ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang
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ARENAS OF RETREAT<br />
Christ. Dark, as it were, calls unto the dark, light unto the light. In this strange<br />
and beautiful poem, there is a welcome generosity of intent on Vaughan’s part,<br />
a desire, as Frank Kermode has suggested in a related context while revisiting<br />
this poem, “to have more of the story than was originally offered” 24 in John 3:2<br />
(indeed, much of John is relevant); and it produces a powerful overflow of<br />
mysterious meaning, a “dark conceit” that brings together Nicodemus and<br />
Herbert, the language of the Song of Songs and Dionysius the Areopagite, the<br />
first moments of Christianity with the last, a hallowing reverence for the quiet<br />
of prayer amid the clatter of the present, the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene, and<br />
the Bride of Christ, the light of midnight associated with the “Sun” and “a deep,<br />
but dazling darkness” that is God.<br />
A poem that has stimulated so many readings need not be reinterpreted again<br />
in full, but a few oddities and points of resistance are still worth remarking on.<br />
Several appear in the crucial opening stanza:<br />
Through that pure Virgin-shrine,<br />
That sacred vail drawn o’r thy glorious noon<br />
That men might look and live as Glo-worms shine,<br />
And face the Moon:<br />
Wise Nicodemus saw such light<br />
As made him know his God by night.<br />
On the strength of Vaughan’s usual sympathy with nature, a few readers have<br />
made the opening conceit more difficult than it is by seeking to draw a parallel<br />
between the experience of Nicodemus seeing Christ at night with the habits of<br />
glowworms facing the moon. 25 But Vaughan would seem to be developing the<br />
contrast; the association of men with glowworms in the seventeenth century was<br />
often applied contemptuously, as the example (one of several cited by the OED)<br />
from Joseph Hall makes especially clear: “the world is full of such glowwormes,<br />
that make some show of Spiritual Light from God.” (Given the 1652 date of the<br />
work of Hall’s in which this phrase appears, it is even conceivable Vaughan had<br />
this particular example in mind.)<br />
The contrast helps to throw into sharp relief the special character of<br />
Nicodemus’s “wisdom.” He not only saw the light; the light illuminated him<br />
with the knowledge that it was “his God” (my italics). While others might<br />
continue to face the moon, kept from the light of truth by a veil, he saw through<br />
the “pure Virgin-shrine” of the moon, a figure that combines chaste Diana with<br />
the Virgin Mary, to this other light, “the glorious noon,” the “Son” of God. The<br />
vision is both compelling and unequivocal. If it injects into the poem a<br />
conspiratorial note, moreover, involving a plot of the elect that especially<br />
sanctions secrecy, the association is one that appears frequently in Vaughan’s<br />
writings, particularly later on (see “The Seed growing secretly” and The Life of<br />
Paulinus as well as the earlier “Love, and Discipline”). It is also a perspective<br />
inevitably and often subtly articulated by disenfranchised royalists. 26<br />
207