Today’s Poem: To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Today’s Poem: To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
Robert Herrick’s pastoral advice to young ladies
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 courtiers, gathered around the ultimately unfortunate King Charles I, we might think of Herrick as the tribe’s chaplain. Having taken holy orders in 1623, he served as Anglican vicar of Dean Prior, in Devonshire, from 1630 — with a hiatus during the English Civil War and Protectorate, when the reigning Puritans expelled many high-church Royalist clergymen from their parishes — until his death in 1674.
As we might expect, Herrick the clergyman wrote poems on religious themes. His best-known poems, however, the ones that have traditionally appeared as standards in high-school and college English textbooks, to illustrate what is meant by the carpe diem theme in seventeenth-century Cavalier poetry.
Consider Today’s Poem, the most famous of Herrick’s lyrics, whose very title suggests that theme: Seize the day. But where Herrick’s tribal brothers were driven by the idea that there’s never enough time for all the fun you want to have, the more eternity-minded Herrick argues, in four common-meter abab stanzas, that the gathering of rosebuds should culminate at the nuptial altar. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, but the word of our God shall stand forever, saith the prophet. Not so lovely maidens, who would rather not be old maids. Marry in haste, saith the poet, or repent at leisure.
To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
by Robert Herrick
Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today Tomorrow will be dying. The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, The higher he’s a-getting, The sooner will his race be run, And nearer he’s to setting. That age is best which is the first, When youth and blood are warmer; But being spent, the worse, and worst Times still succeed the former. Then be not coy, but use your time, And while ye may, go marry; For having lost but once your prime, You may forever tarry.
How funny: I was literally in the middle of comparing Herrick’s poem to Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” when I saw someone’s tweet linking this post! (Talking of comparison, Herrick’s reference to coyness occurs only in the last stanza; Marvell’s in the second line!).
It’s one of those poems where its lightness, and seeming effortlessness, belies its artistry. It was only after a few readings, for instance, I noticed how perfectly the spondaic “Old time” & “go marry” - at the beginning & at the end of line 2 of the first & last stanzas - complement each other.
And the 3rd stanza, with its chiasmus of superlatives and comparatives, until we fall over the edge of the sole enjambment in the poem, where the final line “succeed[s] the former” - it’s a perfectly placed flourish!
Lovely choice. I had not been aware that this poem was the source of "Gather ye rose-buds while ye may." But you coyly ascribed simply to "the poet" the paraphrasing of the lines "Thus grief still treads upon the heels of pleasure: Married in haste, we may repent at leisure." I had to look up that one. (What would we do without Google?) The author of that good advice was William Congreve.