ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
Which once had neither being, forme, nor name,
Grant I may so
Thy steps track here below,
8.
That in these Masques and shadows I may see
Thy sacred way,
And by those hid ascents climb to that day
Which breaks from thee
Who art in all things, though invisibly;
Shew me thy peace,
Thy mercy, love, and ease,
9.
And from this Care, where dreams and sorrows raign
Lead me above
Where Light, Joy, Leisure, and true Comforts move
Without all pain,
There hid in thee, shew me his life again
At whose dumbe urn
Thus all the year I mourn.
Elegy, in Silex, rarely discovers, or in this case uncovers, a point of view that
urges accommodation with an imagined community because the absence of that
community is also always being lamented—right down to Vaughan’s decision
never even to identify by name the person whom he’s lamenting. Would
anybody out there really care? Or so the poem seems to say.
The wind blows where it lists in Silex, but rarely in one direction or for very
long and often bringing a bracing sense of chill. To celebrate light—to switch
metaphors—is to begin to worry over its loss: “O take it off! make no delay,/ But
brush me with thy light, that I/May shine unto a perfect day.” To find a “gallant
flowre” in the landscape is immediately to wish to see through it and eventually
to view the landscape as but a “Masque” and shadow leading to a greater reality.
As has been recently re-argued, Silex “is much more about the possibility of
searching than it is about finding,” 14 or more accurately still, about the problems
of searching, especially in the first part when, in the immediate wake of the
Puritan triumph, the rhetoric of retreat is most insistent and Vaughan’s sense of
displacement from the present most pronounced and profound. An often
anthologized poem like “Religion,” for instance, begins as if an ideal devotional
retreat is being envisioned:
My God, when I walke in those groves,
And leaves thy spirit doth still fan,
I see in each shade that there growes
An Angell talking with a man.
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