ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
the speaker in retreat as a wandering recluse himself—the reference to “cold friends”
further defining him in his isolation and motivating him to look elsewhere for a
warmth less vulnerable to the change of seasons or the whim of social indifference.
(The occult linkage between one recluse and another points toward what one
critic has called “The Fellowship of the Mystery” in Vaughan.) 12 But the leisurely
address is also crucial to setting up the broader drama of the poem: the personal
“shock” of recognition that occurs in the middle of the poem, when after rare and
intricate questions have been posed, the “warm Recluse” simply declares,
that he now
Did there repair
Such losses as befel him in this air
And would e’r long
Come forth most fair and young.
As Stevie Davies rightly notes, the response is met with “an extraordinarily
emotional outburst” at the poem’s center; 13 but it is also an obscure outburst,
since what the speaker “hears” is not the hopeful message of regeneration that
readers often draw from the “warm Recluse’s” promise to come forth “e’r long
…most fair and young.” Rather, it is an acute fear of his own “mortality,” and
the further, deepening recognition of the divided and distinguished worlds to
which each “recluse” now inalterably belongs:
5.
This past I threw the Clothes quite o’r his head,
And stung with fear
Of my own frailty dropt down many a tear
Upon his bed,
Then sighing whisper’d, Happy are the dead!
What Peace doth now
Rock him asleep below?
What is so striking and disconcerting (to us as well as the speaker) is the
recognition that the dead, in their peaceful sleep, are better off than the living:
“Such losses as befel him in this air.” Vaughan never specifies what these losses
might be (sickness? injury? slaughter?), but like the allusion to “cold friends,”
they hint at a world well left behind, an attitude amplified many times over in
the great long prayer, extended over three stanzas, that concludes the poem:
7.
O thou! whose spirit did at first inflame
And warm the dead,
And by a sacred Incubation fed
With life this frame
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