ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
of identifying a “discovery” in the first place.) At almost the precise moment
when Herrick was elegiacally erecting “His Pillar of Fame” against “the
Kingdom’s” overthrow at the end of Hesperides (1648) to mark his shift into
silence, Vaughan was emphatically rethinking his relationship to English poetry
and to the “Kingdom” at large through the influential guiding hand of George
Herbert. Herbert’s “holy life and verse,” Vaughan remarked in the 1655 Preface,
had already “gained many pious Converts (of whom I am the least)”—the phrase
in parentheses echoing Herbert’s own motto, which was borrowed, in turn, from
Jacob in Genesis 32:10, and characteristic of the intimate bond Vaughan forged
with Herbert and of the significant place the Bible held in the writings of both
men. While Lovelace was seeking, uncertainly, to continue as “the Cavalier”
into the 1650s, Vaughan was in the process of repudiating, publicly, any
connection with “idle” verse: his own “follies” and those of his contemporaries.
If Vaughan looked to France with other royalists, it was not to “naturalize” court
romances—“Foreign Vanities” as he called them in the Preface. It was to
translate writings from some of the “primitive” fathers of the Church once
located there. If he took flight, it was as a lyricist, pure and easy; or so he wished
his readers of the Preface to believe.
The urge to rewrite and the desire for the “primitive” stem from a similar wish
to return blood and bread to his poetry in more ways than one; and I do not
think it is at all accidental that the moment when Vaughan first identifies
himself with his ancient, warlike clansman, the Silurists (on the title page of
Silex Scintillans 1650), should coincide with his “regeneration” as a poet under
Herbert’s tutelage. Both involve quests for a new identity, a new authority, a new
way of speaking to the present circumstances. In his earlier poetry, Vaughan had
written as an outsider, as a poet on the fringe of a courtly, royalist tradition. “I
knew thee not” begins his commendatory poem to Fletcher; “I did but see thee,”
he remarks at the outset of his verse elegy to Cartwright, although in both cases
Vaughan’s desire to throw in his lot and join a communal act of Royalist
commendation and solidarity was sufficient to overcome these hesitations. And
as a poet on the fringe, he registered his wish to belong through a tissue of
echoes, especially in his early amatory verse in Poems (1646), from Donne,
Habington, Carew, and Jonson, among others. He also came to regard himself
as a regionalist. As the Swan of the Usk in Olor Iscanus, published in 1651 by
Humphrey Moseley (but largely completed by 1647), Vaughan voiced his
political views (and loyalist support) from afar as well as recorded local goings
on: the death of several people killed in action, the appearance of Katherine
Phillips as a poet, and of festivity and fellowship in Brecknock. If every poet had
a river, Vaughan could be a tributary connected to a European and English
mainstream, no less, if he had one too:
But Isca, whensoe’r those shades I see,
And thy lov’d Arbours must no more know me,
When I am layd to rest hard by thy streams,
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