ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
O how I long to travell back
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plaine,
When first I left my glorious traine,
From whence th’ Inlightned spirit sees
That shady City of Palme trees;
But (ah!) my soul with too much stay
Is drunk, and staggers in the way.
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move,
And when this dust falls to the urn
In that state I came return.
“Search well another world; who studies this,/Travels in Clouds, seeks Manna,
where none is” (“The Search”). Peace is in another country far beyond the stars
(“Peace”). Here, the flesh is weak: the soul staggers, “The sons the father kil”
(“The Constellation”).
If retreat is often as elusive and problematic in Silex as it is enchanting, there
are still other responses to the difficulties of historical displacement besides
melancholy lament or the kind of visionary satire only partially realized in “The
World.” The world that necessitates escape can also be re-turned, re-imagined
as a place ripe for transformation itself: perhaps “healed,” as in the end of
“Religion,” or more radically altered by calling for the Second Coming itself:
Ah! what time wilt thou come? When shall that crie
The Bridegroome’s Comming! fil the sky?
Shall it in the Evening run
When our words and works are done?
Or wil thy all-surprizing light
Break at midnight?
(“The Dawning”)
In the face of such possibilities, Vaughan seems almost without defense,
already transported by the cry from above and wondering now only about the
hour of Christ’s arrival. Like a good many writings of the 1650s, including
some of Marvell’s poems, Silex reverberates with a sense of great expectations:
two Judgment Day poems, one on the Conversion of the Jews, a strange
“dramatic monologue” based on an episode from Joshua (“The Stone”) and a
host of allusions to the day of doom, some appended in the form of Biblical
inscriptions, others more loosely suggested through a kind of continuous
allegory with light and darkness or an occasional reference to a phrase from
Revelation itself.
Marvell might tease this theme in many directions, 16 but for Vaughan,
apocalypse is most often represented as a solution to corruption, to the dark
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