'Lords of Wine and Oile': Community and Conviviality in the Poetry of Robert Herrick (OUP, Sept 2011)
This collection of essays grew out of a conference held in summer 2008, halfway through the process of editing The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, at Buckfast Abbey, and Herrick's nearby church at Dean Prior. The book brings together an international group of scholars to analyse his poetic response to the communities - both real and imagined - that he inhabited throughout his active literary career. The essays explore his self-fashioning as a manuscript poet in Jacobean London and Cambridge, his experiences in London during the Civil War and the political and personal significance of publishing his collected works at the end of almost a decade of conflict. Michelle O'Callaghan and Nick McDowell re-examine his affiliations with the coteries of Ben Jonson and Thomas Stanley. Syrithe Pugh and Stella Achilleos uncover the political implications of his imitations of Ovid and Anacreon, and the Royalist sympathies of his printer and publishers are described for the first time by Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly. Herrick's musical collaborations with William and Henry Lawes are analysed by Richard Wistreich and Stacy Jocoy, and Line Cottignies compares his attitude to the authority and individualism promoted by print to that of another Royalist poet, Katherine Philips. His often overlooked religious poetry is discussed by Graham Parry as a product of the tolerant inclusiveness that is also evident in his secular poetry. His work attracts contrasting readings from Katharine Maus, Leah Marcus, John Creaser and Achsah Guibbory who respectively employ the insights of queer theory, postmodernism, formalism, and historicism to debate the significance of Herrick's distinctive contribution to early modern poetry.
Come Sons of Summer, by whose toile,
We are the Lords of Wine and Oile
By whose tough labours, and rough hands,
We rip up first, then reap our lands.
Crown'd with the eares of corne, now come,
And, to the Pipe, sing Harvest home.
Come forth, my Lord, and see the Cart
Drest up with all the Country Art.
See, here a Maukin, there a sheet,
As spotlesse pure, as it is sweet:
The Horses, Mares, and frisking Fillies,
(Clad, all, in Linnen, white as Lillies.)
The Harvest Swaines, and Wenches Bound
For joy, to see the Hock-cart crown'd.
Copyright The Herrick Project 2006