'The Vine' By Robert Herrick

621 Words3 Pages
People hide and refuse to accept their deepest secrets and desires. But what happens when it is time to face the truth? “The Vine” by Robert Herrick is about the narrator’s secret desire to rape a young virgin girl. In the poem about the narrator’s wet dream, Herrick uses phallic imagery to express this secret idea to the unsuspecting reader. The poem also includes the idea of repressed dreams to explain his undesirable desires. As sickening as this truth is, this wish has been there all along and is just now surfacing. Robert Herrick uses many phallic images throughout the poem to show the narrator’s desire for rape. Word choice such as “vine” and “stock” are selected as phallic images by the author to symbolize the penis. The purpose of