The poem “Corinna’s Going A-Maying” by Robert Herrick begins with a young man full of excitement and eagerness about the morning of the first day of May. All of the teenagers in the town are finding a partner or beloved and going “a-maying” into the woods to find flowers and bring them back to decorate the town. While the poem begins with the simple echo of a young and yearning soul, it has a much deeper, more conflicting message to offer. Toward the end of the poem it becomes clearer that the speaker may not be able to control the moment the way he would like to be able to. Perhaps he cannot “seize the day,” as the saying goes. The poem facilitates the ongoing argument that there may be no real way to hold on to his beauty, Corinna, or beauty in general due to the difficultly in acting in the moment.
The poem has an important shifting point around line 40. From there on, the speaker is no longer romanticizing about the excitement of the first of May or describing the process of the day. He has also surpassed the point of describing Corinna’s physical beauty in order to convince her to come with him. Instead he is commenting on the negative things that they will be missing out on if they do not take the opportunity to join the others on the first of May. He speaks of the others and compares himself and Corinna to them and how they are seemingly left out of all the festivities. He even states the great effort many people went through in order to go participate and says that both he and Corinna are wasting the valuable time of their youth as well as the valuable time for them to be together. In the end, however, we find that the speaker will most likely not get to go with Corinna. For reasons unknown, she is not home. Although the speaker desperately desires to “seize the day” with Corinna, he is absolutely powerless to do so. He ultimately has no control over what she does or where she goes. They are not in a lasting relationship and therefore he would have to make a somewhat impulsive motion to ask her to go out with him, like he has just attempted. However, this leaves him unprotected in the wake of rejection, which he experiences by Corinna’s absence. This demonstrates how things hardly, if ever, turn out the way they are imagined. Yet we know this poem was well thought out and “imagined” beforehand. Perhaps this contradictory element to this poem has a lot to do with lyric poems in general. Maybe they are not always so planned. Maybe the poet has to occasionally take what he or she is given despite what ideas they would prefer to seize or conquer with words. The very idea of acting in the moment that is so clearly the topic of interest in this poem is made to seem far more difficult to attempt than it sounds.
Another interesting aspect of this poem to note is the fluidity of beautiful images and imaginings throughout each verse paragraph. By describing all of the beauty concerning the spring day, the speaker is prolonging the realization that Corinna is not present and therefore not coming with him for the festivities. No matter how many streets parks are “made green and trimmed with trees” or “whitethorn [that are] neatly interwove[n],” (ll.30) Corinna is not there. The poem suggests that it does not matter what Corinna is doing, because she is not there. All the while, we know that the only thing that does matter for the speaker is that the fact that Corinna be there. It is as if, for him, there is no beauty and thus a terrible urgency, despite the lovely surroundings of May Day. Yet we know he does not give up during the course of the poem. This calls attention to the question of why the poem would be structured in a way that conjures images of freedom and beauty if the one true object of beauty is seemingly absent and unobtainable by the end of the poem. Herrick is saying something rather important, when he writes the speaker’s appraisal of the beautiful day in May. He is softly demonstrating the speaker’s own inability to relinquish the eternization of beauty. It is as almost as if the speaker is so unconscious of his excessively optimistic thoughts of Corinna’s beauty that not only does he not have the power to “seize the day,” some deep, inner part of him is opposing everything else in his mind and body telling him to “go a-maying” or “seize the day.” Part of him wants to keep the untouchable idea of Corinna’s beauty to himself, because it is more easily eternized. But is this a way to make beauty last a little longer? Maybe. But the end result is the same; beautiful Corinna is not there and thus, beauty eventually fades away. So “carpe diem” must be the right antidote for the decay of all things. One would think. But while the poem is so adamantly focused on grabbing the moment and running with it, or carpe diem, then why would Herrick have even gone to the effort of scribbling these thoughts down? The writing of lyrical poetry contradicts almost every aspect of carpe diem, or this poem’s essential theme, as it takes time, reflection and thought to express ideas in a coherent, lyrical manner. This tension of calls into question some very prominent elements of what it means to be human.
Acting in the moment is all we have but not all we as humans have. We will all soon become a part of the past and even those who believe in carpe diem enough to document their thoughts must also believe in the future and the power that future readers and interpreters have when reading their poems. We all strive to be part of something that is greater than ourselves and for many, that something is the past. By investing in the future we are securing a position in the ever expansive, overreaching past. Perhaps the speaker in “Corinna’s Going A-Maying” may never be able to come to terms with living in the moment due to circumstances or the entrapment in a poem that is a defiance of the very this very idea. Despite the incapability to veer form eternization, the idea of carpe diem is still left in open as well as the possibility that something along those lines does exist. However, no one knows for sure. Maybe it was never there. Maybe it is impossible. Or maybe it has yet to be found. Like Corinna, we just do not know. Lyrical poetry is our best attempt at an answer because of the way it deals with these arguments.
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