Kiss Fancies in Robert Herrick

Abstract

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 of erotic 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.