ABSTRACT
Robert Herrick’s musical pieces in Noble Numbers, both the scored and the unscored, are enriched by being read against the background of musical devotion, of sacred music with freely invented rather than Scriptural words. Some of Herrick’s couplets call to mind the very earliest of propitiatory distichs; the Disticha Catonis were being used in the schools for their exemplary piety and morality, and easy Latin. Although the childlike tone is often visible in Herrick’s didactic couplets and in the affective prayers, it is most clearly manifest in the occasional, personal prayers. In Herrick’s meditation on death there is no skull in evidence; even Herbert’s represents a less comfortable acceptance. To see all these strains merge, the didactic, the affective, the meditational, the domestic or naturalized, one has to look at the last nine poems of Noble Numbers , a kind of Holy Week sequence.
