ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
dearest and nearest relatives”), there is still the constant call of the wild in
Vaughan: the sharp outbursts against the new Puritan authorities for propagating
destruction rather than worship; 7 the pointed barbs against the apparent
hypocrisy involved in sectarian sainting (“St. Mary Magdalene”); the strange
mutterings about “murthered men” amid thoughts of “greenness” (“The
Timber”); the frequent lashing out at lewdness (“The Daughter of Herodias”);
even the cries against God, cries that resonate like “songs in the Night”—to
borrow a phrase from the epigram from Job on the title page of the completed
Silex—with the ubiquitous wish to be elsewhere: in the desert with St. Jerome
perhaps, or walking the fields of Bethany with the raised Jesus and his disciples,
or simply with the many dead, Abel or otherwise. “They are all gone into the
world of light,” begins Vaughan with disarming simplicity in one of his most
anthologized poems, “And I alone sit lingring here.”
As the above remarks will already have suggested, the calling is most acute
in the devotional poetry. “More of fashion then force” is how Vaughan
characterized Herbert’s other followers in the Preface to the completed Silex
Scintillans, 8 but the same cannot be said of him in his desire to be elsewhere or
in the burst of stanzaic experiments that greets the reader of Silex Part I. Herbert
had led the way in sounding the heart, but within the “daylight sanity and
vigour,” in Seamus Heaney’s phrasing, of an ever present via media incorporating
the principal events of worship. 9 The Temple is the story, at one level, of bringing
“lovely enchanting language” to church and making it “well dressed and clad,”
as Herbert says in “The Forerunners.” Vaughan is everywhere more woolly in
Silex Scintillans. His is the narrative of the exile—of the person who, quickened
by devotional longing, “stole abroad” (my italics), as he says at the outset of
“Regeneration,” the emphatic opening poem to the 1650 volume:
A Ward, and still in bonds, one day
I stole abroad,
It was high-spring, and all the way
Primros’d, and hung with shade;
Yet, was it frost within,
And surly winds
Blasted my infant buds, and sinne
Like Clouds ecclips’d my mind.
His search, amid bad inner and outer weather, is for the dazzling light of divinity,
as he goes on to say, and it issues in notions of amazing radical change:
Here, I repos’d; but scarse well set,
A grove descryed
Of stately height, whose branches met
And mixt on every side:
I entred, and once in
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