For essay #2, give a general analysis of one of the following three poems by Herrick (all three poems have detailed questions, below): "The Vine," "Lily in a Crystal " (not in NAEL7 but in the Norton Online Archive), or "His Farewell to Sack." Little or nothing has been written about the poems, so spend time reading the poems and pondering the questions. You may, of course, consult with me, as well.

        Like Emily Dickinson and other lyric poets who have left a poetic panoply or plethora, Herrick, with the 1130 secular poems of his volume Hesperides and 272 religious poems of his volume Noble Numbers, has left an oeuvre of more than 1400 poems, impossible to analyze in individual detail in any one book-length critical study or even series of book-length studies. Of Herrick's twenty-six poems anthologized in NAEL6 or twenty-three anthologized in NAEL7 (with some additional poems included in the Norton Online Archive), some general groupings can be ascertained (some poems, inevitably, cross over categories): (a) container, clothes (cf. art, poetry): "Delight in Disorder"; "The Lily in a Crystal"; "Upon the Nipples of Julia's Breast"; "To the Water Nymphs Drinking at the Fountain"; "Upon Julia's Clothes"; "Upon Prue His Maid"; "The Vine"; (b) passing of time, death: "Upon the Loss of His Mistresses"; "Corinna's Going a Maying"; "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time"; "To Blossoms"; "Upon Prue His Maid"; (c) sex, eros, romantic love: "Upon the Loss of His Mistresses"; "The Vine"; "Delight in Disorder"; "The Lily in a Crystal"; "To the Virgins to Make Much of Time"; "Upon the Nipples of Julia's Breast"; "The Night-Piece to Julia"; "His Farewell to Sack"; "How Roses Came Red"; (d) delights of the natural world; pastoral: "The Argument of His Book"; "Corinna's Going A-Maying"; "The Hock-Cart or Harvest Home"; "To Blossoms"; "To Marygolds"; "His Farewell to Sack"; (e) art, poetry, the imagination (cf. container, clothes): "The Argument of His Book"; "Upon the Loss of His Mistresses"; "Delight in Disorder"; "His Farewell to Sack"; "Upon His Verses"; "His Prayer to Ben Jonson"; "Upon Jack and Jill"; "Dreams"; "To His Book's End"; (f) religious vocabulary, imagery: "The Argument of His Book"; "Corinna's Going A-Maying"; "To the Water Nymphs Drinking at the Fountains"; "His Prayer to Ben Jonson"; "A Grace for a Child"/"Another Grace for a Child" (alternate titles of the same poem); "To His Savior, The New Year's Gift"; "To His Conscience"; (g) politics, the cavaliers: "The Bad Season Makes the Poet Sad"; "His Return to London"; line 14 of "Delight in Disorder."

G1. (a) In which poems does Herrick use the rhymed couplet? (b) How does the rhymed couplet suggest both Neoclassicism and the influence of (or affinity with) Ben Jonson?

G2. (a) In which poems does Herrick use the concept or motif of microcosm versus macrocosm? (b) How does Herrick's poetry compare in this concept or subject with Donne's?

G3. (a) How might Herrick's occupation prior to his clerical appointment be related to the container poems? (b) How are container poems or this motif inherently metapoetic? (c) How do Herrick's clothes poems compare or contrast with Jonson's?
 

Notes and Questions on "The Vine"

1. What ideas about romantic love; sex or the erotic or eros; roles of, attitudes or values of, and relations between the genders; waking or dreaming or fantasy states; nature or the natural world (and the interrelation to humanity), are conveyed by the poem, both individually as well as in their connections?

2. As suggested by the title, the most recurrent imagery and figurative language is drawn from the natural world, the pastoral genre. What bearing might this pervasiveness or proportion or dominance have on any of the poem's ideas, and how? Why talk about what Herrick does, using the imagery (simple or figurative) of nature?

3. (a) What is the basic plot of the poem, as suggested by lines 1-4 and 21-23? What male physiological process occurs, and how is this conveyed? (b) How might the name of the lady appropriate to the basic "plot" of the poem? (The fact that the name can be pronounced as either three or two syllables, noted by Adams and Logan in the NAEL6 footnote to the poem, doesn't explain the choice, since the names Julia and Anthea, who are referred to in the immediately preceding anthologized poem, "Upon the Loss of His Mistresses," could also be scanned as disyllabic or trisyllabic, depending on the exigencies of meter--as could many other feminine names--and consequently could have been the mistress designated as the speaker's dream girl.) (c) What sequence or sequences, direction or directions, can be found in the spatial and anatomical direction(s) traveled by the speaker's vinous fantasy in lines 5-21? (d) What gender exchange (or metamorphosis; cf. line 2) takes place in lines 12-13 (cf. Richard Crashaw's "The Flaming Heart" for another gender interchange)? What ideas about sex, roles, and the genders may be suggested? (e) How do lines 1-2 and 22-23 form a sort of envelope structure to the poem? How might the envelope structure be related to any of the poem's ideas or themes? (f) How might the poem's basic extended metaphor (in more than one sense), signaled by the poem's title, be suggestive about male anatomy and male delusions of grandeur?

4. (a) What pattern is there in all or most of the verbs in the poem, both in regard to denotation and connotation, as well as position in the poetic line? (b) How might part have both a general anatomical meaning as well as a specific anatomical meaning in "this mortal part of mine"(line 1)? How might "mortal" also have multiple meanings? How many times in the poem does the word part or parts occur? What might this repetition suggest about any of the topics identified in question 1 on this poem? (c) How does "metamorphosed"(line 2) recall and allude to Ovid, intertwining with lines 11-13? (d) How is the meaning of "small"(line 5) problematic for the modern reader, as it is in line 12 of Wyatt's "They Flee from Me"? (e) How in denotation and connotation are the synonyms "tendrils"(6), "nervelets"(8), "clusters"(10), and "curls"(14) meaningful both individually and interconnectively for what they describe? How might there be a contrast in the forcefulness of words between "tendrils"(6) and "belly"(7) and "buttocks"(7)? (f) What older as well as more regularly modern senses do they words "ravished"(13) and "enthrall"(15) have in Herrick's Renaissance English (check your collegiate dictionary; cf. this similar play of senses in Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV: "Batter My Heart")? (g) What faint, additional sense does the word "temples"(11) pick up, given the allusion in line 13? (h) Why choose the myth and associations of Bacchus (lines 9-13), rather than one of the many other classical myths, many of them to be found in Ovid's epic collection (excerpted in NAWM; and in the Renaissance section of NAEL, in Golding's famous translation, used by Shakespeare in the plays)? For instance, the story of Apollo pursuing Daphne is told in Ovid's work, which would parallel nicely the male speaker (and poet) equating to Apollo, the female being unwantedly pursued equating to Daphne, and then her transformation to a fixed tree equating to bondage. (i) What might be suggested by the introduction of leaves into the speaker's new dream or fantasy anatomy or "identity" in lines 18 and following? (j) What parallels or contrasts are there in word choice and connotation in the roughly synonymous "mortal part"(1) versus "flesh of mine"(22)? (k) What two or more senses or meanings may stock (24) have, relative to the equation between male anatomy and plant life in the poem? (Look the word up in a collegiate dictionary or the OED.) What two very different interpretations of the masculine physiological process (or its outcome) being described in the poem might the two different senses of stock convey? (l) What tone is or what tones are there in the poem, and how does tone relate to or help express its themes?

5. (a) How might rhyme scheme or verse form, as well as line length, be appropriate to or help express any of the poem's ideas or themes or characterizations? (b) What is notable about the rhyme sound of lines 1-2 relative to lines 22-23? What structural or organizational effect is enhanced by rhyme here? (c) How do grammar and rhyme interact to help organize or structure the poem? (d) How might any of the rhyme pairs (except for lines 9-11) be thematic? (e) How is the rhyme scheme of the poem varied somewhat in lines 9-11? Why might Herrick have done this in this passage or part of the poem? (f) Where does Herrick use subtle alliteration, assonance, or consonance to subtly add expression to any of his themes, ideas, or characterizations? (g) Where and how does Herrick thematically use any facets of rhythm and meter (see these in HTL), including run-on or enjambed or end-stopped lines, substitution of feet (for accented or stressed or unaccented or unstressed syllabic variation from the metrical norm)?
 

Notes and Questions on "The Lily in a Crystal" (NAEL6; not in NAEL7, but in the Norton Online Archive)

1. (a) What ideas about romantic love; sex or the erotic or eros; roles of, attitudes or values of, and relations between the genders; nature or the natural world (and the interrelation to humanity); art or aesthetics; the relationship of art to nature (cf. the section "Art and Nature: Elizabethan Aesthetics" in the NAEL introduction to the sixteenth century), are conveyed by the poem, both individually as well as in their connections? (b) Why might the owners of Victoria's Secret and Frederick's of Hollywood endorse this poem? (c) How do the primary images of the poem, focused in the poem's title, work against or dilute potential lewd suggestions of the poem's eroticism? (d) What words or images in the last stanza suggest not only "containerization" but also deception? How? What is being suggested about romantic love, eros, and the relationship between the genders? (e) What tone is or what tones are there in the poem, and how does tone relate to or help express any of the poem's themes or ideas?

2. (a) In what way does this poem have an envelope structure, the last stanza or two echoing and picking up the first stanza or two? How might this structure or organization relate to any of the poem's ideas or themes? (b) Into how many parts are the poem's seven stanzas organized or grouped? How does each part function as a unit or component in the overall poem? (c) How does the first word of stanzas 5, 6, and 7 signal logic or consequence, and what bearing on the poem's structure or themes does this repetition have? (d) In what way is the opening line of stanzas 1, 2, and 3 parallel, and what bearing on the poem's structure or themes does this repetition have? Who is the you the speaker repeatedly addresses, exactly? (e) How many lines does each stanza have, and what is the rhyme scheme chosen to be used in all of the stanzas? How many syllables does each of the lines have, this pattern repeated in all stanzas? (f) How might the prosodic and stanzaic complexity or variability referred to in item e be related to any of the poem's ideas or themes?

3. (a) How does the first line of stanza 5 recall, both logically but also with variation, the dominant imagery of stanzas 1, 2, and 4? Why omit the dominant imagery of stanza 3? What sequence or order might there be in the major images used in stanzas 1-4, respectively? Themes or ideas suggested? (b) What bearing on the poem's ideas or themes might the poem's repeated drawing of a good deal of its imagery from the natural world have? Why these particular elements of the natural world? Patterns or connections among them? One hoary system of classification of the natural world is animal, vegetable, and mineral; why might Herrick draw on two of these to comment on the third? (c) Much of the poem's imagery is gustatory as well as visual; how might such imagery relate to, connect to, or help express eroticism (or facets of the erotic in passion)? How might such imagery connect with Freud's notion of the relation between sexuality and child or infant development? (d) How do facets of each image work thematically in its particular place, as well as in combination with images elsewhere in the poem? (e) What is the color scheme of the poem, both in individual stanzas and overall, and how does it relate to the poem's themes or ideas?

4. (a) Why is the rose "smiling" in line 1? (b) What multiple senses or implications does "tombed"(5) have? (c) How do "naked"(9), "wantoning"(14), "gently strokes"(18), "darts his radiant beams"(20), "clean and subtle skin"(28), "stir/More love"(34-35), and "beam"(36) all have at least two spheres or areas of reference--the natural world, and romantic (or erotic) love?

5. (a) How might rhyme scheme or verse form, as well as line length, be appropriate to or help express any of the poem's ideas or themes or characterizations? (b) How does grammar interact with stanzaic form and prosody to help express any of the poem's ideas or themes? For example, how many sentences is the first stanza composed of? Effect? The remaining stanzas? (c) Where does Herrick use subtle alliteration, assonance, or consonance to subtly add expression to any of his themes, ideas, or characterizations? (d) Where and how does Herrick thematically use any facets of rhythm and meter (see these in HTL), including run-on or enjambed or end-stopped lines, substitution of feet (for accented or stressed or unaccented or unstressed syllabic variation from the metrical norm)?
 

Notes and Questions on "His Farewell to Sack"

1. How are the interrelations of art (especially poetry), Nature (the natural world, its pleasures, and sex), and the supernatural (or spiritual, or divine) explored in this poem?

2. Additional annotations beyond NAEL: (a) J. Max Patrick (see the NAEL bibliography to Herrick) annotates lines 11-12: "disperses animal spirit and vital spirit throughout the body as light is thrown back brokenly from a frosted surface"; (b) line 17 (J. Max Patrick): "with a magnificent display mounts upward"; (c) "wanting" (line 30): "lacking"; (d) line 34: look up "swan song" both in a collegiate dictionary and the OED; J. Max Patrick annotates "swans" as "poets"; (e) "numbers" (line 35): usual poetic periphrasis for "poetry" or "poems"; (f) line 54: look up the word lucubration in your collegiate dictionary, including the etymology; how does the metonymy in the proverbial expression alluded to in line 54 work?

3. (a) How do lines 1-10, 11-22, 23-36, and 37-54 function as the main parts or thought-units of the poem and constitute the poem's overall organization? (b) How does one part lead to the next, and how are the parts interconnected, for example by imagery?

4. Writers of the English Renaissance, heavily schooled in Roman literature and Latin language, and to a lesser extent Greek language and literature, draw much more on the Latin or Greek etymological meanings or overtones of words than a modern reader may be alert to. For example, how are the words aspire and spirit, used in the poem, related etymologically? What is the etymology of "nectar" (line 19) and "erroneous" (line 43), and how is this etymology meaningful both in context and overall the poem?

5. (a) The figure of speech apostrophe, a dominant one in the poem, often suggests things about the speaker's physical, emotional, psychological, or social state, as well as his or her relationship to the addressee (remember the class discussion of Sidney's sonnets). How does this figure work in this poem? How is personification related to the repeated apostrophe in this poem? With what suggestions or ideas? (b) Where do the imagistic motifs of light-dark, heat-cold, male-female, and liquid occur in the poem; and how do they function structurally (making connections) and thematically? (c) Besides visual imagery, where, and with what thematic suggestions, do tactile, gustatory, auditory, and olfactory imagery occur in the poem? Besides visual imagery, which other two types of imagery predominate, and with what thematic effects or suggestions?

6. (a) What multiple meanings, possible in Herrick's lifetime (check the OED), are possible in "dear" (line 1), "quick" (line 5)? (b) Where, and with what effects or meanings, does Herrick or his speaker mix or meld Classical allusions with Judeo-Christian ones? (c) Where, and with what effects or meanings (not only general themes but portrayal of the speaker's emotional or psychological state or states), does the speaker repeat key words such as "near," "dear," "spirit" or "spirits," "sweet" or "sweets"? (d) How are (balanced) antithesis and epanorthosis used thematically in the poem?

7. (a) Where, how, and with what thematic suggestions, does the speaker modulate through different tones in the poem? (b) What repeated punctuational devices does Herrick use (and where) to convey some of the speaker's tonal modulations? (c) How does where some of the heavy punctuational stops (periods or semicolons) occur in the poem help convey anything about the speaker's emotional state(s) or the poem's ideas? (d) How do syntax or sentence structure, underlying the lines, help convey anything about the speaker or the poem's ideas (e.g., sentence length; periodic sentence; sentence fragment; anaphora)? (e) How are rhythmical and metrical and sound effects used thematically in the poem (e.g., the distinctive alliteration--more precisely, sibilance or sigmatism--in lines 5-9)?

8. (a) How does the speaker's metaphor of "first-fruits" (line 7) appropriately, simultaneously, and thematically allude to Genesis, Bacchus, and the addressee of the poem? (b) How does the speaker's metaphor in "espoused" (line 50) work in context, as well as connect backwards to the poem's opening section and any of the poem's imagistic motifs? (c) How is there an underlying thematic, imagistic connection betweenn lines 8, 15, and 43? (d) In general, how does Herrick not only use figurative language and imagery thematically, but also diction (word choice: why this word and not a different one; denotation, connotation, levels of usage, abstract/general or concrete/specific)?
 

N & Q on "The Argument of His Book"

1. (a) What ideas does Herrick convey about poetry and especially his poetic oeuvre? (b) Why might Herrick have chosen the sonnet form -- in a distinct variation that includes the school of Jonson or the Cavaliers -- for this metapoetic introduction to his poetic oeuvre? (c) One subject in the poem is origins or beginnings; how is this subject appropriate for the placement of this poem in Herrick's collected poetic works?  (d) How are lines 1, 5, 9, and 13 marked off as  parallel introductions to the thought or content units of three quatrains and a couplet? (e) How are the various poems by Herrick in NAEL subsumed by the subjects, motifs, and imagery of the poem? (f) How is the subject or motif of microcosm vs. macrocosm, pervasive in  English Renaissance literature, incorporated in the poem? (g) What pun might there be on "after all" (line 14)?
2. (a)  How does this poem compare as a metapoetic outline of Herrick's poetic oeuvre with Ben Jonson's poem "To My Book"? (b) How do these poems by Herrick and Jonson, respectively, compare and contrast with Edmund Spenser's poem Amoretti No. 1 ("Happy ye leaves")?

N & Q on "Upon the Loss of His Mistresses"

1. (a) As indicated by the NAEL footnote, the mistresses are imaginary; how is the male mind or psychology portrayed by this poem? (b) How is the sonnet form transformed by Herrick and the Jonsonian school in this poem, including rhyme scheme, line length, and structure? And how do these elements of form or structure help convey the poem's content, themes, characterization, or portrayal of human nature or human psychology? (c) How might there be some sort of thematic sequence or progression in the list or catalog of mistresses, considering the distinctive trait of each one of them? (d) Several lines are marked by trochaic openings (e.g., lines 1-4, 6, 8, 12); how is this metrical component appropriate for the poetic genre evoked or invoked by the last two lines of the poem? (e) What metapoetic ideas does the poem convey?
2. (a) All the mistresses' names except one end in a; what ideas or emotional resonance might be contributed through this recurrent sound or onomastic parallel in the poem? (b) A recurrent pun in English Renaissance poetry occurs in the use of the word "number" or "numbers"; how does the pun on arithmetical and literary meanings work in this poem? (Look up meanings of number or numbers in your collegiate dictionary.)  (c) A recurrent pun in English Renaissance poetry and drama occurs in the use of the word "die" (cf. Wyatt's "The long love," Henry Howard Earl of Surrey's "Love, that doth reign"); how is this pun used in Herrick's poem?

N & Q on "Dreams"

1. This poem is one of the two extremes in length -- the very short poem, or the very long poem -- causing difficulty in interpretation.  The long poem makes knowing where to begin to interpret difficult; the very short poem is over so fast that the same problem occurs. One of the great collections of extremely short poems, often with attendant difficulties in interpretation, is the book of Proverbs in the Bible (which should be printed as poetry, and is so in most modern translations of the Bible, as well as some editions of the King James Bible). (a) How is the poem founded on and conveying the paradoxical combination of large and small, microcosm and macrocosm? (b1) How do the poem's length and size of title contrast with line length (cf. the line length of "Upon the Loss of His Mistresses")?  (b2) How does the poem's overall size contrast with the size of its subject? How is this contrast echoed or paralleled elsewhere in the poem? (c) What several meanings does the poem's first word have, especially with respect to several re-readings of the poem? (d) How much length or proportion of the poem is given to daytime, and how much to night time? What meanings or ideas might be suggested by the disproportion in the amount allotted to each in the poem? (e1) How are union and separateness contrasted in the poem, especially with reference to the Earth's diurnal cycle? (e2) How does the contrast between union, or communion, and separateness relate to the duality of microcosm and macrocosm in the poem?  (f) How is chiasmus used to create antithesis or contrast in the poem?
2.  (a) How might any sound effects in line 1 help convey its content? (b) How might any sound effects in line 2 help convey its content? (c) How does the form of the poem (that is, its stanzaic form actually equalling its overall poetic form or genre) relate to any of the material noted or asked about in question 1, above?
3. (a) What two-line or three-line poems can you find in the book of Proverbs in the Bible? (b) How do these poems compare or contrast with Herrick's "Dreams," especially with reference to their brevity or miniaturized form?

N & Q on "Delight in Disorder"

1. (a1) How does this poem, as well as Ben Jonson's "Still to Be Neat" (as footnoted in NAEL) convey ideas about esthetics? That is, how is the poem not only about sex and clothing (not that in real life -- today -- among the members of this English literature class -- any connection exists between the two), but also about art (in general) and poetry? (a2) What  is the implicit analogy applied to the poem (or work of literature or visual art) and the reader (or viewer) of: (a) certain articles of clothing covering or containing the lady, and (b) details of the clothing -- as well as the gestalt -- enthralling the speaker?  (b1) How does the poem divide into the two parts of lines 1-2 and lines 3-14? How does each of these two parts constitute a thought or content unit? (b2) What Jonsonian modifications does Herrick make of the sonnet or 14-line form? (b3) How is the periodic sentence used expressively or thematically in lines 3-14? (b4) How are lines 3-12 composed of sentence fragments? Why might sentence fragments be more appropriate to the purpose or content of these lines than complete sentences that contain main clauses? How might the sentence fragment form be expressive or thematic? (b5) What order or sequence or progression may underlie or structure the examples in lines 3-12? Themes or ideas suggested by the order or sequence?
2. (a) How are the kinds of clothing (both what they're for, and what they're made of) suggestive in their imagery or the figurative language applied to them? (b) How is personification recurrent and expressive or thematic in the poem? (c1) How is each of the following words polysemous or plurisignificant or highly connotative: "kindles" (line 2), "wantonness" (line 2), "fine" (line 4), "distraction"  (line 4), "enthralls"  (line 6), "crimson"  (line 6), "neglectful"  (line 7), "winning"  (line 9), "tempestuous"  (line 10), "careless"  (line 11), and "tie"  (line 11)? (c2) What interconnections are there among some of the words cited in 2c1? (d) What oxymoron occurs in line 12, and what ideas are conveyed about clothing, eros, and art? ( e) How do "bewitch"  (line 13) and "precise"  (line 14) have multiple significant or thematic interconnections?
3. A well-known Latin epigram, from ancient times, which came down to the Renaissance was ars [est] celare artem ("the art is to conceal the art"), along with the concept of sprezzatura, as formulated by Castiglione in The Courtier and translated as a combination of "grace" and "recklessness" in Thomas Hoby's Renaissance translation of this work (see the excerpt from Book 1 of Hoby's translation, "[Grace]," in NAEL).  How does Herrick's poem relate to these concepts?