‘Cleanly-Wantonnesse’ and Puritan Legislation: the Politics of Herrick's Amatory Ovidianism

Abstract

The frontispiece and title page of Herrick's 1648 publication, the Hesperides, constitute a witty and riddling piece of self-presentation, which combines classical allusion and a statement of political allegiance. On the title page, an ornate crown appears beneath a slight misquotation from Amores III. ix, Ovid's lament for Tibullus: 'Effugient avidos carmina nostra rogos' ('our songs will escape the greedy funeral pyre'). The crown is of course a visual emblem of the work's royalism, in 1648 a cause in eclipse, with the King in the custody of Parliament. The juxtaposition suggests that Ovid's observation on the triumph of poetry over death is being applied as a gesture of defiance in the face of political defeat, an assertion that the royalist spirit and royalist song will survive the apparent death of the royalist cause. The bust of the author in the frontispiece opposite reflects the same combination of ideas. Two winged amores flying towards the bust draw attention to its two striking peculiarities. That on the left reaches out with one hand as if to catch hold of a lock of the luxuriant dark hair with which, along with fine moustaches, it is endowed, despite its otherwise marmoreal and sculpted appearance, carrying in the other hand a rose garland to crown it. The amor on the right, carrying another rose garland, seems to be about to hang it over the bust's enormous nose. The long curls, the hairstyle made fashionable by the King and his sons, are, like the title page's crown, a badge of allegiance to the royalist cause. The nose, meanwhile, reflecting the title page's quotation, is Herrick's jocular gesture of self-presentation as another Ovidius Naso, 'Ovid the Nose', about whose cognomen Shakespeare's Holofernes puns 'Why, indeed, Naso but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy?' (Loves Labours Lost IV.ii). The picture represents Ovid reborn as a defiantly partisan Herrick, and alerts the reader to the inextricability of the volume's practice of classical imitation and its political programme.Recent years have seen increasing recognition of the Hesperides' political engagement, with more attention paid to the poems on explicitly political themes, to Laudian aspects of its religious stance, and to the Caroline agenda of its poems on festivities banned by Parliament.1 Yet the role of the Hesperides' oft-noted and pervasive allusiveness within its political programme has not been examined. Indeed, under the influence of the most accomplished student of Herrick's classical 'borrowings', Gordon Braden, the generally accepted idea of Herrick as classical imitator still resembles the now discredited traditional view of Herrick the apolitical aesthete, 'who in a troubled age is largely content to create a timeless Arcadia'.2 Finding in Herrick something 'approaching ... latter-day notions of pure poetry', Braden strictly delimits the meaningfulness of his imitative practices, concluding that Herrick is 'less interested in what his poets mean than in what they say' and responds 'primarily to moments of verbal grace rather than to structures of meaning'.3 I would suggest to the contrary that Herrick's imitation of Ovid is systematic, strategic and meaningful, foregrounded as an act of self-presentation which functions as a guide to the unifying polemical purpose of the collection. The Ovidianism of the Hesperides is in fact much more pervasive and multi-faceted than has previously been recognized, and I examine other aspects of it, and of its contribution to Herrick's royalist polemic, elsewhere.4 Here I shall focus on one particularly insistent strain, the allusions to and imitations of Ovid's amatory elegies, examining its role in the political programme of the volume, and what it tells us about Herrick's own conception of the nature and purpose of imitation.Love poetry constitutes a high proportion of the Hesperides, and is announced as one of its major constituents in 'The Argument of his Book',I write of Youth, of Love, and have AccesseBy these, to sing of cleanly-Wantonnesse. …