His Muse.
In Herrick the air is fragrant with new-mown hay; there is a morning
light upon all things; long shadows streak the grass, and on the
eglantine swinging in the hedge the dew lies white and brilliant. Out of
the happy distance comes a shrill and silvery sound of whetting scythes;
and from the near brook-side rings the laughter of merry maids in circle
to make cowslipballs and babble of their bachelors. As you walk you are
conscious of 'the grace that morning meadows wear,' and mayhap you meet
Amaryllis going home to the farm with an apronful of flowers. Rounded is
she and buxom, cool-cheeked and vigorous and trim, smelling of rosemary
and thyme, with an appetite for curds and cream and a tongue of 'cleanly
wantonness.' For her singer has an eye in his head, and exquisite as are
his fancies he dwells in no land of shadows. The more clearly he sees a
thing the better he sings it; and provided that he do see it nothing is
beneath the caress of his muse. The bays and rosemary that wreath the
hall at Yule, the log itself, the Candlemas box, the hock-cart and the
maypole, nay,
'See'st thou that cloud as silver clear,
Plump, soft, and swelling everywhere?
Tis Julia's bed!'--
And not only does he listen to the 'clecking' of his hen and know what it
means: he knows too that the egg she has laid is long and white; so that
ere he enclose it in his verse, you can see him take it in his hand, and
look at it with a sort of boyish wonder and delight. This freshness of
spirit, this charming and innocent curiosity, he carries into all he
does. He can turn a sugared compliment with the best, but when Amaryllis
passes him by he is yet so eager and unsophisticate that he can note that
'winning wave in the tempestuous petticoat' which has rippled to such
good purpose through so many graceful speeches since. So that though
Julia and Dianeme and Anthea have passed away, though Corinna herself is
merely 'a fable, song, a fleeting shade,' he has saved enough of them
from the ravin of Time for us to love and be grateful for eternally.
Their gracious ghosts abide in a peculiar nook of the Elysium of Poesy.
There 'in their habit as they lived' they dance in round, they fill their
laps with flowers, they frolic and junket sweetly, they go for ever
maying. Soft winds blow round them, and in their clear young voices they
sing the verse of the rare artist who called them from the multitude and
set them for ever where they are.
His Moral.
And Amaryllis herself will not, mayhap, be found so fair as those
younglings of the year she bears with her in 'wicker ark' or 'lawny
continent.' Herrick is pre-eminently the poet of flowers. He alone were
capable of bringing back
'Le bouquet d'Ophelie
De la rive inconnue ou les flots l'ont laisse.
He knows and loves the dear blossoms all. He considers them with tender
and shining eyes, he culls them his sweetest fancies and his fondest
metaphors. Their idea is inseparable from that of his girls themselves,
and it is by the means of the one set of mistresses that he is able so
well to understand the other. The flowers are maids to him, and the
maids are flowers. In an ecstasy of tender contemplation he turns from
those to these, exampling Julia from the rose and pitying the hapless
violets as though they were indeed not blooms insensitive but actually
'poor girls neglected.' His pages breathe their clean and innocent
perfumes, and are beautiful with the chaste beauty of their colour, just
as they carry with them something of the sweetness and simplicity of
maidenhood itself. And from both he extracts the same pathetic little
moral: both are lovely and both must die. And so, between his virgins
that are for love indeed and those that sit silent and delicious in the
'flowery nunnery,' the old singer finds life so good a thing that he
dreads to lose it, and not all his piety can remove the passionate regret
with which he sees things hastening to their end.
His Piety.
That piety is equally removed from the erotic mysticism of Richard
Crashaw and from the adoration, chastened and awful and pure, of Cowper.
To find an analogue, you have to cross the borders of English into Spain.
In his _Noble Numbers_ Herrick shows himself to be a near kinsman of such
men as Valdivielso, Ocana, Lope de Ubeda; and there are versicles of his
that in their homely mixture of the sacred and the profane, in their
reverent familiarity with things divine, their pious and simple
gallantry, may well be likened to the graceful and charming romances and
villancicos of these strangers. Their spirit is less Protestant than
Catholic, and is hardly English at all, so that it is scarce to be
wondered at if they have remained unpopular. But their sincerity and
earnestness are as far beyond doubt as their grace of line and inimitable
daintiness of surface.