AN IMMORTAL POEM BY ROBERT HERRICK

 

AN IMMORTAL  POEM  BY ROBERT  HERRICK

Born on 24^th August 1591 the English lyric poet Robert Herrick who was also a cleric died on 15^th October 1674. He is best known for his two anthologies Hesperides and Wit’s Recreation. One of his immortal lyrics is TO DAFFODILS which reads as follows:

  Fair Daffodils, we weep to see

You haste away so soon:

As yet the early-rising Sun

Has not attain’d his noon. Stay, stay,

Until the hasting day

Has run

But to the even-song;

 

And, having pray’d together, we

Will go with you along.

 

We have short time to stay, as you,

We have as short a Spring;

As quick a growth to meet decay

As you, or any thing.

We die,

As your hours do, and dry

Away

 Like to the Summer’s rain;

Or as the pearls of morning’s dew,

Ne’er to be found again.

Life’s brevity and the quick fleeting away of beauty is a common theme in world’s great poetry. A Persian poet says that while each inhalation symbolises life, each exhalation symbolises death. Similarly, an Urdu poet Fani Badayuni likens each new breath to the corpse of the preceding old breath.

In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act 5, Sc.3, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.” And women, in Twelfth Night, Act 1, Sc.1, are roses, whose fair flower being once display;d , doth fall that very hour.     

          Herrick tells ‘Daffodils’ that we, human beings, too, have short time to stay and as quick a growth to meet decay as they or any thing. Like them we also dry away and are just like the pearls of morning dew, never to be found again.

          What adds extra charm to the theme of brevity of life in Herrick’s poem is his religious request to the daffodils :

” Stay, stay, until the hasting day has reached the time of the even-song’ so that they may pray together.”

This touch of ‘pensive fantasy’ and ‘meditative flavour’ entitles TO DAFFOLIS to be counted among immortal English songs.

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26^th March 2021                                                G. R. KANWAL