Kinky Herrick

[print edition page number: 83]

Despite the pervasive eroticism of his work, Robert Herrick has enjoyed relative anonymity in recent gender- and sexuality-oriented literary scholarship, his sexual politics occasioning little critical debate or even interest. I say enjoyed not because I expect Herrick would like being passed over — his work certainly provides evidence to the contrary — but rather because when his poetry does gain critical attention, its erotic content is frequently taken to indicate either a psychosexually stunted or a misogynistic psyche (or, often, both). Lillian Schanfield, for example, notices that Herrick

lurks, leers, glides, spies, melts, yearns, swoons, heaves, pants, and dreams … perseverates about women’s physical parts, body movements, and clothing … mentally disrobes his idealized mistresses … in raptures about their lips, breasts and nipples, hair, teeth, legs, bellies, buttocks, waists, calves, thighs, skin, feet and sundry “parts” … praises their shoes, fabrics, petticoats and other articles of feminine clothing … sniffs sweat, perfumes and other odors … [and] fantasizes about kissing.^[1] [84]

As Schanfield’s list indicates, Herrick’s collection Hesperides (1648) indexes an extraordinary variety of sexual activity, the speaker an unrepentant fantasist, fetishist, and connoisseur of female bodies and accoutrement. For Schanfield, however, these erotic investments are not forms of benign sexual variation but rather indicate a pathology, conveying a “furtive air of unhealthy sexuality” that indicates the poet’s own “sexual problems related to immaturity, passivity and possibly impotence.”^[2] Schanfield is admittedly singular in the transparency of her diagnostic reading, yet in a similar vein, feminist critics of Herrick have often uncritically applied Nancy Vickers’s account of Petrarchism’s ostensibly inherent misogyny to accuse Herrick of the “impulse … to dominate, control, and display [women] to delight the male reader and to perpetuate the cultural repression of women,” in Moira Baker’s phrase.^[3] Similarly, Bronwen Price asserts that, for Herrick, the woman’s “dissected form” is placed in “subjection to classification, identification, definition and ultimate mastery of the male gaze.”^[4] While part of the persistence of these accusations of misogyny can be explained by the relative neglect of Herrick’s work in the twenty-first century — accounts of the sexual politics of early modern love poetry have been greatly nuanced in the past thirty years — as recently as 2010, Pamela Hammons assessed that women in Herrick are “rendered passive, still, silent, and empty [85] of agency.”^[5] Even as Hammons acknowledges “the limits to Herrick’s ability to imagine consistently a heteronormative male subject who is absolutely independent of and master over object,” she identifies a persistent “fear of a male subject trans-shifting into a passive, static object controlled by others” in his verse.^[6] Similarly, in 2021 Katie Kadue asserted that women are literal “garbage” for Herrick: “They already are and always were refuse, masquerading as human women. Specific human body parts — legs, thighs, breast, teeth, hair, eyes, head — are disposed of as false figures for what a woman really is: a vague ‘something,’ made of ‘stuffe.’”^[7] For Kadue, Herrick’s fetishism is naked evidence of his perception of women as so much trash. As Michael Schoenfeldt both summarizes and assesses, “Commingling fear, disgust, and desire in its confrontation with the female body, Hesperides seems intent on forestalling the eroticism it stirs.”^[8]

Despite this tone of critical disgust, the general observation subtending their assessments — that Herrick’s eroticism is idiosyncratic, fetishistic, and voyeuristic — is, in fact, a good one. Herrick’s erotic poetry is one of fragmented bodies, of kissing, panting, and stroking, of voyeurism and scopic pleasures, and of whipping and binding; it also rejects male penetration, ejaculation, and orgasm as particularly desirable teloi of sexual encounters. Given the overwhelming normativity of critical accounts of his erotic imaginary, then, it seems to me that Herrick is due for a queer — indeed, a kinky — reassessment, one that embraces rather than pathologizes these very perversities for which he has been castigated. The recuperative impulse in my reading, that is, is not to interpolate Herrick’s eroticism into a normative paradigm, as [86] does David Landrum when he argues that Herrick is not the “voyeuristic effeminate pervert” his reputation makes him out to be.^[9] Rather, in this chapter I trouble negative critical accounts of Herrick’s opinion of women and “perverted” sexual acts more generally through exploring his kinky fantasies of being beaten, bound, penetrated, and dominated. In so doing, I will problematize not his fantasies but rather the critical impulse to reflexively diagnose pathology or misogyny when confronted with such modalities of desire. Disputing Schoenfeldt’s claim that Hesperides “represent[s] sexual desire in ways that necessarily preclude satisfaction,” a formulation that forecloses the possibility that nongenital eroticism — and thus nonteleological sex acts — can be satisfactory,^[10] I will argue that Herrick’s nongenital erotics, his kinky and masochistic fantasies, are nonpathological examples of benign sexual variation with significant implications for our understanding of both his work and early modern sexual formations more generally. Informed by Catherine Bates’s account of early modern poetic speakers who adopt postures of masochistic impotence, as well as Karmen MacKendrick’s concept of counterpleasures, I demonstrate both Herrick’s kinkiness and its queer, antimisogynistic ethos.^[11] Furthermore, I will briefly adumbrate how Herrick’s erotic ethic not only fails to entail a pathological fear of and desire to control women but also demonstrates a broader, queerer array of early modern sexual formations and pleasures than is often allowed by modern scholarship.

While not all of the pleasures I will here discuss fit within the paradigm of masochism — falling under the more general rubric we often call BDSM — masochism’s critical allure has generated an array of theories [87] for understanding nonpathological forms of pleasure-in-pain. One such paradigm can be found in MacKendrick’s concept of counterpleasures. To begin, MacKendrick examines Freud’s discussion of forepleasures, or pleasures that “are essential as preliminaries to ‘normal’ sexual pleasure but which, if lingered over, become ‘perverse.’” These pleasures, she continues, “may be so strong that instead of being promptly and properly rushed through, these preliminaries become themselves the ‘aim’ of sexual activity.” This is a problem for Freud, not least because, being part of normative sexual activity themselves, forepleasures reveal “the inherent perversity of the ‘normal’” — if forepleasures are part of normative intercourse, the line between normal and perverse becomes difficult to assess.^[12] For MacKendrick, however, dwelling in forepleasure is not pathological, but rather allows one access to counterpleasures, or “pleasures that tend away from all sorts of teleologies,” of which masochism is only one of many examples.^[13] These counterpleasures resist the circuits of linear, heteronormative sexuality and are indeed particularly pronounced in masochistic or BDSM contexts, as Brandy Simula’s social science research has shown. As Simula demonstrates, “Despite the long-standing use of orgasm as an indicator of ‘good sex,’ recent research … has suggested that for many individuals, orgasm is not a required and, in some cases, not even an important or desired component of sex.”^[14] Participants in her BDSM research in particular “resisted the importance of orgasm as an indicator of a sexual experience or sexual fulfillment.”^[15] In a similar way, Herrick’s resistance to being the agent of penetration and experiencing orgasm, his insistence on “perverse,” nongenital pleasures suggests a means of resistance to dominant, (proto-)heteropatriarchal [88] penetration-and-ejaculation narratives that prioritize male orgasm as the sine qua non of sexual experience. That is to say, Herrick’s kinky embrace of perverse pleasures offers speakers and readers alike a means of resistance to normative paradigms of heteropatriarchal, (re)productive forms of sexual experience.

As Catherine Bates has shown, Renaissance Petrarchism is shot through with the topoi of masochism, the lover’s abjection problematizing ideals of male social and sexual sovereignty. Bates notes that

Renaissance lyric is populated by … figures who appear by choice to defy the period’s model of a phallic, masterly masculinity — these adopted positions of impotence, failure, and gendered discontent seeming willfully to pervert what might otherwise have been seen (indeed, might thereby be defined) as the patriarchal norm.^[16]

Many of Herrick’s fantasies draw on the tropological matrixes familiar from this Petrarchan pain tradition; in the fifth of his five poems titled “To Dianeme,” for example, the speaker finds himself in abject servitude to the “unkind” (14) and “cruell” (16) Dianeme, the uncompromising sadist to his helplessly devoted masochist.^[17] When Dianeme is “Stung by a fretfull Bee” (2), the speaker immediately places himself in erotic and physical service to relieve her pain:

I the Javelin suckt away,
And heal’d the wound in thee.
(3–4)

That is, Dianeme has been violently penetrated by a third party’s “Javelin,” which the speaker seeks to heal through an act of oral devotion. Dianeme is not the only sufferer, however; carrying a “thousand thorns [89], and Bryars & Stings” (5) in his “poore Brest” (6), the speaker’s interior state is a veritable honeycomb, little more than a series of holes and wounds. Where the speaker is eager to alleviate the pain of penetration for his Dianeme, though, she is uninterested in returning the favor. Dianeme is not indifferent to his suffering but sadistically revels in it; she “sit[s] and smile[s] / To see [him] bleed” (10–11), requiring him to endure the violence of penetration while offering her his oral ministrations.

Herrick’s speakers are, indeed, repeatedly penetrated in ways they seem to find both nominally objectionable and secretly thrilling; in “The Cheat of Cupid,” “Upon Cupid,” and “Love’s Play at Push-pin,” for example, they recount being painfully yet excitingly shot through with Cupid’s arrow, or, in the case of “Push-pin,” a pin:

I put, he pusht, and heedless of my skin,
Love prickt my finger with a golden pin.
(3–4)

The speaker eagerly initiates a sexual encounter — put has a range of contemporary meanings including to “thrust, poke, or push at”; to “urge, incite; to instigate”; to “drive or plunge (a weapon or sharp object) home, or in or into something or someone”; and to “attempt to mate” — but finds himself quickly outmatched by a sadistic Love.^[18] Explicitly “heedless” of the boundaries of the speaker’s body, Love “prickt” the hapless speaker, causing a wound that “festers” (5) with “poyson” (6) and thus creates a lasting malaise with his “childish,” playful, and sadistic tricks. While the image of Love shooting a helpless speaker with his cruel arrows is common in Petrarchan poetry, Herrick stages this scene time and time again; dwelling on the physical mechanics of penetration, his speakers find themselves compulsively repeating the moment in which they first experience the irresistible torments of desire — that is, they [90] continually return to the inception of their painful, pleasurable, and unmistakably kinky relationship with L/love.

The Petrarchan pain tradition is not restricted to violent penetration but entails a variety of physically unpleasant sensations, including the ubiquitous dialectic of heat and cold, of burning and freezing; that is, the central literary matrix through which early modern desire was expressed encompasses a variety of nongenital erotic counterpleasures whose kinky implications are not yet recognized in the extensive criticism on this literary mode. Herrick’s speakers, however, are well aware of and alive to these pleasures in poems like “The Frozen Heart.” In this lyric, the speaker coyly embraces his suffering, complaining

I freeze, I freeze, and nothing dwels
In me but Snow and ysicles.
(1–2)

This highly conventional imagery of freezing soon shifts to burning, and, though the speaker initially begs for release — “For pitties sake give your advice / To melt this snow, and thaw this ice” (3–4) — he soon realizes that he does not, in fact, desire relief:

I’le rather keepe this frost, and snow,
Then to be thaw’d, or heated so.
(7–8)

The burning-freezing motif recurs in “The Frozen Zone: or, Julia disdainfull” and “To Dewes”; in the latter, Herrick again underscores the masochistic element of unrequited love, the poem beginning,

I burn, I burn; and beg of you
To quench, or coole me with your Dew.
(1–2) [91]

Emphasizing the pleasures of this pain, the speaker continues,

I frie in fire, and so consume,
Although the Pile be all perfume.
(3–4)

He may be burning and begging for mercy but that does not stop him from noting the sensually pleasant aspects of his experience, the perfume released upon his burning. The nine poems called “Upon Love” in Hesperides similarly register the pains of love on the one hand and express a desire to remain in that painful space on the other. The second “Upon Love” is a particularly good example of this; the speaker characterizes love as “full of pensive fear” (2), “terrour” (7), and “Flames” (10) that provoke “horrour” (9) in an embodied way, his “haire then stand an end” (6). While the speaker initially laments the pains of love, however, as the poem progresses he moves to an outright embrace of its tortures:

But if horrour cannot slake
Flames, which wo’d an entrance make;
Then the next thing I desire,
Is to love, and live i’th fire.
(9–12)

In this short lyric, we see Herrick beginning in Petrarchan conventionality — lamenting the pains of love — but ending in radical acceptance of his situation as a permanently tortured subject. He concludes, that is, by expressing desire to live in the space of infinite pain and infinite delay that characterizes the masochistic subject position — thus demonstrating the centrality of such a kinky subjectivity to Petrarchism and Renaissance discourses of desire more generally. [92]

Indeed, the first of two poems called “The Dreame” does not simply dabble in kink but stages a functionally complete BDSM scene from start to finish:

Me thought, (last night) love in an anger came,
And brought a rod, so whipt me with the same:
Mirtle the twigs were, meerly to imply
Love strikes, but ’tis with gentle crueltie.
Patient I was: Love pitifull grew then,
And stroak’d the stripes, and I was whole agen.
Thus like a Bee, Love-gentle stil doth bring
Hony to salve, where he before did sting.
(1–8)

The speaker first endures the gentle crueltie of love, whipt with a Mirtle rod; then, he luxuriates in what we might think of as aftercare, a personified Love tending to both the physical and psychological distress he has inflicted, growing pitifull and stroak[ing] the stripes he left on the speaker. Fascinatingly, through this encounter, the speaker becomes whole agen — that is, he is disarticulated through Love’s erotic violence and yet reintegrated by Love’s loving ministrations. In this overtly homoerotic encounter, then, the speaker adopts a passive, receptive position (one normatively associated with femininity then and now); both loses and regains the self through a kinky erotic experience; and takes pleasure in so doing. We see another rehearsal of a masochistic scene in “To the little Spinners,” in which the speaker pleads with “pretty Huswives” (1) to “spin / A Lawn … so fine and thin” (3–4) that it could repair the damage caused by “cruell Love” (5). Love has, the speaker reveals, beaten him mercilessly, leaving him [93]

so whipt,
That of my skin, I am all stript.
(6–7)

The speaker, that is, has been stripped not only of his clothing, his outer lendings, but also his skin; Love’s violence to the speaker’s physical body obliterates the protective membrane between speaker and world. The speaker’s use of stript doubles down on both the pathos and the prurient interest of the lyric, allowing him to remind the pretty Huswives of the nakedness of “each part” (10) of his body. His further plea that the housewives “skin again each part” (10) invites these women to contemplate and repair a variety of locations on his naked body. The use of skin here is a fascinating choice; the verb is far more often used to signify the removal, not the repair, of flesh. In his use of this autoantonymic verb, then, the speaker asks the women to cover his body with a prosthetic skin woven out of fine lawn, redoubling the emphasis on his nakedness; on the dismemberment of the physical body (which will here be repaired only through the addition of prosthetic skin); and on the lyric’s kinky impulses, the repair itself framed in the language of violence.

“The Wounded Heart” similarly conjoins female textile arts with a radically passive male masochism, but here, the beloved’s artistic abilities are framed as indicative of her sadistic attitude. The poem begins

Come bring your sampler, and with Art,
Draw in’t a wounded Heart[.]
(1–2)

While the speaker uses the imperative case, he is a desperate suppliant rather than a commanding poet-speaker. Instead, the mistress takes the artist’s role, begged to Draw a wounded Heart in her artful sampler. Not only does the speaker cede his aesthetic control, but he thus also proposes that the normatively feminine act of sewing a sampler is a means [94] of artistic creation. The speaker contrasts the beloved’s ability to pierce the embroidered heart with the impenetrability of her own body:

Not that I thinke, that any Dart,

Can make your’s bleed a teare:

Or peirce it any where;

Yet doe it to this end: that I,

May by

This secret see,

Though you can make

That Heart to bleed, your’s ne’r will ake

For me.

(4–12)

Objectifying himself, the speaker embraces his status as suffering objet d’art created by the mistress who will never herself ake for the speaker. However, while her impassivity and control are rendered on the page, the speaker does not castigate her cruelty or indifference, as would the traditional Petrarchan lover; rather, he seems to revel in her artistic prowess, marveling at her ability to construct something she does not herself feel and taking pleasure in the aestheticization of his suffering.

Similarly, as suggested by the title of “To Anthea, who may command him any thing,” the speaker engages in a total power exchange with another dominating female figure. The poem begins with the speaker begging Anthea to command him to live, love, and remain faithful:

Bid me to live, and I will live
Thy Protestant to be:
Or bid me love, and I will give
A loving heart to thee.
(1–4) [95]

Cheekily blasphemous, the speaker’s Protestantism lies not in a rejection of idols — indeed, he promises to return her commands with idolatrous worship and the devotion of A loving heart — but rather in his protestations of love for the godlike Anthea. As the speaker elaborates on this image of the heart in the following stanza, he strikingly frames it as A, rather than my heart — “A heart as soft, a heart as kind / A heart as sound and free” (5–6) — dissociating from his own body in the pledge of his heart to Anthea. Indeed, the speaker never once claims his heart for his own, displacing it as a, that, or it. The speaker seems unbothered by this division, regarding it not as a troubling self-estrangement but rather as a pleasurable ceding of control to Anthea. As the poem progresses, he asks her to make increasingly negative commands, such as to “bid it [the heart] to languish quite away” (11) and to “Bid me to weep” (13), “despaire” (17), or “die” (20). These pleas to be tortured by a powerful, threatening female figure align the speaker with the Deleuzean masochist, the “victim in search of a torturer … who needs to educate, persuade, and conclude an alliance with the torturer” via a specifically contractual relationship.^[19] Anthea may have “command of every part” (23), yet this control is in accordance with the speaker’s own desires. We can, then, see in this poem an example of a mutual masochistic scene; the speaker leaves the ball in Anthea’s court, her agency in the situation coming not from arbitrary, tyrannical control of his body and heart but rather her choice of whether or not to fulfill the speaker’s fantasies. That is, rather than a pathology or reflex of misogyny, here we see a speaker respectfully asking a woman to join him in a kinky, counterpleasurable encounter.

Ceding control of the body to threateningly alluring female figures is also central to “Disswasions from Idlenesse,” which takes several familiar tropes — advice against love and the figuration of female bodies as [96] traps for unwary men — and inverts them, suggesting that male passivity and ensnarement by women is a desirable state. The speaker begins conventionally, providing his interlocutor, young Cynthius, with “good doctrine” (2) to “Play not with the maiden-haire” (3), before proceeding to enumerate more perils to be found on female bodies; each curl on a woman’s head is a “snare” (4) and her face is full of “traps to take fooles in” (6). Continuing to describe the “fetters” (12) of women’s bodies, as the speaker proceeds lower, the dangers of female flesh become increasingly acute:

Armes, and hands, and all parts else,
Are but Toiles, or Manicles
Set on purpose to enthrall
Men, but Slothfulls most of all.
(7–10)

Men are manacled, enthralled, and made prisoners and slaves by these female figures — at this point, we appear to be in the realm of a fairly orthodox misogyny, and it would seem that the solution is to “Live employ’d” (11) rather than slothfully, in order to “live free” (11). However, the speaker then shifts to admit not only that he has been captured, but also that he likes it: rather than taking his own advice, he has instead

found, and still can prove,
The lazie man the most doth love.
(13–14)

This unexpected sententia retroactively ironizes the poem’s title; the idle speaker is a lazy lover, fettered, manacled, and enthralled by women and their bodies — and is perfectly happy to be so. Herrick returns to this theme in “The silken Snake,” in which his frequent beloved Julia [97]

For sport … threw a Lace
of silke and silver at [his] face.
(1–2)

Though the speaker has a moment of “affright” (5), the putative snake is harmless; it “scar’d” but “did not bite” (6), startling but not harming the speaker. Julia’s aggressive but ultimately benign gesture suggests a space of fantasy, one in which a garment typically used to contain female flesh transforms into a phallic snake as it is thrown at a hapless male. (It also points to a recurring cross-dressing motif in Herrick that warrants further consideration than I will be able to offer here.) Engaging the speaker in harmless play, the encounter evokes the beginning of a striptease whose titillation comes not from the woman’s removal of clothing but rather the possibility of engaging in bondage play, the pleasurable threat posed by the garment itself as it makes its way to the speaker.

“Upon a black Twist, rounding the Arme of the Countesse of Carlile” similarly draws erotic inspiration from the restrictive possibilities of female adornment. The Countess wears a “curious twist” of “blackest silk” (2) on her arm that the speaker quickly eroticizes; the bracelet,

Which, circumvolving gently, there
Enthrall’d her Arme, as Prisoner.
Dark was the Jayle; but as if light
Had met t’engender with the night[.]
(3–6)

The Countess’s arm is enthrall’d, rendered a Prisoner in a Dark … Jayle, language of confinement that emphasizes the physical restriction incurred by the wearing of the band. This language of imprisonment is combined, however, with that of sexual generativity; the Countess’s “spotlesse wrist” (1), or light, Had met t’engender with the night of the Dark … Jayle. [98] Beyond the simple fact of sexualization, there are a number of interesting features of this characterization. First, the grammar of the line gives agency to the prisoner, not the jailer; the light meets the night rather than the other way around. In other words, the power lies with the person in bondage in ways that mirror the logic of the masochistic contract. Second, like the overwhelming majority of Herrick’s verse, this erotic encounter is neither penetrative nor ejaculative but emerges through the pleasurable mingling of surfaces, here the wrist and the black twist.^[20] And third, despite this lack of penetration, the encounter is nevertheless reproductive, an act of engender[ing]. While the politics of discursively foisting such reproduction onto a woman are certainly questionable, what is most notable for my purposes is the confluence of these three factors — the expression of masochistic agency; a highly erotic yet nonpenetrative encounter; and the implication of reproduction resulting from this assignation. The poem’s erotic tenor becomes even more interesting in its back half, in which the speaker both identifies with the imprisoned Countess and desires to take her place:

… if there be
Such Freedome in Captivity;
I beg of Love, that ever I
May in like Chains of Darknesse lie.
(9–12)

Not merely asking but beg[ging] Love to imprison him in Chains of Darknesse perpetually, the speaker’s fantasy both aligns him with a female figure, problematizing any assumed distinction between male and female, and places him in a passive, pleasurable, and masochistic position for perpetuity. [99]

The enthralling possibilities of manaclesque bracelets are similarly explored in “The Bracelet to Julia” in which the speaker and Julia engage in switchy bondage play. The speaker ties a “silken twist” (2) around Julia’s wrist to demonstrate that she is his “pretty Captive” (5). While he initially represents himself as the dominant figure in the relationship, he quickly moves to more metaphorical bondage in which he is the subordinate partner. Julia is subject to mere physical captivity; as he tells her, “Tis but the silke that bindeth thee, / Knap the thread, and thou art free” (7–8), insisting that her bondage is easily broken. The speaker, conversely, is her “Bondslave” (6), “bound, and fast bound” (10) to her in ways that exceed the physical. While Julia’s bonds are easily broken through the cutting of a thread, when the speaker characterizes his own imprisonment, he doubles down, insisting that he is not merely bound but fast bound, emphasizing the permanency of this position of bondage. Bondslave also suggests a stronger degree of subjection and longer duration than Captive and naturalizes the unequal relationship dynamics, suggesting an element of class subordination on the part of the speaker, and emphasizes the bond, or the promise or obligation that connects — indeed, binds — them. Conversely, Julia’s characterization as a Captive suggests an illegitimate, rather than naturalized, imprisonment. While it is conventional to suggest that love makes one into a slave, there is no recrimination, no regret, and no anger; rather, the speaker closes the poem by saying “from thee I cannot go; / If I co’d, I wo’d not so” (11–12) — even granted his freedom, he would choose to remain eternally bound to Julia.

As one final instance of Herrick’s kinky fantasies, I would like to consider “Upon Julia’s haire, bundled up in a golden net,” a short lyric toward the end of Hesperides that again is fascinated with the restrictive potential of women’s clothing. Fixated on both Julia’s hair and the net that binds it, the speaker urges Julia to shed the “rich deceits” (1), “goldene Toyles, and Trammel-nets” (2) that restrain her locks: [100]

Set free thy Tresses, let them flow
As airs do breathe, or winds doe blow.
(7–8)

His argument hinges on Julia’s self-possession; “thine hairs” (3), he states, are “Already tame, and all thine owne” (4); that is, she is already wholly in control of her self and her entire body. While one could perhaps question the racialized implications of such positive valuation of Already tame hair, more immediate for my purposes here is the speaker’s lack of possessiveness; he pleads that she let her hair down but recognizes his lack of right to make dictates about her body, which is all thine owne. While Julia is self-possessed, needing no restraint, the speaker requires confinement:

Tis I am wild, and more then haires
Deserve these Mashes and those snares.
(5–6)

Abjecting himself with his argument that he deserve[s] to be mash[ed], snare[d], and confined, the speaker closes with a plea to

let such curious Net-works be
Lesse set for them [her hair], then spred for me.
(9–10)

Unlike Julia, the speaker both needs and desires physical restriction. Prostrating himself before a self-sovereign female figure, the speaker fantasizes a scene of cross-dressed bondage in which women’s clothes are used to confine and control his body — and one in which he takes unmitigated, unproblematic pleasure.

In this chapter, I have tracked only one of many patterns of erotic deviance in Herrick’s poetry, his kinky interest in being penetrated and beaten, and bound and confined; as these examples have hopefully suggested, [101] however, Hesperides is full of fetishistic interest in body parts and accoutrement, non-genital erotic contact, erotic entanglements with flowers and insects, kissing, and voyeurism, to name only a few — a veritable buffet of varieties of sexual expression. To borrow a quote from Melissa E. Sanchez, Hesperides, in short, “make[s] visible early modern images of pleasures and intimacies that challenge heteronormative ideals of companionate marriage and ‘homonormative’ ideals of egalitarian friendship — both of which tend to define sex that is tender and monogamous as the optimal sex.”^[21] Is Herrick a pervert? According to conventional definitions of perversion — the refusal of teleological sexuality, the lingering over process rather than ends, fetishistic pleasures in accoutrement, a desire for erotic bondage — clearly yes. The point is not to recuperate Herrick from such a designation, to reslot him into normative paradigms of sexual expression. Rather, it is to show how Hesperides engages perversion to open up new and different forms of power relationships, of sexual politics, of identification, and of pleasure, for speaker and reader alike; despite their ostensible heteroeroticism, its poems offer a far wider, queerer array of nonpathological and nonpathologized pleasures and positions for the early modern sexual subject than is often assumed possible.