Robert Herrick's Poem 'The Vine'

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Erotic fantasies often focus on the concept of sexual domination where one partner controlling the other. In Robert Herrick’s 17th century poem “The Vine”, he expresses his suggestive and dominating thoughts over Julia’s body through the use of imagery, metaphors, and symbolism.
As a poet, Herrick wrote hundreds of poems that focused on real or imaginary women that were purely written with imagery. The first example of imagery we see in the poem is in line 5. “Methought, her long small legs and thighs” (Herrick, line 5), here Herrick uses two seemingly contraindicative adjectives to describe Lucia’s lower body. However, the words long and small together in such a context make the reader envision Lucia as a tall and delicate young lady. Essentially …show more content…

Women during Robert Herrick’s time were all viewed as the same regardless of their social rank, they were wives and mothers. Nothing more and nothing less. David Landrum states “Female submission was considered essential to an ordered, stable society, so that "as wives were subject to their husbands, so women were subject to men, whose authority was sustained informally through culture, custom and differences in education, and more formally through the law” (p. 181). Therefore, in Herrick’s poem, Lucia was silenced because that was her role as a woman. She could not have spoken up even if she had the courage to without the threat of more dominance exerted on …show more content…

Herrick uses the vine to represent his physical obsession over Lucia’s body, “Which, was crawling one and every way” (Herrick line 3). Herrick dreams that his “moral part” “metamorphoses” into a vine when then “crawls” to explore and “enthrall” his lover Lucia’s dainty body. “"Metamorphoz'd" "mortal part" of the male speaker "Enthrall[s]" the "dainty Lucia" (2, 1, 4)-giving this gift ultimately allows the male speaker to believe that he has the female beloved right where he wants her” (Hammons, pg. 40). Once again, he does not want her to leave and therefore keeps her as a prisoner caught in his

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