Dark Was The Jayle

Robert Herrick 1591-1674

 

Herrick is a poet I have loved since my early twenties, but I’m not sure how I found him. Perhaps in a Norton Anthology? Or Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading? Who knows. He’s often crossed with his emotional opposite, austere old Herbert. I admire Herbert as a poet, but I love Herrick. Herrick is delightfully perverse. It is easy to miss his genuine artfulness. His rhymes, like his poems, are perfectly simple. Every biographicall notice I have read about him insists that he was a quiet country parson and that his poems are art, not autobiography. There is no real Julia unlacing herself, no Julia whose nipples are like strawberries drowned in cream.

His dates put him at the tail-end of the great efflorescence of English letters initiated by Sydney and Spenser. His poems are indeed diverse, and I accept that they are Roman inspired epigrammes and lyrics about a varietie of country folk, many of whom he would have known. But still, his obsessions can’t possibly be out of books. He wants to kiss that instep. He wants to continue up to her knee. If Donne would have gone farther so be it, Herrick took what he could get. I suppose it is an argument against the reality of his nymphs when one considers what an actual woman smells like unlacing herself (and I mean this as no insult! I can think of no more glorious aroma….) until you see the list of odours released into the air by her fragrant skin: Musks and Ambers. Musk is the secretion of the anal gland of the civet cat. I realize Herrick would be horrified at the comparison of his nymph Julia to the anal gland of a civet cat, but he wrote the words. And I suppose if we, er, ahem, I, were to update these poems it might prove necessary to entitle one, Upon Julia’s Anal Gland, or at least her Bartholin Gland, weeping pearls of perfume. Well, I can see this has gone on altogether too long. As a side bar I want to mention that I read a Herrick poem (for another post) at my wedding.

 

Love Perfumes All Parts

 

If I kisse Anthea’s brest,
There I smell the Phenix nest:
If her lip, the most sincere
Altar of Incense, I smell there.
Hands, and thighs, and legs, are all
Richly Aromaticall.
Goddesse Isis cann’t transfer
Musks and Ambers more from her:
Nor can Juno sweeter be,
When she lyes with Jove, then she.

The Shooe Tying

Anthea bid me tye her shooe;
I did; I kist the instep too:
And would have kist unto her knee,
Had not her Blush rebuked me.

 

Clothes Do But Cheat And Cousen Us

 

Away with silks, away with Lawn,
Ile have no Sceans, or Curtains drawn:
Give me my mistresse, as she is,
Drest in her nak’t simplicities:
For as my Heart. ene so mine Eye
Is wone with flesh, not Drapery.

 

Upon A Black Twist, Rounding Her Arm

 

I saw about her spotlesse wrist,
Of blackest silk, a curious twist;
Which, circumvolving gently, there
Enthrall’s her Arme as Prisoner.
Dark was the Jayle, but as if light
Had met t’engender with the night;
Or so, as Darknesse made a stay
To shew at once, both night and day.
One fancie more! but if there be
Such Freedome in Captivity;
I beg of Love, that ever I
May in like Chains of Darknesse lie.

 

Upon Julia’s Breasts

Display thy breasts, my Julia, there let me
Behold that circummortall purity:
Betweene whose glories, there my lips Ile lay,
Ravisht, in that faire Via Lactea.

 

Upon Julia’s Washing Her Self In The River

 

How fierce was I, when I did see
My Julia wash her self in thee!
So Lillies thorough Christall look:
So purest pebbles in the brook:
As in the river Julia did,
Halfe with a Lawne of water hid,
Into thy streames my self I threw,
And struggling there, I kist thee too;
And more had done (it is confest)
Had not thy waves forbad the rest.

 

Upon Julia’s Unlacing Herself

 

Tell, if thou canst, (and truly) whence doth come
This Camphor, Storax, Spiknard, Galbanum:
These Musks, these Ambers, and those other smells
(Sweet as the Vestrie of the Oracles.)
Ile tell thee; while my Julia did unlace
Her silken bodies, but a breathing space:
The passive Aire such odour then assum’d,
As when to Jove Great Juno goes perfum’d.
Whose pure-Immortall body doth transmit
A scent, that fills both Heaven and Earth with it.