(baptized Aug. 24, 1591, London, Eng.
died October 1674, Dean Prior, Devonshire) English poet.
Educated at Cambridge and later ordained, he became known as a poet in the 1620s and by the end of that decade had become a country vicar in Devonshire. A disciple of Hesperides (1648), containing 1,400 poems, mostly short, many of them {{link=epigram">epigram s. He is best remembered for the line "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may."
Robert Herrick, detail of an engraving by W. Marshall, from the frontispiece to Hesperides , ...
By courtesy of the trustees of the British Museum; photograph, J.R. Freeman & Co. Ltd.