15 October: Boreham on Robert Herrick

A Pastoral Symphony
To this day there are some parts of Devonshire in which the fifteenth of October is regarded as sacred to the memory of Robert Herrick. It is the day on which, with heavy hearts, they buried him. As we glance across the intervening centuries we see in him the most amazing bundle of contradictions with which history can present us. Herrick was like a pendulum swinging, everlastingly from despair to delight, and from paradise to perdition. His eyes were always wet with tears or scintillating with twinkles. Was he lucky? He was also pitifully ill-starred. Was he brilliant? He was also unconscionably dull. Was he romantic? He was also the most prosaic and matter-of-fact of men. Was he an ascetic? He was also a gourmand. Was he saintly? He was also depraved. State any single fact that you will concerning him, and a diametrically opposite statement could be amply substantiated.

From his very cradle fate handed him the bitter and the sweet in swiftly-alternating doses. Shortly after his birth his father committed suicide; here was a splash of inky black! But, shortly afterwards, he was adopted by Sir William Herrick, one of the wealthiest and most influential goldsmiths of the day; here was a stroke of glittering fortune! But the fates were most propitious when, at the most impressionable stage of his youthful career, they brought him under the spell of Ben Jonson. At the age of nineteen Herrick witnessed the first performance of "The Alchemist," Jonson's sparkling comedy, and was enchanted. He felt that the man who could produce so glorious a play must be a magician, a prodigy, a superman. He sought and obtained an introduction to Jonson and laid the tribute of his enthusiastic homage at his hero's feet. The admiration was mutual.

A Mother's Firm Hand At The Helm
At the age of 23, however, he suddenly vanished. The taverns saw him no more. His mother took a hand in the shaping of his destiny. The way in which the most brilliant wits of the period revelled in her boy's society convinced her that his feet needed better guidance than they were getting. She set to work, secured powerful influence, and entered her son at St. John's College, Cambridge. He did well; breathed a happier and more wholesome atmosphere, and, in his 39th year, entered the ministry. He was presented with the living of Dean Prior, near Totnes, in Devonshire. Having already displayed a remarkable gift for writing exquisite gems of pastoral verse, this seemed an ideal settlement. Those who are familiar with his "Cherry Ripe," "Gather Rosebuds While Ye May," "To Meadows," "To Robin Redbreast," and with his vast collection of similar pearls, do not need to be reminded that, on such themes, nobody has ever sung more daintily or more charmingly.

Surely such a poet, in Devonshire, would be in his element. The setting seemed perfectly to match his spirit. As he himself had said:

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May, or June and
July flowers;
I sing of maypoles, hock­carts, wassails, wakes,
Of
bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes.

Where would a man of such a mood be more at home than in Devonshire? Yet the astounding fact is that Herrick simply hated Devonshire. In one couplet he describes Devonshire as a rocky county of rocky men with rocky ways. Here is another example:

More discontents I never had
Since I was born, than here,
Where I have
been, and still am, sad
In this dull Devonshire.

In another ebullition he as good as says that he would rather live at the North Pole or in the heart of the Sahara, than in Devonshire:

First let us dwell on rudest seas;
Next with severest savages;
Last, let
us make our blest abode
Where human foot as yet ne'er trod;
Search worlds
of ice, and rather there
Dwell than in loathed Devonshire.

If, among all the remarkable contradictions of Herrick's perverse and contradictory life, one were to seek the most glaring anomaly of all, he would have to consider very seriously this antipathy of a pastoral poet for the sweetest and most entrancing of the English counties.

The Sweetening Influence Of Troubled Years
Yet, after all, perhaps the most dramatic contrast in this long chapter of contrasts is the contrast between the Robert Herrick of early manhood and the Robert Herrick of old age. His long life extended through the most turbulent years of British history. He was born in the spacious days of great Elizabeth. He saw the rise of the Stuarts, the outbreak of the rebellion, the ascendancy of the Puritans, and the execution of the king. He lived all through the days of the Commonwealth, and he witnessed the Restoration. The lot of a clergyman in a period of such swift transitions resembled the lot of a toad under a harrow. Herrick was of an accommodating turn of mind; but when the changes are so frequent and so violent, no man can trim his sails to every wind.

In the ceaseless swirl of things, Herrick lost his benefice and was swept back into the vortex of his earlier life in London. As an old man, however, he returned to Devonshire. Nobody knows why. Perhaps, distance lending enchantment to the view, he repented of the hard things that he had said of that delicious county. In those mellow sunset years he repented of much. Even his earlier poems occasioned him concern:

For those, my unbaptised rhymes
Writ, in my wild unhallowed times,
Forgive
me, God, and blot each line
Out of my book, that is not Thine!

He spent his last 12 years among the people whom he had once described as "rudest savages" and completely captivated their hearts. For long years after his death the Devonians fondly cherished every memory of the things that the good old man had said and done. And the world still treasures some of his verses as among the freshest, most musical, and most chaste that any English minstrel has ever penned.

F W Boreham

Image: Robert Herrick