ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
Given the level of linguistic intensity recorded in these passages and their
evident attention to “quickness,” it is perfectly understandable why scholars
have not been content to locate Vaughan strictly within Renaissance
conventions of the pastoral but have looked to Hermetic texts of the period,
especially those produced by Thomas Vaughan, to explain the energizing
potential embodied in the representation of nature in the devotional verse (as
well as the presence of words with occult inflections like “ray,” “seed,” “dew,”
and “tincture,” for instance). As Thomas noted, with an elitism characteristic of
the Vaughans more generally, “the Peripatetickes [Aristotelians] look on God, as
they do on Carpenters, who build with stone and Timber, without any infusion of
life. But the world, which is Gods building, is full of Spirit, quick, and living.” 11
“Quick” and “living” have special meaning for Henry, too, but not only as
properties found in the nature identified in his verse. “Infusions of life,” mobility
of thought, characterize the very essence of “sacred ejaculations,” as in the
celebrated opening of “The Morning-watch”:
O Joyes! Infinite sweetnes! with what flowres,
And shoots of glory, my soul breakes, and buds!
All the long houres
Of night, and Rest
Through the still shrouds
Of sleep, and Clouds,
This Dew fell on my Breast;
O how it Blouds,
And Spirits all my Earth! heark! In what Rings,
And Hymning Circulations the quick world
Awakes, and sings.
In this waking hymn, the level of identification with nature is so intense (even
if Vaughan begins by way of a line from Herbert’s “H.Scriptures”) that it is all
but impossible to distinguish internal from external: the breaking and budding
of the speaker’s body from nature’s (“O how it Blouds,/and Spirits all my Earth”),
or the “Hymning Circulations” in the world from those uttered by the rejuvenated
speaker who forcefully twists nouns into verbs. “If Priest, and People change, keep
thou thy ground,” Vaughan noted in “Rules and Lessons.” Here and elsewhere,
the act of keeping is more than an exercise in stoic resolve, just as “ground” is
more than a term in a familiar phrase. Keeping is a matter of absorbing and being
absorbed by the landscape, of authoring its language in “quickening” turns.
To highlight the animated landscape in Vaughan is to underscore the noninstitutionalized
(or in the case of “Regeneration,” the fleetingly
institutionalized) opportunities for worship repeatedly “discovered” in Silex
Scintillans, the traces of God continually glimpsed in animated things that point
to their ultimate home—stones, herbs, and birds, and here especially the cock
of “Cockcrowing,” in singular possession of a “Sunnie seed” from above:
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