ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
changes recently brought about, rather than as a response to belief in the
impending possibility of social improvement, in a potential Utopian moment: 17
Sin triumphs still, and man is sunk below
The Center, and his shrowd;
All’s in deep sleep, and night; Thick darknes lyes
And hatcheth o’r thy people;
But hark! what trumpets that? What Angel cries
Arise! Thrust in thy sickle.
203
(“Corruption”)
Egypt is now; for Vaughan, there is no Psalm 114 (as there was for Milton), but
the poet still has an enunciating role in the imagined cosmic drama. As Louis
Martz has recently noted, “hatcheth o’r” means to close over, to form a hatch
over, but “perhaps also with the suggestion of bringing to maturity a hidden
process.” 18 If so, it is a hidden process, like the shift from “hatch“ to ”sickle“
(without mentioning “hatchet”), in which the speaker participates; for when he
suddenly shifts from narrator to auditor to announcer (“But hark!”) and
recirculates in the imaginary present the blast of trumpets and the angel’s cry
from Revelation 14:15, he bears witness to the moment of change itself.
That “sickle” should form a slant rhyme with “people” is perhaps the merest
coincidence, a flickering sign of the antipopulism that runs fiercely at times
through Vaughan’s writing. Elsewhere, however, judgment scenes allow for a
return of the repressed, for an opportunity to vocalize victimization beyond that
hinted at in the elegies or appearing in the guise of Latin in the prefatory poem
to Olor Iscanus, “Ad Posteros.” In this regard, “Abels blood,” remains one of the
most restless and unsettling poems in Silex. As the blood of the murdered Abel
emerges from the ground to protest the slaughter of innocence, so the poem
protests the notion of human-sanctioned violence of any sort, including even
the usurpation and amplification of Abel’s voice as a justification for revenge.
(Framing the case against Charles at his trial, the Republican John Cook had
done precisely this in asking for justice against the king: “How long Parliament,
how long Army, will ye forbear to avenge our blood?”) 19
From the beginning, Vaughan uses “still” to denote an action that is ongoing
without, perhaps, ever ending—at least until the moment of Judgment itself when
it will be possible, once again, to think of “still” in its other sense of meaning quiet:
Sad, purple well! whose bubling eye
Did first against a Murth’rer cry;
Whose streams still vocal, still complain
Of bloody Cain,
And now at evening are as red
As in the morning when first shed.
If single thou