ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
Under a Juniper, some house,
Or the coole Mirtles canopie,
Others beneath an Oakes greene boughs,
Or at some fountaines bubling Eye.
For a moment the sense of the past belongs entirely to Vaughan. The pun on
“leaves” hardly diminishes the note of devotional fervor, as the idyllic
description continues for another three stanzas and displays what Stephen
Greenblatt might call the “marvelous possessions” of the Old Testament:
figures of Jacob dreaming and wrestling with Angels, Abraham being visited
by his “winged guests,” and so forth.15 But these “possessions,” privately
imagined and momentarily owned, also come to be seen as signs of loss (“O
how familiar then was heaven”), as signs of what the recent disturbances have
claimed. “Is the truce broke?” The question simply hangs there in all its
glancing insinuations; then proceeds a long Spenserian allegory describing the
gradual degradation of Religion until it is seen to break forth like Duessa:
“And at first sight doth many please,/But drunk, is puddle, or meere slime/
And ’stead of Phisick, a disease.” The satire here might be chalked up to
Vaughan, the physician, simply leaping into the fray, but the reference to “first
sight”—ours and Vaughan’s—suggests too the tenuous thread on which even
mediated descriptions of faith now hang: how easily, in fact, a vision or
reading is sacrificed to present events, how readily the reader is dispossessed of
his or her landscape and its marvelous possessions.
The closing prayer attends to this problem. Vaughan calls for a healing that
involves both a critique of Puritan worship (and therefore not a real mediation)
and a revivification—a quickening—of the land that will allow Angels to talk
once more to man, for retreats to be real and idylls not to be idols:
Heale then these waters, Lord; or bring thy flock,
Since these are troubled, to the springing rock.
Looke down great Master of the feast; O shine,
And turn once more our Water into Wine!
The eucharistic allusions are unmistakable; but the Biblical inscription that
follows suggests, too, that renewal is also linked to the restoration of the church:
“My sister, my spouse is as a garden Inclosed, as a Spring shut up, and a fountain
sealed up.” Vaughan is not Spenser, or St. George, but he can still thrust a sword
from below in an attempt to rescue the true church. Vaughan, we remember,
translated Juvenal as well as Boethius.
* * *
Still, retreat is never far from Vaughan’s thinking (nor is Boethius), even if the
subject is often double-edged, and double-edged for more than one reason:
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