Give me a kiss, and to that kiss a score; Then to that twenty, add a hundred more: A thousand to that hundred: so kiss on, To make that thousand up a million. Treble that million, and when that is done, Let’s kiss afresh, as when we first begun.

These lines are from Robert Herrick’s lyric “To Anthea (I).” Herrick (1591–1674), an Anglican priest and one of the Cavalier poets, is known for short, songlike poems that celebrate love, pleasure, and the fleetingness of youth. The poem belongs to the courtly, witty tradition of erotic compliment and playful arithmetic common in early Stuart verse. It was published in Herrick’s major collection *Hesperides* (1648), issued during the upheavals of the English Civil Wars, though many of the poems likely circulated earlier in manuscript. The speaker’s extravagant counting of kisses exemplifies Herrick’s blend of sensual immediacy with rhetorical ingenuity.

The speaker turns kissing into a kind of exuberant calculation: numbers escalate from “a score” to “a million,” then are “trebled,” only to be reset—“Let’s kiss afresh, as when we first begun.” The hyperbole conveys desire’s boundlessness while also suggesting that love cannot be exhausted or fully quantified. The poem’s charm lies in its paradox: the more precisely the speaker counts, the more the counting becomes a game that proves intimacy exceeds measure. The final turn back to the beginning implies renewal—each kiss should feel like a first kiss—capturing Herrick’s recurring theme that pleasure is both abundant and perishable, best seized in the present.