Poem of the Week 2024/23

Upon Her Voice

Let but thy voice engender with the string,

And Angels will be borne, while thou dost sing.

– Robert Herrick

Length is an interesting phenomenon in poetry: often the long form, the epic, is rated the highest achievement of the art form, just as novels are often valued over short stories, but the lightning flash of a brief poem has its own art & its own fascination & power. Some poets naturally gravitate towards the brief (I can't imagine that any admirer of Emily Dickinson ever wished that she had attempted an epic). Herrick was one of those; his witty, sensuous, observational poems are mostly short & all the more memorable for it.

In this poem, two lines tell us all, though the title, which is sort of a line of its own, announces the subject (just as epics have a statement of subject & theme at the opening ("Arms & the man I sing"), so do briefer poems, if only to save time by pointing our minds in the right direction). The poet is speaking to a woman; she is not singing, but he hopes she will be; he must have heard her in the past, because he knows what delights to expect. There is a flirtatious undercurrent here, as he pleads with her to sing; it is not her voice alone, but her voice united with "the string" (a lute or violin or some such instrument) – not just united, but engendered. Engender means not only "to make people have a particular feeling or make a situation start to exist" – that is, her voice, united with an instrument, will create something new, something worth waiting for – but also to procreate, to beget – that is, art is generated by something akin to a sexual relationship, in which two procreators produce an independent, third, living being. (As Iago says, "My muse labors, & thus is she delivered".)

What sort of child is being produced? We find out in the second line: no squalling earthly babes, but angels. And not just one, but many; an abundance of heavenly messengers. Angels traditionally are shown hymning praise to God, often depicted in art with harps & other instruments. They also put us in mind of the music of the spheres that was supposed to result from the exquisite mathematical circling of the planets. The voice united with the string will remove us from this mundane reality to a higher existence.

And the angels are borne: the primary meaning of that word is carried (just as the sound vibrations we call music are carried to us through the air), but there is also the underlying pun, continuing the procreative theme, of given birth. The music floats, but is also rooted in our basic physical, as well as spiritual, urges.

Yet this glorious moment is as brief as this poem: it lasts only while thou dost sing (note the use of the intimate form thou; this word often strikes us as formal, because it is archaic, but it was once a living word in English, the equivalent of the intimate French tu). Given the sexual subtext to the poem, it's difficult not to see a glance here at the briefness of orgasm as well as the briefness of spiritual exaltation: a reminder that we are a complex mixture of the animal & the angelic. Herrick, perhaps most famous for the line Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, here pleads with an unidentified but crucial woman to produce, through the unlikely union of voice & string, a moment of earthly ecstasy.

Given the frequently saucy nature of Herrick's poetry, editions from the more decorous decades between his lifetime (he died in 1674) & the late twentieth century were frequently heavily edited & difficult to come by, so a complete edition of his poetry was one of the books I kept an eye out for. Oxford University Press published a wonderful two-volume set, but it's quite expensive. But several years ago, during yet another difficult period, on top of all my other difficulties, I had to help arrange a ridiculous offsite for a ridiculous group at my then job (which was also ridiculous). I vowed to myself that if I managed to make it through the week of the offsite without strangling one or more people, I would buy The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, edited by Tom T. Cain and Ruth Connolly, without even waiting for one of OUP's occasional sales. Reader, that carrot kept this donkey on track & out of jail. Buying expensive books of poetry: preventing violence for untold years!