ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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ARENAS OF RETREAT<br />
And my Sun sets, where first it sprang in beams,<br />
I’le leave behind me such a large, kind light,<br />
As shall redeem thee from oblivious night.<br />
(“To the River Isca”)<br />
In the aftermath of the Civil War, however, what came west was not poetry but<br />
Puritanism.<br />
It would be wrong to suggest that these “secular” poems (as they have come to<br />
be called) and the lyrics appearing many years later in Thalia Rediviva (1678) are<br />
without merit. They show evidence of literary ambition and energy beyond that<br />
of much collected in Saintsbury’s three-volume edition of Minor Caroline Poetry: 4<br />
an attention to odd words or conceits in contemporary usage like “Kelder of mists”<br />
(meaning “womb,” from the Dutch for cellar and probably borrowed from<br />
Cleveland’s “The King Disguised”); and an ability to extemporize at some length<br />
on an incidental topic (“Upon a Cloke lent him by Mr. J. Ridsley”). As Aubrey<br />
recognized, Vaughan could be “ingeniose.” But the poetry still lacks a sustained<br />
theme or, better yet, a purposive vision, a precise register that will fully<br />
differentiate Vaughan (whom Aubrey also called “proud and humorous”) from<br />
the many gentlemen poets of the period. In Silex, the break with the genteel<br />
tradition is decisive. In the process, however, Vaughan became not less but even<br />
more of an outsider—more of a writer on the margins, as might be said today, so<br />
long as we remember that in the tradition in which Vaughan was writing in the<br />
Renaissance, the margins, in this particular case, were also sites of textual and<br />
political power. (Recall the Geneva Bible or the role Welsh antiquity played in<br />
the formation of England’s identity, to say nothing about Herbert’s family lineage<br />
in nearby Montgomery.) “I am here in body but not in heart” the poetry and the<br />
prose keep repeating. I am with George Herbert, that “most glorious true Saint” of<br />
the British Church and “a seer” whose “incomparable prophetick Poems”<br />
predicted the present disasters; 5 I am with St. Paulinus of Nola (in France); I am<br />
with the Spanish Jesuit Juan Eusebius Nieremberg; I am with Christ in the Mount<br />
of Olives. I am only barely here in the body, as the penultimate paragraph to the<br />
1655 Preface, nearly Vaughan’s “final” statement, makes clear; and I am here only<br />
because of God’s special mercy: “When I expected, and had (by his assistance)<br />
prepared for a message of death, then did he answer me with life.” 6<br />
To speak of Vaughan as being only barely present in the body is to begin to<br />
see how fully he framed his role as an author in this vital but resisting light. Even<br />
if we pass quickly by his militant revision of the Book of Common Prayer<br />
(banned by the Westminster Assembly in 1645) that appeared as the first part<br />
of his Mount of Olives (1652), in which the Laudian practice of bowing at the<br />
name of Jesus is remembered; even if we refuse an explicitly autobiographical<br />
reading of his “Prayer in adversity, and troubles occasioned by Our Enemies”<br />
(“Thou seest, O God, how furious and Implacable mine Enemies are, they have<br />
not only rob’d me of that portion and provision which thou hadst graciously<br />
given me, but they have also washed their hands in the blood of my friends, my<br />
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