ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
something eagerly desired because it has been so fully interrupted; something
denied and therefore more fully desired. Based in part on Book II, Metre 5 of
Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, Vaughan’s most famous poem, in fact, might
be said to worry conventional ideas of retreat (as, say, expressed in Vaughan’s
own translation of Guevara’s The Praise and Happinesse of the Countrie-Life)
beyond the pale. Rather than a mere anticipation of the glories of childhood
eventually perfected in Wordsworth, “The Retreate” is a poignant hymn of
personal displacement:
Happy those early dayes! when I
Shin’d in my Angell-infancy.
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy ought
But a white, Celestiall thought.
As in “Religion,” the controlling scheme is relentlessly temporal: “before” (or
“when,” “when,” “before” in the remaining paragraph). But with each
restatement, the sense of bifurcation between then and now becomes only more
deeply etched (as if the act of restating only made Vaughan more aware of the
problem of placelessness), until the wish to retreat receives its quintessential
expression in a line famously transported from one of Owen Felltham’s Resolves
(“The Conscience, the Caracter of a God stampt in it, and the apprehension of
Eternity, doe all prove [the soul] a shoot of everlastingnesse”):
My gazing soul would dwell an houre,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My Conscience with a sinfull sound,
Or had the black art to dispence
A sev’rall sinne to ev’ry sence,
But felt through all this fleshly dresse
Bright shootes of everlastingnesse.
One is tempted to say that the simple addition of “Bright” makes all the poetic
difference in the world here, especially when the “shoote” is “felt through all this
fleshly dresse” and in the alliterative plural. Much of the emotive thrust of the
poem, indeed of Vaughan in general, is fused in this wishful couplet. But as in
many of Vaughan’s most memorable lines, the brilliance leaves only a deeper
yearning in the reader (and the poet) for an afterglow—in this case, if not for a
vision of all going into a world of light, then for a view of a luminous past that
recedes at a pace faster than the itinerant imagination, as the “O” of desire gives
way to the “ah” of defeat:
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