ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

CAROLINE AMUSEMENTS
As you, or any thing.
We die,
As your hours doe, and drie
Away,
Like to the Summers raine;
Or as the pearles of Mornings dew
Ne’r to be found againe.
115
(“To Daffadills”)
It would be difficult to find a more exquisite response to mutability in the
seventeenth century. The poem is characteristically Herrick’s in its ceremonial
blend of nature and religion, its refusal to risk spoiling the mood—the
deliquescent moment—by oversounding the moral, and its elegantly simple
diction. If the first stanza’s blending of personal grief and communal prayer
leads us to recollect Paul’s charge, “Let all things be done decently and in
order” (I Corinthians 14:40)—itself a staple of the Book of Common Prayer’s
defense of the use of some ceremonies in religious worship 40 —the reminiscence
is purposefully distant. It serves as a kind of undersong to remind the reader
that Herrick’s “we” is indeed “real,” a “we” with a collective depth to it, and
that the elaboration spun here in verse is around one of the most familiar—
the most common—of sentiments.
To describe Herrick as a poet of the familiar or commonplace, however, is
not just to agree with but to refine upon Eliot’s notion that it is the “honest
ordinariness which gives the charm” to Herrick’s poetry. 41 As someone in part
indebted to the epigrammatic tradition, Herrick has a good deal of everyday stuff
in Hesperides: salutes to friends, brief comments about his book and its readers,
scurvy distichs, bits of advice; and as with “Discontent in Devon,” these poems
often appear with little embellishment:
Lay by the good a while; a resting field
Will, after ease, a richer harvest yeild:
Trees this year beare; next, they their wealth with-hold:
Continuall reaping makes a land wax old.
(“Rest Refreshes”)
Again, no one would confuse this with a Jonson epigram, in which that poet
strenuously sets himself apart from the proverbial or what might be construed as
the “popular” voice; Herrick seems singularly undefensive about this dimension
of his art, even as he hints at making a wider statement about civil unrest. So,
too, Herrick characteristically thinks of hospitality in local, household terms. No
kings lodge at his “grange,” but this absence hardly interferes with the pleasure
he gets from taking a personal inventory of his “private wealth.” Counted
correctly—in this case with a ritualizing regularity that manages not to be