ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
at the trial of Charles. But even here, while Vaughan can recall Hebrews and
retract the thunder of voices from his poem—the “urgent sound like unto that/
Of many waters”—he cannot fully “still” the exclamatory violence from his own
voice:
May Abel be
Still single heard, while these agree
With his milde blood in voice and will,
Who pray’d for those that did him kill!
As the clinch of the final rhyme indicates, the deep still calls upon the deep.
“Will” and “kill” are difficult to dislodge, except through a superior act of the
will, indeed perhaps as difficult to dislodge, finally and absolutely for Vaughan
in the early 1650s, as a “martyred” king from a crucified Jesus, both of whom are
said to have prayed for “those that did him kill!”
* * *
Given the turbulent undertow in a poem like “Abels blood,” it is easy to
understand why Vaughan frequently prayed for “the patience of the Saints”
(“The Palm-tree”). How to walk the straight and narrow (“The Ass,” “The Men
of War”), how to keep close counsel (“Righteousness”) are frequent themes in
the second part of Silex when the note of expectation and release is especially
strong, a note that receives circumstantial grounding in the various allusions to
“our sad captivity.” They were also prime challenges for Vaughan, as they were
for Milton, and therefore attitudes potentially ripe for fashioning into acts of
heroic resistance or of sublime secrecy. In the remainder of this chapter, I want
to concentrate on two of Vaughan’s most impressive poems from this angle. Both
are from Silex 1655, and in both, with their twin concerns with martyrdom and
mysticism, the idea of retreat receives something approaching its ultimate
expression in Vaughan.
In the case of “The Proffer,” the literature of religious persecution was rich
with examples of martyrdom, and the charge to remember them in times of
duress was a commonplace in Renaissance England, as the illustrious printing
history of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs makes clear. Vaughan himself cited perhaps the
greatest exemplar from late antiquity in his translation of The Life of Paulinus:
“It is an observation of the Readers of Saint Cyprian, quod in ejus scriptis singula
prope verba Martyrium spirant, that through all his writings, almost every word
doth breath Martyrdome. His expressions are all Spirit and Passion, as if he had
writ them with his blood, and conveyed the anguish of his sufferings into his
writings.” 20 Whether or not Vaughan had Cyprian in mind at the end of “The
Proffer” when he exhorted himself (and others, by implication) to “keep the
ancient way,” he fully imagined the poem from the point of view of the body
under siege—attacked by “black Parasites” and “pois’nous, subtile fowls!/The
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