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Robert Herrick integrates using kind and literary devices to develop a seemingly light-hearted poem which has lots of suggestively political and sexual connotations. Overall, the fourteen-line verses are really regularly structures: two longer lines alternated with four much shorter lines, the rhyme occurring in couplets. The consistency of the structure, along with the constant alternation in line length creates the look of song verses or nursery-rhymes, which is one method which the author develops a light-hearted tone.
This consistency just breaks down at the end, where, at the end of the verse, there are 3 brief lines and 3 long lines, instead of 4 and 2, respectively.
This break reflects the change in tone. The last stanza, in plain contrast to the preceding verses which represent love and joviality, includes many pictures of death. For example, it explains how Corinna and the speaker will become like "short lived shade (66 )" and how they are even presently "decaying (69 )." Therefore, it is almost as if the form changes in this last verse because it is interrupted by the abrupt change in images.
Additionally, Herrick includes this one inconsistency in an otherwise strictly regular poem in order to draw the reader's attention to the last few lines.
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It remains in these lines that the author sums up the message of the poem and the carpe diem theme which is recurrent throughout much of his poetry: "Then while time serves, and we are however rotting,/ Come, my Corinna, come, let's go a-Maying (69-70)." The light-hearted tone of the poem is created not just by the verse-like patterns of its verse structure, but likewise through repetition, sound gadgets, and word choice.
There are lots of circumstances of repetition in this poem.
In reality, it appears in the very first line: "Get up! get up for embarassment!" The repetition of "get up" develops, right from the start, the joyful tone of a holiday morning. Another example is the first line of the third verse (line 29), in which the repeating of "come" has a hypnotizing humming result, similar to both music and eager playfulness. Noise devices, such as the assonance of lines 30 and 31 (field, street, each, green, trees, and so on) also include to the lyrical nature of the poem.
In addition to the musicality of the lines, word-choice plays a strong part in creating a happy tone. The jocular use of “slug-a-bed” in line 5, for instance, reflects the playfulness of the author and subject. Also, more serious topics, such as “prayer” and “sin,” are inserted into a context which deflates the weight of their typical connotations. For example, observe lines 10 through 12: “When all the birds have matins said, / And sung their thankful hymns: ‘tis sin, / Nay, profanation to keep in...
” Prayers and hymns, which are usually solemn daily rituals, are attributed to birds, thus decreasing their serious associations. Similarly, to equate staying in bed with “sins” and “profanations” is to mockingly make light of the usual gravity of these words. In this way, the author maintains the light-hearted tone of his speaker on this holiday, while also extending his playfulness to the outside world, as if no over-shadowing force can possibly exist or come to ruin the festivity.
Form in Herrick's "Corinna's Going A-Maying". (2016, Aug 03). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/form-in-herricks-corinnas-going-a-maying-essay
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