Poetry Sunday 18 May 2014

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with notes by Ira Maine, Poetry Editor

Robert Herrick (1591-1674) had been twenty years a vicar in Devon before an unfortunate devotion to King Charles the First lost him his living.  In 1648, at the age of fifty seven, and being supported by friends in London he rolled all of his poems  up into one book, with the intention of selling enough to bring in some money.  His work was not popular, was considered old fashioned, and did not sell well, despite the fact that his poems are first class.  Sadly, his work had more in common with the taste popular forty or fifty years earlier, causing his contemporary poetry buying audience of the time to pass him by.

Eventually, Herrick had his living restored to him, but his 1648 book ‘Hesperides’ remains his only volume of poetry.

Somewhere, out there and out of sight, hidden from those who will not see, out beyond the Western Ocean, is ‘The Garden of the Hesperides.’

The Greeks knew about this garden, and wrote about it.
WB Yeats sent ‘The Wandering Aengus’ there,to;

‘…walk through long green dappled grass,
And pluck ’til time and tides are done,
The silver apples of the Moon,
The golden apples of the Sun…’

It’s the place that Gerard Manley Hopkins longed for;

‘…I have desired to go where winds not blow,
Where falls not rain, or hail or any snow…’

It is a place written into every poem ever written. It is that longing felt when great music is heard, when Bach or Mozart ravish your senses and you know, with trembling certainty, that just for a wild, heartbreaking moment you are standing there, shaking, in the Garden of the Hesperides.

Here’s Herrick, watching apple blossoms fall;

TO BLOSSOMS

Faire pledges of a fruitfull Tree,
Why do ye fall so fast?
Your date is not so past;
But you may stay yet here a while,
To blush and gently smile;
And go at last.

What, were ye borne to be
An houre or half’s delight;
And so to bid goodnight?
‘Twas pitie Nature brought thee forth
Meerly to shew your worth,
And lose you quite.

But you are lovely Leaves, where we
May read how soon things have
Their end, though ne’er so brave;
And after they have shown their pride,
Like you a while; they glide
Into the Grave.

Herrick here, though surrounded by a rampant Spring, where everything promises a new Season’s explosion of life, sees too the beginning, and end of life in a falling apple blossom.  This is very much more in the style of John Donne who is already almost twenty years dead, and who, believing in the resurrection of life, scorned death by finishing a poem with the triumphal last line;

‘Death; Thou shalt Die!’

Herrick’s poem is as rendered with the older spelling in my 1964 ‘Seventeenth Century Poetry’  Editor Hugh Kennard. Rinehart Editions.