ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
Father of lights! what Sunnie seed,
What glance of day has thou confin’d
Into this bird? To all the breed
This busie Ray thou hast assign’d;
Their magnetisme works all night,
And dreams of Paradise and light.
It is also to note the primitive, shadowy character of Vaughan’s landscape to be
more like that of Milton’s Mask (originally staged in nearby Ludlow Castle) than
that of the more manicured Herbert: unbounded, alluring, sometimes with odd
flora in it, and occasionally overburdened with mystery and meaning. Vaughan’s
most moving elegy, in fact, starts off in the direction of Herbert, with a courtly
reference to a “gallant flower” borrowed from Herbert’s “Peace,” but then shifts
into a mode of deliberate inquiry more reminiscent of a mid-century naturalist
like Sir Thomas Browne, in this case the Browne of Urn-Burial (1658), since
Vaughan’s wanderings lead him quickly below ground:
I walkt the other day (to spend my hour)
Into a field
Where I sometimes had seen the soil to yield
A gallant flowre,
But Winter now had ruffled all the bowre
And curious store
I knew there heretofore.
2.
Yet I whose search lov’d not to peep and peer
I’th’ face of things
Thought with my self, there might be other springs
Besides this here
Which, like cold friends, sees us but once a year,
And so the flowre
Might have some other bowre.
3.
Then taking up what I could neerest spie
I digg’d about
That place where I had seen him to grow out,
And by and by
I saw the warm Recluse alone to lie
Where fresh and green
He lived of us unseen.
Part of the elegy’s initial appeal is the leisurely address and the odd details that
emerge in the process, especially in the second stanza. These help to “characterize”
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