ENG LYRIC POETRY.pdf - STIBA Malang

ARENAS OF RETREAT
knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for
my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night” (5:1–2).
We might remember the bride as the church represented in “The Brittish
Church” lamenting its forced separation from Christ, its head. But in this night
of nights, things are different; now the body muses over an amorous return of
the head in a moment of near perfect stillness:
Dear night! this worlds defeat;
The stop to busie fools; cares check and curb;
The day of Spirits; my souls calm retreat
Which none disturb!
Christs progress, and his prayer time;
The hours to which high Heaven doth chime.
Gods silent, searching flight:
When my Lords head is fill’d with dew, and all
His locks are wet with the clear drops of night;
His still, soft call;
His knocking time; The souls dumb watch,
When Spirits their fair kinred catch.
In the allusion to Christ’s kingly “progress, and his prayer time,” we might be
tempted to fantasize momentarily about the other, decapitated, king, whose
habits of private prayer had been made available for all England to witness in
the frontispiece to Eikon Basilike (1649). But the license for a lover’s intimacy
in this instance belongs to Scripture and to Herbert: the chime of “Prayer (I)”
as part of the stanzaic “background” incorporating the “still, soft call” reminds
us that the most intimate moment of communion in Vaughan could be fully
realized only in company with Herbert. Still, the final enactment of “this worlds
defeat” lies elsewhere—in the great concluding stanza:
There is in God (some say)
A deep, but dazling darkness; As men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear;
O for that night! where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.
Vaughan is not “there” yet; and were he to arrive, moreover, there would be no
means of measuring his desire to be elsewhere—of defeating the world. But the
wish has taken him to the farthest outpost of the imagination: to a deep but
dazzling darkness so powerful and remote that all thoughts of living—whether
with Herbert or Paulinus, Jesus, Nicodemus, or Mary—are willingly exchanged
in favor of becoming altogether invisible in God. Here, at the end of “The
Night,” the distance between militancy and devotion approach zero.
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