Kiss Fancies in Robert Herrick

Abstract

Kiss Fancies in Robert Herrick by William Kerrigan In a tradition stretching from Edmund Gosse to Gordon Braden, critics have intimated that something major and male is absent from Herrick's erotic verse. Although he believed that "Julia" was an actual mistress, and observed that Herrick wrote "so much that an English gentleman, not to say clergyman, had better left unsaid," Gosse also noted the "total want of passion in Herrick's language about women."1 F.W. Moorman, writing around the electric word "passion," complained of a "lack of the genuine fire of love."2 Something is obviously missing in these descriptions of what is missing. It was left to Braden to elevate this tradition to the standards of twentieth-century candor: "The emphasis on foreplay and nongenital, especially oral, gratifications, the fixation on affects (smells, textures) and details (Julia's leg), and the general voyeuristic preference of perception to action ... are all intelligible as a wide diffusion oferotic energy denied specifically orgastic focus and release. What is missing in the Hesperides is aggressive, genital, in other words, 'adult' sexuality."3 Herrick was practicing a discipline, attempting to confine libido to artistic imagination, and the result is a "selfcontained lyric world whose principal activity is the casual permutation of its own décor."4 In Braden we have an observation about the poetry and a supposition about the man. The poetry specializes in obstructed desire. "Jocund his Muse was, but his life was oast." Ovid and Martial said the same thing, but there is a better case on purely internal grounds for believing the Renaissance poet: his verses are not as jocund as theirs. The man, Braden supposes, was probably living under a self-imposed sexual prohibition, using the poems to make up the deficit and simultaneously to channel his erotic feeling away from intercourse. Now there are Herrick pieces, such as "Kisses," "Up Tailes All," and "To Anthea," that invite women to have intercourse with the poet. Braden would have to claim that these verses are uncharacteristic or half-hearted.5 1 believe that this claim can in fact be substantiated. The supposition can never be more than that, 156William Kerrigan maybe right, maybe wrong, but the observation on which it rests seems to me sound. Braden is a great student of decorative eroticism in the Western literary tradition. Far from consigning Herrick to triviality, his treatment of "decoration" in Hesperides redeems that word from its usual pejorative sense by exploring, in superb literary detail, some of the aesthetic and psychological possibilities of decorative verse. This scholar has spent long hours with somewhat imagined, perhaps imagined, and obviously imagined poetic love affairs; the charge of "imagined" hovers about nearly every mistress in the Petrarchan tradition, and Braden knows a great deal, perhaps more than any of us do, about this tradition. I think it was Braden's particular attunement to the uncertain borders between fantasy and fact that led him, in the case of Herrick, from literary response to biographical proposal. The supposition is his way of drawing closer to Herrick — our foremost scholar of imagined love placing a garland on the remains of one of its most serious practitioners. "I know you, lyricist," Braden is saying. "We were made for each other." Yet Braden has left unfinished business here. His biographical speculation assigns a defensive and regressive role to the erotic verse without showing that these qualities are in some fashion the source or precondition of its literary value. My essay hopes to fill that gap.6 For to another sort of critic, this view of Herrick opens him to bluff dismissal. J.B. Broadbent, for example, finds the poet insufficiently broad bent. He celebrated "tertiary sexual characteristics," fawned over "fetishistic superficies," and was not above stooping to "snuggling infantilism": All Herrick's sweets are the same, and too sweet — pretty lewdness is boring. People sense something wrong, a lack of genuine sexuality. Herrick himself thought this excused him: 'Jocund his muse was, but his life was chaste,' he wrote for his own epigraph; but that's the condemnation.7 Away with all this cute erotic bric-a-brac (lawns, silks, nipplets, nervelets); the pansy lacked genital...

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