Clubs & Societies Highlight: The Herrick

Co-curricular activities welcome likeminded students and staff to nurture passions and indulge interests, forging friendships which span across classes and year groups. Our current provision is extensive, numbering at over one hundred and fifty options, with more growing each year. Each week, we seek to celebrate one of the many clubs and societies that form part of the rich fabric of Merchant Taylors’.

 

This week we look at The Herrick, a space for the robust and intellectual discussion of a variety of texts.

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today

Tomorrow will be dying.

                                Robert Herrick OMT (1648)

 

Our English society takes its name from OMT Cavalier poet Robert Herrick, best known for his oft-quoted poem 'To the Virgins: to Make Much of Time'. The poem urges the reader to seize the moment and make the most of life as 'Old Time' hurries on. Our society, aimed at sixth-form students but often attended by boys lower down the school as well, gathers literary and linguistic roses that grow beyond the curriculum. Each week a teacher or student takes the lead, introducing the group to a writer, genre or idea that has captivated them. 

The society aims to create a stimulating, discursive space for intellectualism to flourish. Many future English undergrads have delivered their first lecture at the Herrick, on topics as wide-reaching as the birth of the novel, Arthurian legend, TS Eliot and Russian novelists. The sessions often reach beyond the arbitrary boundaries of curriculum subjects and students and teachers from other departments attend the society, bringing philosophy, modern foreign languages, history and classics to the discussion table. 

One Herrick is always very different from the next; one week we could be taking a deep dive into Eliot's Four Quartets, in the next we might explore the idea that language determines thought by unpicking theories of linguistic determinism. At Christmas, we listened to medieval lyrics turned into hymns and gawped over the outrageous marginalia on medieval manuscripts. Last week we considered literature's role in representation of race; the week before we were introduced to the genre of the Southern Gothic. We have pondered what makes great opening lines and travelled back to Puritan Massachusetts in The Scarlett Letter, stepped into Marabar Caves with Forster and onto the battlefield with Tolstoy. We look forward to continue emulating Herrick and 'making much of time'  in the Hour on Mondays, opening our minds into other worlds.

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