SOURCE: “Robert Herrick's Recreative Pastoral,” in Genre, Vol. VII, No. 2, June 1974, pp. 183-95.

In the following essay, Gertzman illustrates Robert Herrick's “recreative” (as opposed to didactic) pastoral in several poems in his Hesperides, noting that the “cleanly wanton” poems are marked by playful humor, fancy, naive enthusiasm, and genial humility.

The pastoral poetry of the Renaissance has received a great deal of critical attention in recent years. Of special interest have been the uses to which great poets such as Spenser, Milton and Marvell have put the genre. The moral and spiritual depths beneath the physically delightful surface have been well documented. But the attractiveness of pastoral for some minor poets, especially lyric poets, has been less fully considered. Of these poets Robert Herrick is an interesting example, especially because of his Hesperides, in which we find a very definite pastoral sensibility, but one in which mood predominates...