Today’s Poem: To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Robert Herrick’s pastoral advice to young ladies

Sandro Botticelli, Primavera (detail of the Three Graces), circa 1486 (Wikimedia Commons)

As a lyric poet, Robert Herrick (1591–1674) counted himself among the “Tribe of Ben”: literary followers and heirs to the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson, a company that also included Richard Lovelace and Thomas Carew. While most of this Cavalier-poet tribe were court…