ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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