“Rise to life with These”: Salvation and Herrick's Mocking Epigrams

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Notes

¹Other critics who address these poems directly include Crane, Halli, and Schoenfeldt.

²Prince argues that Noble Numbers supports the idea of a tolerant Herrick, willing to accept a wide range of beliefs. “… Herrick accepted a variety of human lifestyles without prejudice. If he did not judge others based on their lifestyle choices, we may also conclude that he did not judge them based on their individual religious beliefs” (Prince, n.pag.).

³Oram suggests that “sin is a metaphor, but not a metaphor to be taken seriously” (213), but he does so as part of an argument that Hesperides converts the sacred into the literary.

⁴One discussion of Herrick's aesthetic can be found in Coiro 163–65. While she discusses artistic adornment in a chapter on the mocking epigrams, demonstrating how Herrick conjoins disgusting epigrams with beautiful lyric poetry, she presents the two as contrasts that generate ambiguity in the lyric. Where she sees doubt, I see an aesthetic appreciation of ugliness as well as beauty. See also Guibbory 81–87 and Rollin 172–77.

⁵As Mollenkott notes, for Herrick, “true religion apparently consists … of having ears to hear, eyes to see, and a heart to accept the reality of ‘what is … ’” (200).

⁶For example, Schoenfeldt concentrates on the social implications of the vulgar poems, while Crane approaches them from the perspectives of culture and class.

⁷See, for example, Coiro 141, where she discusses how willing Herrick is to enroll people in his epigrammatic circle, as well as how his “Saints” are rendered elect by their presence in his book.

⁸All quotations from Hesperides are taken from the Martin edition; poem numbering is taken from the Pollard edition.

⁹Rev. 1.3, “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein …” and Rev. 1.5, “And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth. Unto him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood …” Biblical quotations taken from the King James Bible, online version.

¹⁰If one reads the contrasts between the mocking epigrams and Herrick's more beautiful poetry as indicative of God's tremendous grace, then the more disgusting poems reassure Herrick of his own salvation instead of representing his “barely suppressed nightmares and self-doubts” (Coiro 169).