I will be in Clear Lake, Iowa on Labor Day this year, attending my 45^th high school class reunion. Needless to say, I am very much looking forward to seeing a lot of wonderful old friends and reminiscing about the "good old days" at Clear Lake High School.

In our sophomore year, we all took English Lit. The teacher was Miss Friedman, a reasonably attractive, and more than reasonably well endowed young woman, which helped make going to her class a little more fun for Jim, Jack, Les, Darrell, Bill, Red, Tom and the rest of our gang than going to Captain Bob's geometry class, which was truly boooooring.

I liked Miss Friedman very much. She was an excellent teacher, and I learned a lot from her. I knew very little about her personal life then, and I know even less now. What I did know was that she was not married, and while from my perspective today she was really quite young, we kids thought at the time that she was getting a little old to be single. So when we came to Robert Herrick's classic poem, "To Virgins, To Make Much Of Time," some of us thought this hit pretty close to home for the "teach," and shared a few ribald, if sophomoric comments among ourselves over it. Lord knows what we would have said if she had assigned Andrew Marvel's "To His Coy Mistress." ("Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, Lady were no crime . . . Now let us sport us while we may, And now, like amorous birds of prey . . .etc., etc.).

Anyway, I liked Herrick's poem then, and it is still a favorite of mine today. Herrick could be a little ribald himself, which seems odd, given that he was ordained an Anglican Priest in 1623, and spent the last half of his life as a Dean Prior in rural Devonshire, except for the period during the Commonwealth when, as a Royalist, he was relieved of his duties. I am no expert on Herrick, but I get the impression that some of his more light hearted, and some might say explicit verse, was the reaction of a good hearted country vicar to the strictness of Cromwell's Puritans, who, after all, were more than a bit prudish, and who had beheaded his patron King Charles I.

The poet Robert Southey once said of Herrick that he "appears to have had the coarsest mind of all our poets." But this nasty observation did not outlive the much kinder comment by Algernon Swineburne, who declared in his Studies in Prose and Poetry that Herrick was "the greatest song-writer - as surely as Shakespeare is the greatest dramatist - ever born of English race." So with that fine compliment, please enjoy this great 17th century English classic.