Herrick

~David Landrum 1 The church where Robert Herrick served as vicar blackens in the rain, cold as its own stone, empty as the silences of hope or doubt. All flesh is sodden wood, not grass: musty, encumbering even when it goes to gather rosebuds or to bring in May. Under streaking clouds, dark sanctuary, blank graves, oak door grit-stained from pilgrim touches stand like stones washed in a stream. Herrick once threw his sermon in a fit of rage at his snoring, farting, whispering congregation. Down the road, sawyers cover new-cut wood with blue tarpaulins to seal it from the damp. 2 Somewhere in the church graveyard he is dead, the place of his plot lost amid epitaphs erased by wind and rain where he himself was minister long years. No surprise in this, since he said he could utterly forgotten lye and poetry would be his pillar, his monument that never would decline or waste at all But stand for ever by his own Firme and well fixt foundation. In those pig-lands, the mucky soil shit-slurried, clouds tossed over the endless tracts of field, he wrote, as if poetry could be salvation, could come like Christ leading the hosts of heaven and bring him from the meadows and ditches of loathéd Devonshire. That place wore long and hard on him, as he remembered the alehouses of London, where he drank with Ben Jonson at the Sun The Dog, the triple Tunne. Yet Jonson does not mention him in letters or memoirs. And none of his circle wrote Herrick's name. His absence yawns like the empty fields around his place. 3 Wit could not free him, though he said, God I love wit. His poems came at the wrong time, as fratricide plowed every English shire. No one noticed his book piled in the stalls. The din of tracts and pamphlets silenced him. A Puritan supplanted him, took his pulpit and his church. He fled to London (not unhappily), a true-borne Roman, to a ten-year exile but no reward for it. He found his way back to Dean-Bourne, rocky creek, unstable waters, to live obscurity. 4 He lived to eighty-three. Twenty-six years of his life his poetry gathered dust in London's stalls. The seasons rolled again, the liturgy, the holidays, the land settled to peace, new fads and crazes came, and Herrick preached and wrote and read and died until men with powered wigs years afterward picked up and read his curiosity, turning the obscure pages, seeing his lines, Gather ye rosebuds while ye may Old time is still a-flying and wondering, those antiquarians who made their inquiries about this poet. 5 Under the soil time flies: the roots that leached his ribs, took out his flesh, carried his body back to loam. He once said, Putrefaction is the end of all that nature doth intend. The slow roll of seasons confirmed as much to him. In his decline he only saw (dim-sighted) sights dull anyway—not knowing his pillar of fame would rise. It lay, like him, bound up in undug rock.