ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

7
ARENAS OF RETREAT
Blood, bread, and poetry in Henry Vaughan
So in this last and lewdest age,
Thy antient love on some may shine.
Vaughan, “White Sunday”
The subtitle to this chapter is adapted from the title of an essay by the
American feminist poet, Adrienne Rich. In the essay, Rich remarks how, as a
student in her early twenties, she was led to believe that poetry was “the
expression of a higher world view, what the critic Edward Said has termed ‘a
quasi-religious wonder,’ instead of a human sign to be understood in secular
and social terms.” 1 My starting place is to remark that whatever conditions
underlie Rich’s sense of the opposition between poetry as transcendental
expression versus poetry as a sign system to be understood in secular and social
terms, the dialectic is misleading, although in interesting ways, when applied
to a pre-Romantic (who is sometimes thought to be a proto-Romantic) like
Vaughan, despite the fact that he is almost always remembered as the signal
instance of a seventeenth-century poet who became memorable once he
became a poet of transcendence: “Lord, then said I, on me one breath,/And
let me dye before my death.” 2
In beginning in this way, I do not mean to suggest that the difference
between secular and devotional poetry is insignificant to the seventeenth
century or to Vaughan. Indeed, one of the many ironies produced by the
English Civil War points in just the opposite direction. The distinction Milton
drew with characteristic emphasis in The Reason of Church Government Urged
Against Prelaty (1642), alluded to in the previous chapter, between “vulgar
amorists” in verse and poets inspired by “devout prayer to that eternal spirit
who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge,” gets redrawn with new
emphasis and force in the next decade by a royalist-turned-religious seer: a
poet from Wales who, in the 1655 Preface to the completed Silex Scintillans,
regarded himself nonetheless as a citizen of “this Kingdom” (my italics), rather
than of the Commonwealth.
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