ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
Nor do I want to suggest that the more distant reaches of the devotional
experience in Vaughan—whether those associated with mystical theology or
Hermetic lore—are merely imported for what are sometimes thought of as poetic
occasions. Vaughan’s appeal has always been the appeal of the abrupt: the
vertiginous opening of “The World” (“I saw eternity the other night”), the
sublime exodus of “They are all gone into the world of light,” the radical
telescoping of time that marks the beginning of “The Night” in which
Nicodemus comes to Christ under a cover of darkness; and even when his poems
seem to falter, as they are notorious for doing, their claim on us is not readily
demystified. But the opposition noted by Rich is too stark, too insufficiently
dialectical when applied to Vaughan for the simple reason that the further
Vaughan moved toward “quasi-religious wonder,” the more completely he
betrayed his connections to history. Or to rephrase the issue in contemporary
terms, the deeper he sounded a note of “retreat,” the more deeply he entered
into a discourse of “retreat” sounded by his disenfranchised royalist Anglican
contemporaries. The language of devotion was also the language of debate. 3
It is important to keep this reactive (and reactionary) paradox in mind, not
because every utterance of this deeply meditative poet ought to be interpreted
as a veiled political allegory, but because history in its most personally and
institutionally disruptive forms—war, the loss of a younger brother William
(perhaps a casualty of the fighting), the beheading of the king, and the
disestablishment of the church—provided Vaughan with an imperative of the
most elemental kind: to rewrite himself in relation to his immediate culture,
something he did over the space of a turbulent, busy, and often sickly-spent five
years, roughly from 1650 to 1655. During this time, Vaughan published no less
than six separate works. He brought out three collections of original poems: Silex
Scintillans, Part I (1650), Olor Iscanus (1651), and Silex Scintillans, Part II (1655),
with a reissue of the poems from Part I and a substantial “Authors Preface to the
Following Hymns” that, in urging a renewal of censorship, reads like a belated
counter to Milton’s Areopagitica. And he matched this output with three
volumes of prose that included original meditations in The Mount of Olives
(1652), some hefty translations of devotional works out of Latin in Flores
Solitudinis (1654), and a shorter translation for medical purposes entitled
Hermetical Physick (1655). During these years, too, after some time spent as a
soldier in the king’s army, Vaughan became a physician. Surviving in solitude is
certainly one of the overarching themes in these works, a matter of his
ministering to mind, body, and spirit, in prose and verse.
In pointed contrast to a number of his contemporaries (Herrick and Lovelace
come readily to mind), Vaughan is the prime instance of a poet, or better yet,
an “Author” who discovered his calling during the Civil War and the
Interregnum. Indeed, he is perhaps the sole instance for which such a claim
might be made. (His closest competitor in this regard is probably Andrew
Marvell, whose most celebrated lyrics are generally assumed to belong to the
same years; but the very absence of a secure chronology militates against the idea
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