Analyzing Robert Herrick's Poem 'The Vine'

757 Words2 Pages

We all dream and wake up wondering, “what was that all about?” Can we ever really be sure? Some dreams are crazier than others and leave us questioning our own sanity, just like the speaker in this poem who dreams about forcibly taking advantage of a woman. The speaker in Robert Herrick’s 1653 poem, The Vine, uses the manifest and latent dream content and the battle between the id and superego to reveal his undisclosed desires. To begin with, latent content should be unburied from the manifest content of the speaker’s dream. At first glance, we notice the speaker’s dream is about a nonconsensual sexual experience with a woman. This leads us to think negatively of him right off the bat. We must look deeper in order to unravel the underlying idea. Freud believes that as humans we protect ourselves from our desires that are not socially accepted. Our unconscious however, …show more content…

He realizes that he has an erection in real life, serving almost as a wake up call that he should not be aroused by something so unwelcome to society. The superego’s job is to ensure that the id does not lead the speaker to do things that the community will reject. The only time the speaker is awake is toward the end of the poem, it reads, “That with the fancy I awoke; / And found (ah me!) this flesh of mine / More like a stock than like a vine” (Herrick 21-23). We see his surprised reaction as he states “ah me!” when he wakes to find himself erect from his dream. His penis being in this “stock” state, as he puts it, serves as the superego in its physical form and knows the difference between right and wrong. The superego here is able to tell the speaker that it was just a dream, that he is safe from judgement in real life. However, the id remains unsatisfied until the speaker is able to distinguish between his dream and what he really longs for, such as a feeling of power in his waking

Open Document