The following version of the poem was used to create this guide: Herrick, Robert. "The Vine." Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50721/the-vine.

Note that all parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Robert Herrick was born in Cheapside, London. He was part of a large family. His father died when he was less than a year old, and little is known about his early life. He was apprenticed as a goldsmith to his uncle, but left the business to attend university. He was ordained in 1623, but lost his parish when he refused to take an oath related to the English Civil War. He regained his parish after the Restoration of the English monarchy, and he practiced until his death at the age of 83. Herrick never married, and it is thought that the women in his poems are mostly fictional.

Herrick is considered a "Cavalier Poet," a group of seventeenth-century courtiers who supported King Charles I during the English Civil War. In 1649, Charles was executed, the question of monarchical versus commonwealth rule having divided the English population. In 1660, the monarchy was re-established when Charles II assumed the throne, and as such the prominent supporters of the monarchy (like Herrick) enjoyed the benefits of this period known as the Restoration.

Nearly all of Herrick's work reflects themes of rejecting the status quo in favor of the pleasures of life. He is perhaps best known for his poem, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time," which dramatizes the "carpe diem" or "seize the day" philosophy of living life to the fullest in the present moment. The central plot of "The Vine" is an erotic fantasy about a speaker turning into a vine in order to embrace his lover.