By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Glow-worms, shooting stars, and elves: all can be found in ‘The Night Piece: To Julia’, a charming poem by the seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick. And that’s just the first three lines! The last line invites a sexual reading, a sign of the thinly-veiled eroticism that pervades Herrick’s Julia poems. (Though here we might add foot-fetishism as well.) Before we offer a few words of analysis of this charming poem, here’s a reminder of it.