Henry
Vaughan (1622-1695)
- doctrine of mystic correspondence
(analogical relations between the world of creatures and the
world of spirits; Welsh country doctor
- felt a strong tie or kinship w. creatures of nature
- published 2 books, Silex Scintellans or the Fiery Flint
(1650)
- Olor Iscanus or The Swan of Usk 1651--titles refer to Welsh
ancestry
- Herbert big influence; echoes of The Temple
- Vaughan's twin brother, an alchemical philospher, also big
influence
- imagery of light (God, Election, Heaven, life, happiness)
and darkness (Devil, damnation, death, misery); Sandbank essay
"HV's apology for Darkness"
Robert Ellrod
- Vaughan only meets
himself in solitude, not in dialogue w. a Mistress or Master.
His self-awareness is a self-expression in reverie and sympathy
- like Crashaw, he goes out of himself; unlike Crashaw,
he returns
- similes, intensify emotions rather than defining or clarifying
- self-examination (Browne) conducted through allegory,
not aimed at self-discovery but a kind of contemplation?
- like Xian mystics, yearns to recapture something lost
- pervasive water-symbolism suggests longing for purity
Doug Bush
- 1650 Silex Scintillans
"disowned his secular muse" (lots or tragedies, public war,
and death of brother, contributed to a "conversion")
- inheritor of Herbert: combines "Herbertian religious poet
[of conflict] and the timeless...Neoplatonist" (mysticism)
- strength and centrality of his intuitions of the invisible
Joseph Summers on Vaughan
-
Provincial--Welsh
culture; early poems of first 2 books 1646 are labored
and pretentious, Olor Iscanus 1647--Swan of Usk
-
Silex Scintillans
(2 parts 1650, 1655) are big departure. Religious poetry,
not courtly--137 poems within 7 yr. period. Then no more
for 27 years. 1678 more bad secular poems, a few others.
-
Vaughan has a story
about a Welsh shepherd's bardic seizure: Awen is welsh
for Raptus or poetic fervor. Sleep "in which he
dreamt, that he saw a beautiful young man with a garland
of green leafs upon his head, and a hawk upon his fist-...[hawk
got into his mouth and inward parts, and he woke up scared]
but possessed with such a vein, or gift of poetry, that
he left his sheep and went about the country...the most
famous bard in all the country"
-
Title of Silex Scintillans
(Flashing, or Sparking, Flint) from Jesuit John Nieremberg:
Certain Divine Rays break out of the Soul in adversity,
like sparks of fire out of the afflicted flint"--AFFLICTION
MAKES FLINT SPARK--death of wife, brother, illness of
himself--Also adds that G. Herbert's "holy life and verse"
diverted the foul stream.
-
No other poet so influenced
by Herbert--certainly not Crashaw
-
poems less ordered,
more shapeless than herbert; also writes like D. Thomas--a
lot of description of nature (pastoral?) none in Donne,
Herbert, or Jonson
-
couldn't display "systems"
of thought (Herbert's book)--lack of court polish="oddly
unrhymed lines, lines so twisted to achieve their rhymes,
such imperfect rhymes, awkward shifts" nor such flights
as in "The World"--says first stanza is the best. Miltonic.
-
themes of innocence
and nautre, light (darkness) and greeness, heavenly and
human and even vegetative glory (in Welsh same word for
White, fair, and blessed)
-
"The Retreat"=WW's
Immortality Ode
-
Likes to use "shoots"
like Thomas--light=vegetative glory
-
Loosely associative
structure unlike logical Donne structure or near articulated
Herbert Jonson structures. "Often framed by a meditation--or
a vision--and a prayer, the central section represents
various movements of a mind"--we have to intuitively leap.
-
"They are all gone
into the world of Light"--3 stanzas that describe vision;
1 apostrophe to hope and humility; 1 apostrophe to Death;
1 exemplum of birds nest and negative argument; analogy
of star in tomb and application; concludes w. 2 stanza
prayer. Yeats' Among School Children--rambling meditation.
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