are the last
qualities suggested by Herrick. Yet it may be doubted whether
the volatile ease, the effortless grace, the wild bird-like
fluency with which he
Scatters his loose notes in the waste of air
are not, in truth, the results of exquisite art working in co-
operation with the gifts of nature. The various readings which
our few remaining manuscripts or printed versions have supplied
to Mr Grosart's 'Introduction,' attest the minute and curious
care with which Herrick polished and strengthened his own work:
his airy facility, his seemingly spontaneous melodies, as with
Shelley--his counterpart in pure lyrical art within this century
--were earned by conscious labour; perfect freedom was begotten
of perfect art;--nor, indeed, have excellence and permanence any
other parent.
With the error that regards Herrick as a careless singer is
closely twined that which ranks him in the school of that master
of elegant pettiness who has usurped and abused the name
Anacreon; as a mere light-hearted writer of pastorals, a gay and
frivolous Renaissance amourist. He has indeed those elements:
but with them is joined the seriousness of an age which knew that
the light mask of classicalism and bucolic allegory could be worn
only as an ornament, and that life held much deeper and further-
reaching issues than were visible to the narrow horizons within
which Horace or Martial circumscribed the range of their art.
Between the most intensely poetical, and so, greatest, among the
French poets of this century, and Herrick, are many points of
likeness. He too, with Alfred de Musset, might have said
Quoi que nous puissions faire,
Je souffre; il est trop tard; le monde s'est fait vieux.
Une immense esperance a traverse la terre;
Malgre nous vers le ciel il faut lever les yeux.
Indeed, Herrick's deepest debt to ancient literature lies not in
the models which he directly imitated, nor in the Anacreontic
tone which with singular felicity he has often taken. These are
common to many writers with him:--nor will he who cannot learn
more from the great ancient world ever rank among poets of high
order, or enter the innermost sanctuary of art. But, the power
to describe men and things as the poet sees them with simple
sincerity, insight, and grace: to paint scenes and imaginations
as perfect organic wholes;--carrying with it the gift to clothe
each picture, as if by unerring instinct, in fit metrical form,
giving to each its own music; beginning without affectation, and
rounding off without effort;-- the power, in a word, to leave
simplicity, sanity, and beauty as the last impressions lingering
on our minds, these gifts are at once the true bequest of
classicalism, and the reason why (until modern effort equals
them) the study of that Hellenic and Latin poetry in which these
gifts are eminent above all other literatures yet created, must
be essential. And it is success in precisely these excellences
which is here claimed for Herrick. He is classical in the great
and eternal sense of the phrase: and much more so, probably,
than he was himself aware of. No poet in fact is so far from
dwelling in a past or foreign world: it is the England, if not
of 1648, at least of his youth, in which he lives and moves and
loves: his Bucolics show no trace of Sicily: his Anthea and
Julia wear no 'buckles of the purest gold,' nor have anything
about them foreign to Middlesex or Devon. Herrick's imagination
has no far horizons: like Burns and Crabbe fifty years since, or
Barnes (that exquisite and neglected pastoralist of fair Dorset,
perfect within his narrower range as Herrick) to-day, it is his
own native land only which he sees and paints: even the fairy
world in which, at whatever inevitable interval, he is second to
Shakespeare, is pure English; or rather, his elves live in an
elfin county of their own, and are all but severed from humanity.
Within that greater circle of Shakespeare, where Oberon and Ariel
and their fellows move, aiding or injuring mankind, and
reflecting human life in a kind of unconscious parody, Herrick
cannot walk: and it may have been due to his good sense and true
feeling for art, that here, where resemblance might have seemed
probable, he borrows nothing from MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM or
TEMPEST. if we are moved by the wider range of Byron's or
Shelley's sympathies, there is a charm, also, in this sweet
insularity of Herrick; a narrowness perhaps, yet carrying with it
a healthful reality absent from the vapid and artificial
'cosmopolitanism' that did such wrong on Goethe's genius. If he
has not the exotic blooms and strange odours which poets who
derive from literature show in their conservatories, Herrick has
the fresh breeze and thyme-bed fragrance of open moorland, the
grace and greenery of English meadows: with Homer and Dante, he
too shares the strength and inspiration which come from touch of
a man's native soil.
What has been here sketched is not planned so much as a criticism
in form on Herrick's poetry as an attempt to seize his relations
to his predecessors and contemporaries. If we now tentatively
inquire what place may be assigned to him in our literature at
large, Herrick has no single lyric to show equal, in pomp of
music, brilliancy of diction, or elevation of sentiment to some
which Spenser before, Milton in his own time, Dryden and Gray,
Wordsworth and Shelley, since have given us. Nor has he, as
already noticed, the peculiar finish and reserve (if the phrase
may be allowed) traceable, though rarely, in Ben Jonson and
others of the seventeenth century. He does not want passion; yet
his passion wants concentration: it is too ready, also, to dwell
on externals: imagination with him generally appears clothed in
forms of fancy. Among his contemporaries, take Crashaw's
'Wishes': Sir J. Beaumont's elegy on his child Gervase: take
Bishop King's 'Surrender':
My once-dear Love!--hapless, that I no more
Must call thee so. . . . The rich affection's store
That fed our hopes, lies now exhaust and spent,
Like sums of treasure unto bankrupts lent:--
We that did nothing study but the way
To love each other, with which thoughts the day
Rose with delight to us, and with them set,
Must learn the hateful art, how to forget!
--Fold back our arms, take home our fruitless loves,
That must new fortunes try, like turtle doves
Dislodged from their haunts. We must in tears
Unwind a love knit up in many years.
In this one kiss I here surrender thee
Back to thyself: so thou again art free:-
take eight lines by some old unknown Northern singer:
When I think on the happy days
I spent wi' you, my dearie,
And now what lands between us lie,
How can I be but eerie!
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8