ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
flies of hell” that are clearly associated in the poem with the “Commonwealth.”
(Hutchinson plausibly suggests that Vaughan might have been made an offer to
“collaborate” with the Puritan authorities.) 21 The poem begins with a powerful
denunciation; then as proof of his unbending resistance to temptation, Vaughan
offers in the middle a brief “character” of the holy life that he has struggled to
achieve, a self-portrait in which “every word doth breath Martyrdome”:
Think you these longing eyes,
Though sick and spent,
And almost famish’d, ever will consent
To leave those skies,
That glass of souls and spirits, where well drest
They shine in white (like stars) and rest.
Shall my short hour, my inch,
My one poor sand,
And crum of live, now ready to disband
Revolt and flinch,
And having born the burthen all the day,
Now cast at night my Crown away?
No, No; I am not he,
Go seek elsewhere.
I skill not your fine tinsel, and false hair,
Your Sorcery
And smooth seducements: I’le not stuff my story
With your Commonwealth and glory.
We do not hear the crackle of the pyre that a recent scholar finds in Cyprian’s
writings, but we find a similar concern with the visceral as part of the defense of
the holy way. 22 Famished as it might be, the body serves as symbol of the soul’s
steel-like control in the face of temptation. The eyes remain skyward to the end:
Then keep the antient way!
Spit out their phlegm
And fill thy brest with home; think on thy dream:
A calm, bright day!
A Land of flowers and spices! the word given,
If these be fair, O what is Heaven!
If “The Proffer” remains undervalued (and is ripe to be further historicized), the
poem that has come to seem Vaughan’s richest of late “takes the ancient way”
in an altogether different manner. 23 In “The Night,” the potential martyr’s fierce
resistance melts in the dusky light of the lover’s intimate and secret retreat with
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