Like Gray, Milton, Pope, and (probably) Spenser, Robert Herrick was born within the walls of the City of London, in ‘the Golden-cheap-side’, as he put it. That is, Goldsmith’s Row, Cheapside. He was apprenticed as a goldsmith but had served only half of the ten-year apprenticeship when he entered St John’s College, Cambridge, where he began to write poetry. He later entered the church and in 1629 was sent to be the vicar of Dean Prior, on the edge of Dartmoor. Herrick considered this an exile from London, his true home, and wrote a farewell to the Thames, ‘His Tears to Thamesis’:
I send, I send here my supremest kiss To thee my silver-footed Thamesis. No more shall I reiterate thy Strand, Whereon so many stately structures stand; Nor in the summer’s sweeter evenings go To bathe in thee, as thousand others do. (1–6)
It was the Civil War that came to the rescue. Parliamentarian success in the south-west, in 1646, had the benefit of sweeping Herrick, a Royalist, back to London. There, he published the book for which he is remembered, and in which ‘His Tears to Thamesis’ appears.
[H]e saw Hesperides as a definitive life’s work […] Containing almost 1400 poems, probably almost all that he could find to print in 1647, Hesperides was and remains the only effort by an important English poet to publish his entire œuvre in one organized collection. (DNB)
The Hesperides are the nymphs of the west in Greek mythology. Herrick may have been born in the City but must have been familiar with the more westerly, Arcadian Thames-side region where Herrick Court now stands, in order to have continued, in his address to the river,
No more shall I along thy crystal glide In barge with boughs and rushes beautified, With soft-smooth virgins (for our chaste disport) To Richmond, Kingston, and to Hampton Court. (7–10)