Moran is an educator specializing in British and American literature. In this essay, he explains how the speaker of "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" urges his "virgin" readers to marry and view the passing of time as a threat.

Although William Wordsworth is universally acknowledged as the foremost British poet of nature (with Robert Frost serving as his American counterpart), Robert Herrick certainly stands as an earlier poet who employed nature to meet his artistic ends. Worsdworth, of course, became incredibly famous in his own lifetime for poems such as "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" (1798), "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (1807) and "The World Is Too Much with Us" (1807)—all masterpieces in which the complex relationship between humans and the natural world is explored. Herrick never enjoyed such great success, but his volume Hesperides (1648) teems with poems that, while not at...