Close Reading: "Corinna's Going A-Maying"

"Corinna's Going A-Maying" - Robert Herrick

The May Pole in this poem represents re-generation and a new life. In the first stanza, the speaker (man) wants Corinna to wake up and get out of bed. As we read on we see that practices of "religious worship" are being acted out by nature, the birds and flowers. The man is taking something sacred, and making it profanation. He is attempting to convince Corinna that avoiding having sexual relations is actually a sin. This is obviously the opposite of religious truth when dealing with sex before marriage. In line 15 he tells her to put on her "foliage", making Corinna an embodiment of spring time itself. This poem is a carpe diem poem, suggesting that one can only have a certain amount of time for something. He uses dew in this case to suggest this because dew is only seen for a limited time in the morning. The entire day is focused on Corinna's rising out of bed, and he suggests that even the sun and universe wait for her, personifying the sun and universe. In lines 55 and 56 he speaks of keys and pricking, both metaphors for sex (key in lock, prick penetrates). The poem is A A B B A A etc. until the last couplet of each stanza, in which it ends with a word that rhymes with May or Maying and then the actual word of May or a-Maying.