TO A GENTLEWOMAN OBJECTING TO HIM HIS GRAY HAIRS:
SO WHAT?
Mr. Poetical once lived on a street named Herrick, which was met at the corner by Herbert, which went north past Addison and Shenstone. The village founders, I found out much later, liked to name things after literary figures. Herrick and Herbert were poets. Addison was a newspaper writer, while Shenstone, as we all know, worked at the quarry with Fred and Barney and probably chiseled poetry on a slab himself, in his spare time. I suppose that if I had known that Herrick was a poet when I lived on his street, I might have read his work, so that I might have a nice little anecdote to give along with my address, when ordering dinner. If you lived on, say, Beyonce Lane or Ed Sheeran Boulevard, you’d just have your pizzas delivered to a post office box.
Having lived on Herrick’s street has made me feel somewhat in his debt, but that doesn’t mean that Mr. Poetical wouldn’t smack him down like a tsetse fly if he were boring. You might think, “Of course he’s boring. He’s a poet. He’s from long ago. His poetry never even mentions sparking a fatty or cronking a hottie. What is there in this for me?” Well, Robert Herrick may not have lived to see the development of the cellular phone, or the regular phone, or the automobile or the train or shoes, for that matter, but he did know the essence of poetry. Poetry is about feelings, and understanding the world through words, but mostly, as every poet and poetess knows, it is about trying to get the other sex to drop their pants.
To that end, Herrick wasn't ashamed to act like a big baby. He took risks: while another poet might try flattery to get a girl’s number, Herrick was never shy about insulting and scaring girls to make himself seem more attractive. A daring strategy, but then, he was kind of a goofy looking bird, so you work with what you’ve got.
So you would think that Herrick would be remembered only as a novelty act, like the guy who wrote “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.” Nope. His stuff is still filed in Classic Poetry books with the other eggheads. He can sound like those oh-so-sensitive poetical souls that enjoy nothing more than a walk among the posies, if you pay no attention to what he was saying. You’ve got to admire a writer who knows how to talk dirty and make it sound classy.
Herrick, who lived from 1591-1674, is best known for his poem “To The Virgins, To Make the Most of Time,” which is sort of an anthem for hard-up guys who feel that they could do quite well with the ladies if only virgins realized that the clock is ticking, death approaches, and that their best defense against the inevitable march toward the grave is sleeping with poets. While most connoisseurs of Hard-up Loser Poetry favor that one, Mr. Poetical feels that “To a Gentlewoman Objecting To Him His Gray Hairs” out-pathetics it by miles.
This poem captures the more popular poem’s hope that any woman rejecting the poet will eventually, like the victim of a voodoo curse, be humbled by age. That in itself could be the most passive threat ever conceived—political, sporting and military competitions would be slower, but safer, if fought on the principle of “Let’s just wait—when they go in for hip replacement, we win!”
While both Herrick poems use aging as a reason for urgent, immediate nooky, “To a Gentlewoman. . . “ adds the vanity of a grown man lashing out because his feelings have been hurt. This is clearly the work of a man who would suit up with a girdle, elevator shoes, and a toupee before going to pick up his Depends underwear. One wonders how Herrick survived middle age, since little red convertibles were not yet invented in his day.
Which isn't to say that he didn't know it—about the pathos, that is, not about little red convertibles. No, Herrick certainly knew how desperate he sounded when he screamed on the page at women, "Oh, yeah? You think it's funny that I'm going gray? Wait'll you get old, see how you like that."
We like to believe that poets—at least the ones that have been handed down through the generations—would only concern themselves with the nobler things: with daffodils and God and that “O, what eternal substance mete ‘pon yon yore” stuff that has been causing comas in the classroom for untold generations.
School boards have been sniffing out copies of The Catcher in the Rye since it was published, because of its use of “four letter words.” While kids will fight to their death to get away from poetry because (boo-hoo) it isn’t written in “the way people really talk,” their fathers might, on the way out of divorce court, want to learn how to get back in the game with Bob Herrick’s Sure-Fire Lines for Picking Up Chicks.