Robert Herrick on Julia's Mythic Term Paper

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He even speaks of the petticoat wildly flinging and closely clinging "to thy thighs," evoking the movements of sex and the bodily language of intercourse once again. In the end, this sexualization of language is transformed into words that speak of orgasm and the loss of erection, so often referred to by poets as that "little death" and here labelled as that which is "Drown'd in delights, but could not die" as the speaker grows soft with a passion that did "melt me down" until "I there did lie."

The physicality of these lines might be merely beautiful, as much sexualized love poetry is, had not Herrick's narrated also chosen a wealth of words hinting at the dirtiness of this act, and the fact that it was resisted (in mind) by the woman. " I follow'd still," he says, as Julia walks away from his hungry eyes. The words of transgression are certainly present, as when the author is speaking of how this action "scarce had leave."

Yet the beauty is present. The reader must see this imagined rape through levels of metaphor and fancy language. Archaic, poetic terms are used, such as "thy" and "twould." The petticoat over which he fixates - though it is merely a bit of blue crinoline showing under a skirt - is refered to as canopy of sky and a blaze of fire. (One wonders if he isn't peeping like a Tom from under some stairs, to be able to see her petticoats moving like a sky above him) the poem is beautifully ordered in eleven conjoined cuplets, each with crafted rhythm and pretty (if occasionally quaint) rhyme.

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The form is unobtrusive and reassuring, the shape of classical beauty and tradition which somehow excuses the violence of the content.

Indeed, when the act is finished in his mind, Herrick's narrator actually shoves Julia away and rejects her. In his mind he has built her up as a virginal statue in azure robes, as a goddess of canopied sky and blazing fire - when she proves beneath her petticoat to be merely a defrocked and deflowered maiden, she cannot save him or take him to heaven. He will not love her if she cannot grant that heaven: "I could not: should it move / to life eternal, [only then, he implies] I could love."

There might be many ways to approach this poem. One could be amused by it - by the exaggeration of the significance of this petticoat, the way it was memorialized and made so mythic. One could merely immerse one's self in the beauty of the language. Either response is a surrender to the patriarchal violence inherent in the work, for either way the reader finds himself (or herself!) in silent league with the narrator, laughing at his objectification of Julia which reduces her to this bit of laundry, or allowing his lingual power to efface his….....

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