ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
In focusing on Nicodemus, Vaughan stands completely apart from the other
devotional poets with whom he is usually associated: Donne, Herbert, Crashaw,
or even Milton have no place for Nicodemus in their poetry. And in favoring him,
Vaughan goes against strong exegetical evidence to the contrary, perhaps even
against Calvin’s earlier condemnation of those Protestants as cowardly Nicodemites
who chose to go along with Catholic formalities rather than to risk persecution. 27
Nicodemus has been always a questionable figure for the orthodox; but for Vaughan,
living in a “land of darkness and blinde eyes,” requiring secrecy under the threat of
persecution and yet wishing regeneration, Nicodemus could readily be imagined
as a “kinred” spirit. “The Night,” it should be noted, is next to “Abels blood.”
But something else odd happens in the poem, too, something for which, one
can only guess, Vaughan’s reading of Nicodemus played a pivotal role as well.
Quem quaeritis? If Nicodemus is the exemplary believer (“Most blest believer
he!”) who reappears in John 19:39 to help preserve Jesus’s body, Vaughan
becomes a Mary Magdalene figure looking for the Lord. “And they say unto her,
Woman why weepest thou? She said unto them Because they have taken my
Lord, and I know not where they had laid him” (John 20:13):
O who will tell me, where
He found thee at that dead and silent hour!
What hallow’d solitary ground did bear
So rare a flower,
Within whose sacred leafs did lie
The fulness of the Deity.
Mary’s lament for Jesus becomes braided into Vaughan’s for a vision comparable
to Nicodemus’s, a fusion in which the worry of loss, concentrated in the word
“dead,” is gradually transformed into an experience of wonder by the image of
“the fulness of the Deity” emerging from “so rare a flower.” There is nothing
shocking here, as there is in “I walkt the other day,” when the “warm Recluse”
delivers its startling message of loss and renewal. Rather, the moment of solitude—
Nicodemus’s, Mary’s, Vaughan’s, the reader’s—is hallowed, the ground sanctified,
as it were, by a view of Jesus alone, observed only by nature and by us:
No mercy-seat of gold,
No dead and dusty Cherub, nor carv’d stone,
But his own living works did my Lord hold
And lodge alone;
Where trees and herbs did watch and peep
And wonder, while the Jews did sleep.
“My Lord”: from here, we move from one imaginary garden to another, as the
voice migrates into that of the bride in the Song of Songs: “I am come into my
garden…I sleep, but my heart waketh; it is the voice of my beloved that
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