Herrick never married, and none of his love-poems seem to connect directly with any one woman. He loved the richness of sensuality and the variety of life, and this is shown vividly in such poems as Cherry-ripe, Delight in Disorder and Upon Julia’s Clothes.

The over-riding message of Herrick’s work is that life is short, the world is beautiful, love is splendid, and we must use the short time we have to make the most of it. This message can be seen clearly in To the Virgins, to make much of Time; To Daffodils; To Blossoms; and Corinna's Going A Maying, where the warmth and exuberance of what seems to have been a kindly and jovial personality comes over strongly.


Gather Ye rosebuds While Ye May, by John William Waterhouse, (1909)
The opening stanza in one of his more famous poems, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time", is as follows:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.

I think you missed the point.


The over-riding message of Herrick’s work is that life is short, the world is beautiful, love is splendid, and we must use the short time we have to make the most of it.



Read more: bigmango.boards.net/post/124572/quote/10223?page=1#ixzz4hoj7d5R1

You can define it for yourself when you are dead.

A metaphysical laugh from me.

An old guy, bet he is not much older than me, hobbling on a make shift frame, collecting empties. We save them for him.
I call him Frankenstein's Monster, but no one here knows the reference.

They do know when i say if i am ever like that do not hesitate to kill me.

They laugh , like you and say no way you, you will live for ever.

I know different.

The English Revolution a forgotten episode.

All was in dispute.

The metaphysical poets , perhaps considered on the royalist "side", were anti puritanism.
Subtle sometimes, but often outright libertine.
Enough for tonight, Marvell a fragment:

from Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax Related Poem Content Details
BY ANDREW MARVELL
Within this sober frame expect
Work of no foreign architect;
That unto caves the quarries drew,
And forests did to pastures hew;
Who of his great design in pain
Did for a model vault his brain;
Whose columns should so high be rais’d
To arch the brows that on them gaz’d.

Why should of all things man unrul’d
Such unproportion’d dwellings build?
The beasts are by their dens exprest,
And birds contrive an equal nest;
The low roof’d tortoises do dwell
In cases fit of tortoise-shell;
No creature loves an empty space;
Their bodies measure out their place.

But he, superfluously spread,
Demands more room alive than dead;
And in his hollow palace goes
Where winds as he themselves may lose.
What need of all this marble crust
T’impark the wanton mote of dust,
That thinks by breadth the world t’unite
Though the first builders fail’d in height?

But all things are composed here
Like nature, orderly and near;
In which we the dimensions find
Of that more sober age and mind,
When larger sized men did stoop
To enter at a narrow loop;
As practising, in doors so straight,
To strain themselves through Heaven’s gate.

And surely when the after age
Shall hither come in pilgrimage,
These sacred places to adore,
By Vere and Fairfax trod before,
Men will dispute how their extent
Within such dwarfish confines went;
And some will smile at this, as well
As Romulus his bee-like cell.

Humility alone designs
Those short but admirable lines,
By which, ungirt and unconstrain’d,
Things greater are in less contain’d.
Let others vainly strive t’immure
The circle in the quadrature!
These holy mathematics can
In ev’ry figure equal man.

Yet thus the laden house does sweat,
And scarce endures the master great,
But where he comes the swelling hall
Stirs, and the square grows spherical;
More by his magnitude distress’d,
Then he is by its straightness press’d,
And too officiously it slights
That in itself which him delights.

So honour better lowness bears,
Than that unwonted greatness wears;
Height with a certain grace does bend,
But low things clownishly ascend.
And yet what needs there here excuse,
Where ev’ry thing does answer use?
Where neatness nothing can condemn,
Nor pride invent what to contemn?

A stately frontispiece of poor
Adorns without the open door;
Nor less the rooms within commends
Daily new furniture of friends.
The house was built upon the place
Only as for a mark of grace;
And for an inn to entertain
Its lord a while, but not remain.

Him Bishops-Hill, or Denton may,
Or Billbrough, better hold than they;
But nature here hath been so free
As if she said leave this to me.
Art would more neatly have defac’d
What she had laid so sweetly waste;
In fragrant gardens, shady woods,
Deep meadows, and transparent floods.

Hold on, Buhi

Some of us are a bit busy, and don't have time to write long metaphysical descriptors of human condition.