Cavalier poetry is different from traditional poetry in its subject matter. Instead of tackling issues like religion, philosophy, and the arts, cavalier poetry aims to express the joy and simple gratification of celebratory things much livelier than the traditional works of their predecessors. Robert Herrick is one of the well known cavalier poets. Besides, Andrew Marvell uses metaphysical themes in his poems.
Robert Herrick (baptised 24 August 1591 — buried 15 October 1674) was a 17th-century English lyric poet and cleric. He is best known for Hesperides, a book of poems. This includes the carpe diem poem “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”, with the first line “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may”. Herrick wrote over 2,500 poems, about half of which appear in his major work, Hesperides. Hesperides also includes the much shorter Noble Numbers, his first book of spiritual works, first published in 1648. He is well known for his style, and in his earlier works for frequent references to lovemaking and the female body. His later poetry was of a more spiritual and philosophical nature. Among his most famous short poetical sayings are the unique monometers, such as number 475, “Thus I / Pass by / And die,/ As one / Unknown / And gone.”
Herrick sets out his subject-matter in the poem he printed at the beginning of his collection, The Argument of his Book. He dealt with English country life and its seasons, village customs, complimentary poems to various ladies and his friends, themes taken from classical writings, and a solid bedrock of Christian faith, not intellectualized but underpinning the rest. It has been said of Herrick’s style that “his directness of speech with clear and simple presentation of thought, a fine artist working with conscious knowledge of his art, of an England of his youth in which he lives and moves and loves, clearly assigns him to the first place as a lyrical poet in the strict and pure sense of the phrase.” [Source: Wikipedia]
Andrew Marvell ( 31 March 1621–16 August 1678) was an English metaphysical poet, satirist and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1659 and 1678. During the Commonwealth period he was a colleague and friend of John Milton. [Source: Wikipedia] Marvell’s relationship to Cavalier poetry has been a significant topic of interest for critics of his work, promising as it does to shed some light on both his place within the genres and styles of mid-seventeenth-century verse and on the complexities of political positioning evident in his earlier work. But Cavalier poetry is itself a complex and non-uniform category, with such complexities evident both in the difficulties of organizing and applying such a label to a group of poets and their work, and in the problems of accommodating significant differences and antagonisms between varying modes of Cavalier writing. In line with this understanding, this chapter explores Marvell’s poetic relationship to his Cavalier contemporaries in a way which recognizes that they can’t easily be comprehended as a fixed point of reference with which to measure Marvell’s own place in the poetic landscape of the time.
The passage is taken from the book named The Art of Poetry by Shira Wolosky
‘’One such topos is the approach or attitude to life called carpe diem, or “seize the day.” This has a long history in Latin verse, as the designation “carpe diem” suggests, a history which writers in English learned and referred to. One classic example in English is “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick (1591–1674):
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.Then be not coy, but use your time,
And, while ye may, go marry;
For, having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.
As this poem shows, “carpe diem” is a way of saying: Hurry! Time
is running out! Take your chance, seize your opportunity while you
can, especially your opportunity for love, before your powers desert
you and your decaying body ceases to be an object of desire. The
poem delivers this call through a series of metaphors. The first, the
“rosebuds,” are images of passing time — if they are not gathered
now, then tomorrow will be too late — and therefore of mortal life.
More specifically, as the third line shows — “this same flower that
smiles today” — the images of the rosebuds are images of the virgins
called on to gather them. The word “smiles” associates the flower
with the girls, who, like the flowers themselves, need to be plucked,
since they too “tomorrow will by dying.
The poem goes on to propose other images of passing time: the
sun whose advance also marks its descent; youth, whose warm
blood precedes and hence signals an inevitable decline. But the first
image should sound familiar. We have already seen this comparison
of the virgin girl to a rose, urging her to learn a lesson of haste
and action from its near and inevitable death.
“Gather ye rosebuds” can serve as introduction to what is probably
the greatest expression of “carpe diem” in English, “To His Coy
Mistress,” by Andrew Marvell (1621–1678):
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze.
Two hundred to adore each breast:
But thirty thousand to the rest.
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, Lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near:
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song: then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity:
And your quaint honor turn to dust;
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave’s a fine and private place
But none, I think, do there embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapt power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball:
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
We recognize this as “carpe diem” at once, in the title, which echoes
Herrick’s “Then be not coy.” And of course the concluding verse
paragraph brings the lesson home: “Now therefore, while the youthful
hue sits on our skin like morning dew . . . now let us sport us while
we may.” The whole poem follows a rhetorical structure of argument
and persuasion: If, but, therefore. On this level, it is a skillful effort to
accomplish its purpose, which is the seduction of the coy mistress.
We see, in fact, that “carpe diem” is a form of seduction poem, bringing
together two impulses or patterns in poetry.’’
