‘To Keep a True Lent’ by Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

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Is this a fast, to keep
The larder lean?
And clean
From fat of veals and sheep?

Is it to quit the dish
Of flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with fish? 

Is it to fast an hour,
Or ragg’d to go,
Or show
A downcast look and sour ?

No; ‘tis a fast to dole
Thy sheaf of wheat,
And meat,
Unto the hungry soul. 

It is to fast from strife,
From old debate
And hate ;
To circumcise thy life.

To show a heart grief-rent;
To starve thy sin,
Not bin;
And that’s to keep thy Lent.

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Considering the Poem

Lent, a time of penitence and preparation for Easter, here stimulates Herrick to write a suitably bare, frugal and skilful poem. As we shall see, it’s tightly structured for rhetorical purposes so it’s almost impossible for the reader not to understand Herrick’s point; the speaker’s tone of voice is dramatic and engaging; and the musical possibilities of the language, in particular, effects of rhythm, are used to amplify the rhetorical power of the poem at a critical moment.

Sometimes very simple, common words (often conjunctions like ‘but’, ‘and’ or ‘so’) play an important functional part in a poem by helping to show us how it is organised and how it can be broken down into operating parts for the purpose of study and reflection. This is the case here.

If, as we’re starting to consider the poem, we try to see its overall organisation, the most important word is surely the fierce, uncompromising ‘No’ half way through.

For a start, it inverts the otherwise constant rhythm of the poem which again and again repeats the simple iambic pattern of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. The repetition of these rhythmic units sets up our expectations so any sudden deviation from the norm catches our attention: the word ‘No’ jumps out at us not only because of its confrontational tone but also because it breaks an established pattern by starting the fourth verse with a stressed syllable. We can quickly see that it also divides the poem in two parts, each a separate run of thought, so we can see that the ‘No’ alerts us to the fact that the three questions asked in the first three verses are all pushed aside by the assertions that make up the last three verses. This is the simple, firm foundation that holds up the superstructure of the poem.

The questions in the first half of the poem are rhetorical ones: they are not meant to be answered, but to engage us. Each of the questions is focused on examples of self-denial to do with food or dress that, then as now, are commonly followed in Lent. In fact, Herrick’s poem follows a passage in the Old Testament book of Isaiah (Chapter 38) which deals with fasting and makes much the same point as the poem: that fasting should not be about foregoing enjoyments as a self-denying exercise but about looking beyond ourselves to help other people.

But Herrick doesn’t just follow Isaiah’s argument. He also takes up the tone and speaking style of Isaiah’s warning voice. The rhetorical question is frequently used by Isaiah and by other writers of the Old Testament prophetic books. In biblical contexts it generally has a sonorous, dominant tone, as if delivered down to us from on high. Here, though, the tone of voice is more complicated. Like Isaiah, Herrick is writing to warn and chastise us, and you can, as you read, hear the challenging, impatient tone of the questions and then, later in the poem, the direct and stern tone of the assertions in the last three verses. Herrick is, however, not speaking to us in stentorian tone from above or from afar.

His address is a rather homely warning, delivered from the pantry. He makes a point in the poem of locating himself in an ordinary house and of referring to the familiar and everyday material surroundings of his mid-17th century readers who had larders, platters, dishes and a ‘bin’ (a word we use for objects into which we throw unwanted things but Herrick uses in the older sense of a storage container – a sense that still survives, just, in modern English, in our term bread-bin).

By this setting and by the use of familiar, usually monosyllabic, vocabulary, Robert Herrick brings himself close to the reader and gives force to his argument that Lent should be a time for benevolent activity not self-oriented denial, a time to ‘starve your sin’, not empty out and ‘starve’ the bin in which you keep your food.

Robert Herrick – Selected Poems (Everyman Poetry)