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Tears for Herrick's Church by Claude J. Summers The recent attempts to re-historicize Herrick's poetry have emphasized its sociological and political contexts, especially as they are reflected and expressed in the poetry's Royalist ideology and fierce anti-Puritanism.1 As these studies have shown, the momentous religio-political controversies of the 1630s and 1640s leave their impress upon Herrick's poetry in a number of ways, both obvious and subtle. Most blatantly, the dedication of Hesperides to Prince Charles, the encomia addressed to members of the royal family, the celebrations of Royalist triumphs in the Civil War, and the intimate reflections on the "Times most bad" all witness to Herrick's political allegiance and to the depth and constancy of his commitment. More subtly, the frequent celebrations of country festivities and the replications of ancient ceremonies in Hesperides also participate in an ideological project, testifying to the poet's longing for an older, more stable society and establishing a conservative ideal of "Merry England" against which are measured the turmoil and dissension of the poet's unhappy present.2 Moreover, Herrick's poetry actively responds to the religious controversies of the day, supporting Laudian religious attitudes andpractices, especiallythose thatwere vehemently attacked by Puritans. What has not previously been noticed, however, is that Noble Numbers not only "plays royalism in a religious key, affirming its author's commitment to the conservative Anglican ideal of the English as submissive children of their mother the church,"3 but it also specifically mourns the desecration of the Established Church by the triumphant Parliamentarians. The persecution of the Church is a reiterated concern in Noble Numbers. Although the subject is only infrequently broached directly, the fear and fact of persecution pervasively inform the collection as a whole, contributing to its pronounced sense of apprehensiveness and defeat and to its barely muffled note of despair. By reference to the context of persecution, many aspects of Noble Numbers become comprehensible, including especially its emphasis on the efficacy of suffering and its strategic Apocalypticism, as well as its defiant Laudianism and even its melancholy conclusion in Christ's empty tomb. Moreover, one of the most fascinating (and unjustly neglected) 52Claude J. Summers of Herrick's poems, "The Widdowes teares: or, Dirge of Dorcas" (N-123), is best understood as Herrick's lamentation for his Church. An important contribution to the literature of Anglican survivalism, Noble Numbers responds to the systematic (if piecemeal) Parliamentarian attempts to dismantle and transform the Church of England in the years between 1641 and 1646/ Herrick's fear of the Puritan attack on the Church is made clear in "Graces for Children" (N-93), one of three homely poems spoken to or by children that immediately precede a cluster of more sophisticated poems associatedwith the King. This deceptivelysimple lyric concludes by subtly evoking the spectre of civil war via a reference to its opposite, the pastoral springtime of peace. By so doing, it transforms a conventional prayer for the Church and the monarch into a plea fraught with topicality: He His Church save, and the King, And our Peace here, like a Spring, Make it ever flourishing. (11. 7-9)5 These lines conflate the fate of the Church with that of the King in the prospect of a war that is destined to have disastrous consequences for both. The poignancy of the poem stems from the fact that by the time it was published, in 1648,6 neither the King, nor the Church, nor the peace were "flourishing." By then the King was imprisoned, the Church had been purged and transfigured, and the uneasy peace that existed was born of exhaustion rather than reconciliation. In the face of the Parliamentary victory, the poem's apprehensiveness is not only altogether justified by events subsequent to the poem's composition, but also rendered curiously moving. Indeed, Herrick's disarmingly child-like prayer is affecting precisely because its idyllic pastoral vision exists in reciprocal relationship to history: it has been mocked by the vicissitudes of "times trans-shifting" but in turn it condemns by poignant contrast the unacceptable reality of the Royalist defeat. In several poems of Noble Numbers, Herrick attempts to...
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