I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers:
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers.
I sing of Maypoles, Hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.

These lines come from Robert Herrick’s lyric “The Argument of his Book,” a prefatory poem placed at the head of his major collection Hesperides (1648). Herrick (1591–1674), an Anglican clergyman and Cavalier poet, is known for short, songlike poems celebrating seasonal change, rural festivity, and the textures of everyday English life. In the “Argument,” he announces the range of subjects his book will treat—flowers and months, village customs, weddings, and other rites—offering readers a table-of-contents in verse. The poem reflects the Caroline-era taste for pastoral and ceremonial detail, and Herrick’s desire to preserve traditional festivities in a period of political and religious upheaval.

Herrick’s “I sing…” functions as a poetic manifesto: he defines his art as celebratory, attentive to the small, sensuous, and communal. The catalogue of “brooks…blossoms…birds,” then of Maypoles, harvest carts (“Hock-carts”), and wedding foods, links nature’s cycles to human ritual, suggesting that joy, fertility, and social bonding are continuous with the seasons. The repeated “I sing” emphasizes lyric vocation—poetry as praise and preservation. At the same time, the specificity of local customs implies a cultural memory project: to record a festive, traditional England that Herrick and other Cavaliers feared was being eroded by puritanical reform and civil conflict.