Robert Herrick's Organic Jewelry

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Notes

¹Pearls are traditionally used in this context because of their association with the Virgin Mary, but in the Early Modern period particularly because of their association with Queen Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen (see Pointon 503–04).

²See Halli 228. There is a further incongruity is the word “quarelets,” i.e., tile-like in shape, since pearls are round.

³Notably the combination appears in the following poems: 74.2, 105.1, 183.1, and 404.1 (ll. 51–54).

⁴Elsewhere Herrick expands this dairy analogy to “Fresh Cheese and Cream” (183.1).

⁵The carcanet made of teeth certainly suggests a pearl analogy in addition to the earlier mention of corns for pearls. The association of teeth and pearls is quite conventional and used by Herrick often: 136.1, 226.6, 251.1, and 404.1 (ll. 31–32).

⁶For Herrick's us of septic body parts, see Schoenfeldt 143.

⁷Coiro recognizes the similarity between Ursly and Herrick's image of Zenobia (166–67). Zenobia's teeth in “The Candor of Julias Teeth” (251.1) were used as pearls, and we are invited to believe that these made beautiful pearls in spite of their painful provenance. The difference to Ursly is clearly that Zenobia's teeth were healthy when they were so cruelly taken out, whereas Ursly's teeth are “deaf as nuts,” so already in a state of decay (See L. C. Martin's note, 548).

⁸From “The Argument of his Book” (5.1).