![]() “Hock-carts” are the decorated carts that bring home the harvest, “wassails” the toasts especially associated with Christmas and the new year. Then he moves us on to the larger celebrations in the rural and Christian year. ![]() It’s a playful, pretty string of nouns, and might seem somewhat random, so in the second line Herrick begins to build his calendar and show his pastoral credentials, separating the seasons and specifying July flowers as if to notice the different flora produced by the changing months. The alliteration fairly bubbles along in the opening line. There is harmony as well as contrast, and a satisfying arc is formed from line one’s spring blossoms to the final hope of Heaven’s largesse. Herrick’s art here lies in the trimness of his selection (there were 1,400 poems, after all, in the original collection) and in its ordering, allowing various configurations of the list-as-narrative. In a fine essay on the Poetry Foundation website, the author observes that “Hesperides is the only major collection of poetry in English to open with a versified table of contents.” I wonder if this is still the case, and would be interested to hear of any contemporary contenders setting out their poetic wares in this way, with or without rhyme and metre. Argument signifies “theme” or “contents” and is not a defence. It’s the opening poem of Herrick’s only collection, Hesperides, and summarises some of its topics. ![]() This week, that “Argument” takes the starring role as Poem of the Week, a little hock-cart of sunlit harvest to set us up for the autumn days. In May 2009, my blogpost about Robert Herrick’s poem To His Mistress, Objecting to his Neither Toying or Talking included, by way of introduction, four lines from The Argument of His Book. ![]()
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