ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

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