RICHARD LOVELACE, RICHARD CRASHAW, SIR JOHN SUCKLING, THOMAS CAREW, ANDREW MARVELL, EDMUND WALLER, HENRY VAUGHAN
Milton marks a beginning more than an end, gathering the energies of the Elizabethan age, reconfiguring the poetic, political and religious trends in a way that closes off the past. After Milton, certain forms and styles are out of bounds. But poets grew alongside him on whom his shadow did not fall. Old-fashioned Anglican survivors, they wrote what they had to write regardless of him.
Richard Lovelace, “the most amiable and beautiful person that ever eye beheld,” “a most beautifull Gentleman,” “loved Adonis,” inherited substantial estates in Kent, went from Oxford to court, served in the wars, was imprisoned for supporting the king and wrote the poem “Stone walls do not a prison make.” He rejoined the king in 1645. As he was reported dead, his beloved Lucy Sacheverell, the Lucasta of his verse—“So you but with a touch of your fair hand / Turn all to saraband”—married elsewhere. His return from the dead was a mistake. In 1648 he was back in prison, preparing his book of poems Lucasta for publication. His entire fortune was invested in the Royalist cause. Disappointed, consumptive, he became a threadbare object of charity. “Obiit in a Cellar in Long Acre, a little before the Restauration of his Majestie.” This pell-mell life epitomizes the heroic and tragic careering of a young Cavalier, final heir of Wyatt, Surrey and Sidney, exemplary, anachronistic, a cautionary tale from the Mirrour for Magistrates, which no one much read anymore. Even the verse is, at first glance, something of an anachronism.
Andrew Marvell’s poem commending Lucasta (1649) abounds in insect images. It also predicts a harsh reception for the thirty-one-year-old Cavalier’s first book.
The barbed censurers begin to look
Like the grim consistory on thy book;
And on each line cast a reforming eye,
Severer than the young Presbytery.
Lovelace’s situation was already vexed: Parliament had sequestered his remaining fortune while he was in prison. Marvell looks back to happier days. The poems were composed by a royal favorite, loved by the court and by the wits. Now, “Our Civil Wars have lost the civic crown. / He highest builds who with most art destroys.” Lucasta appeared in the year of the king’s execution and belonged to the fallen order. Marvell’s prediction was not far of the mark.
Lucasta achieved small success. Lovelace is remembered now chiefly for “To Althea, from Prison” (“Stone walls...”) and “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars” (“I could not love thee (dear) so much, / Loved I not Honour more”). But there’s more to him than a couple of anthology pieces. His misfortune was to appear in print in the very year his cause was lost. His style was out of fashion, demanding as it does intellectual and prosodic control, conscious devising. Some poems are marred by a preciosity which in Herrick appears charming, but in Lovelace indicates a failure of tact. Formal lapses, gaps in argument, an occasional lack of prosodic energy, weaken his poems. But the best, perhaps thirty, are accomplished works.
Lovelace, eldest son of a Kentish gentleman, was born either in Holland or in Kent in 1618. His creature poems reflect rural roots, where, for example, “The Grasshopper” invites the elder Charles Cotton to carouse:
Up with the day, the sun thou welcom’st then,
Sport’st in the gilt plats of his beams
And all these merry days mak’st merry men,
Thyself, and melancholy streams.
But ah, the sickle! Golden ears are cropped;
Ceres and Bacchus bid good night;
Sharp frosty fingers all your flowers have topped,
And what scythes spared, winds shave off quite.
Poor verdant fool! And now green ice! Thy joys,
Large and as lasting as thy perch of grass,
Bid us lay in ’gainst winter rain, and poise
Their floods with an o’erflowing glass.
The moral is rural-courtly, the creature emblematic. “The Ant” (“Thou, thine own horse and cart, under this plant / Thy spacious tent”) and “The Snail” (“Compendious snail! thou seem’st to me, / Large Euclid’s strict epitome”) are emblematic too, but more tied in to specific social occasions than “The Grasshopper.” A happy confluence of Aesop and Tusser? The pastoral of Spenser with the unattenuated voice of Gascoigne? The wit of Donne with the formal tact of Herbert? Or simply an individual figuring of rural realities that body forth the larger social and political realities of the day? These poems, and “Aramantha,” with which Lucasta concludes, are Lovelace’s chief legacy. “Aramantha” introduced Marvell to the notion of the political pastoral in tetrameter couplets, Gerald Hammond notes in his introduction to Lovelace’s Selected Poems, “in which the local landscape comes to represent the whole of England, its flora and fauna emerging as types of the factions which fought out the civil war, and which is presided over by an heroine who gradually develops from a vision of Arcadian innocence into a complex figure of national and personal salvation.”
Lovelace’s father was not only a gentleman but a soldier, killed at the siege of Groll when his son was nine. Lovelace became his mother’s ward. In 1629 he was admitted to Charterhouse school, possibly on the king’s nomination, at the same time as Richard Crashaw, son of an anti-Catholic pamphleteer and Puritan preacher, who was to become a notable recusant poet. Crashaw went to Cambridge and eventually (in every sense) to Rome, Lovelace to Oxford, each to a separate destiny.
In 1631 the king made Lovelace Gentleman Waiter Extraordinary. His adolescent comedy The Scholars was played “with applause.” His accomplishments seem a shadow of Sidney’s. Charles Cotton wrote in his memorial verses:
Thy youth, an abstract of the world’s best parts,
Enured to arms, and exercised in arts;
Which with the vigour of a man became
Thine, and thy country’s pyramids of flame;
Two glorious lights to guide our hopeful youth
Into the paths of honour, and of truth.
Among his other deeds, he was the first literal translator of Catullus into English. In 1636, at Gloucester Hall, Oxford, he was made an honorary MA on the occasion of a visit by the king and queen. The next year he received a Cambridge MA and went to court.
When Charles I’s serious troubles began, Lovelace served him, first as an ensign in the Bishops’ Wars (1639–40), along with the equally ill-fated poets and fellow Cavaliers Sir John Suckling and Thomas Carew. During 1640 he wrote The Soldier, a tragedy now lost. He was arrested and committed to the Gatehouse at Westminster for leading the men of Kent in presenting to Parliament the Kentish petition, seeking the retention of bishops and the Book of Common Prayer and supporting the king’s authority. (In what a different cause the men of Essex and Kent marched behind Wat Tyler.) He was released on condition that he cease actively supporting the royalist cause. A condition he did not meet: from that moment on he began his lavish spending on the king’s campaign.
He was with Charles in Oxford in 1645, then traveled abroad and was arrested on his return. The execution of his king changed everything. He had no future in Cromwell’s England. For eight years he survived, writing with a different tone and purpose. In 1656 he composed “The Triumph of Philamore and Amoret” for the marriage of Charles Cotton the younger, the poet who memorialized him. It was his last outstanding poem. He died probably in 1657. Lucasta, Postume Poems was assembled and published in 1659 by his youngest brother, unprofitably.
Donne and Jonson were the Cavalier poets’ chief models. Carew leaned more to Jonson, which leaves him often stiff and wooden. Lovelace followed Donne, and the flaws in his work might have been remedied had he attended more to Jonson. But he preferred brilliance and surprise to clarity. Thus in “Ellinda’s Glove” he wrote:
Thou snowy farm with thy five tenements!
Tell thy white mistress here was one
That called to pay his daily rents;
But she a-gathering flowers and hearts is gone...
Pure conceit, carried to extremes: the opening surprises and charms, but surprise passes and deliberate charm outstays its welcome.
Donne is echoed in several poems, notably “The Scrutiny” and “Night.” This is not the spirit in which Vaughan echoes Herbert, whom he took spiritually to heart, but something less subtle, for Lovelace is Metaphysical by design, not by nature. “Gratiana Dancing and Singing” is wildly implausible: when she ceases dancing, “The floor lay paved with broken hearts.” We hear in Lovelace Continental echoes, too, of writers who were to be important to the Restoration poets, especially Rochester.
Just over a hundred poems by Lovelace survive. Even in so small a body of work, the formal variety is enormous. There are poems connected with war and prison; complaints and love and antilove conceits; poems about creatures; poems on painting (for Lovelace, a friend of Peter Lely, was learned in the art); occasional poems including elegies, epithalamia and anniversary celebrations; pastorals such as “Aramantha” and “Amyntor’s Grove”; a formal satire; meditations; dialogues... the range is wider than Herrick’s, though the final achievement is not so great.
Lovelace’s trajectory illuminates the trends in English poetry at the time. His early verse is intimate, even private in its concerns, written for a friend or circle of friends, wits and courtiers. When that world crumbled his address became more public: favored courtier become outcast and fugitive.
John Suckling’s poetry is wryly cynical on the surface, with an embittered wit. In Lovelace, cynicism is thematic, irony is not a technical device but a thematic verity. He is not so obviously accomplished as Carew, but he is more memorable, his development more interesting in its typicality. He survived a great loss and endured the aftermath.
I would love a Parliament
As a main prop from heaven sent;
But ah! who’s he that would be wedded
To th’ fairest body that’s beheaded?
An ungainly stanza, the awkwardness proceeds from and mirrors feeling.
The best Restoration poets resemble Lovelace. Yet even a casual reading shows the coarseness of their work compared to his, how ready they are to be satisfied with mere effect. History has started again and in its new, or renewed, light shadows are shorter and less opaque. Their view of poetry is at once more precise—they have come home from France, after all—and narrower. Though many are courtiers, they are not Cavaliers. Ideals of devotion and service are a thing of the past. Charles I’s was the last courtly court. Lovelace embodies older virtues: an uomo universale: courtier, scholar, soldier, lover, musician, connoisseur of painting, latter-day Sidney, devoted to king, mistress and art. “To Althea, from Prison” is the quintessential Cavalier statement, passionate, lived. He was the last of the knight-poets; his death in poverty rather than service proved that the age of Wyatt, Surrey, Ralegh, Sidney and others of their stamp was over.
The transition was not abrupt: a line cannot be drawn. A poet like Andrew Marvell spans three ages like a delicate but serviceable bridge. The first length spans Charles I’s reign and fall, the second spans the Commonwealth, the third the Restoration. “He was of middling stature, pretty strong sett, roundish faced, cherry cheek’t, hazell eie, browne haire. He was in conversation very modest, and of very few words: and though he loved wine he would never drinke hard in company, and was wont to say that, he would not play the goodfellow in any man’s company in whose hand he would not trust his life. He had not a generall acquaintance.” Marvell is a poet whose political readjustments in times of turmoil have not told against him. There is something honest-seeming about everything he does, and running through his actions a constant thread of humane concern. The king loved him even when he leaned toward the Puritan cause; at a perilous time he wrote verses commending both Lovelace and—the only other time he wrote commendatory verse—Milton’s Paradise Lost. Even when he celebrated Cromwell, his praise was temperate. He possesses transparency of conscience to an unusual degree. Poetry is a delight in language, image and truth. Through poetry balance is restored even when the world is off its axis.
And now to the abyss I pass
Of that unfathomable grass,
Where men like grasshoppers appear,
But grasshoppers are giants there:
They, in their squeaking laugh, contemn
Us, as we walk more low than them;
And, from the precipices tall
Of the green spires, to us do call.
His grasshopper shares much with Lovelace’s. Marvell’s origins, however, were less distinguished. His father was a Low Church clergyman, “facetious, yet Calvinistical.” Marvell was born in Hull in 1621. The town boasted a good grammar school, which he attended. Then he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of twelve, during the poetic ascendancy of Cowley and Crashaw. He received his BA in 1638–39 and was briefly a convert to Roman Catholicism. He left the university in 1641 without taking a further degree. Well trained in languages, he composed his earliest verses in Greek and Latin on the death of Princess Anne. Aubrey declares, “For Latin verses there was no man could come into competition with him.”
When the Civil War came he was noncommittal. He went abroad for four of the seven years 1642–49, spending two years in Rome. He may have traveled as a tutor in preparation for his later posts. By 1649 he was keeping Royalist company. As well as contributing to Lucasta, he wrote verses on the death of Lord Hastings:
Go, stand betwixt the morning and the flowers;
And, ere they fall, arrest the early showers.
Hastings is dead...
Already the garden is there. In a poem full of Donne and generalization, the mature Marvell stirs.
His Royalist sympathies, though attenuated, had not entirely faded in 1650 when he composed his “Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland.” It is the most complex and the best directly political poem in the language. It retains a radical balance in the terms of its celebration and commendation. Here is how Charles dies on his “tragic scaffold”:
He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene:
But with his keener eye
The axe’s edge did try;
Nor called the gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless right,
But bowed his comely head
Down as upon a bed.
This was that memorable hour
Which first assured the forcèd power.
Like the great historian Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Marvell can’t quite bring himself to watch as the ax cleaves the royal nape. Cromwell, the “forced power,” is by contrast with the ceremonious king all movement, agitation. He has an “active star,” seeks glory and adventure—in more senses than one. The poem lives because of Marvell’s sense of loss—and gain, and because of the pivotal vision of “A bleeding head,” from which the eventual blessing of a strong government flows. Charles embodies right. Marvell, it is recorded, declared that the “cause was too good to have been fought for,” and “men should have trusted the King.” He respects Charles, he admires Cromwell. Cromwell’s forced victory was “To ruin the great work of time”:
Though justice against fate complain,
And plead the ancient rights in vain:
But those do hold or break
As men are strong or weak.
Might has prevailed. Marvell, never cured of his royalism, at one moment looked forward to a dynasty of Cromwells. It was not to be.
He found favor with the moderate elements of Cromwell’s party and became tutor to Mary, daughter of Lord Fairfax, a distinguished retired general in the Parliamentarian cause who had wished—but not quite dared—to save the life of the king, and to whom Milton dedicated a fine sonnet. Marvell spent two years in Fairfax’s household at Nunappleton, Yorkshire. Poetically it was a fruitful time. He wrote to praise and please his patron, celebrating Appleton House and the park and creating those poems whose charms are as real as they are hard to define.
In 1653 Milton recommended Marvell for the post of assistant Latin secretary. Four years later it was awarded him. Meanwhile, residing at Eton, he tutored a ward of Cromwell’s and became more firmly a supporter of the Commonwealth. He was intent to serve his country and the de facto government and to make progress himself. In 1655 he published anonymously “The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C.”
He was elected MP for Hull in 1660 and held the seat until his death. He supported the Restoration and seems to have been accepted as a man whose loyalty (unlike Milton’s) was not in question. In any event, he helped secure Milton’s safety and release. He served the Crown in embassies abroad, campaigned for religious toleration and became a satirist against the court party. He died in 1678 in London. His Miscellaneous Poems, including much of his best work, was published in 1681, though the “Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return...” was canceled from all but one copy and was first reprinted in 1776.
Marvell was not a professional writer. Most of his poems are in one way or another “flawed.” The tetrameter couplets he favored prove wearying: the form can dictate rather than receive the poetry. The excessive use of “do” and “did” auxiliaries to plump out the meter mars many lines. Some of the conceits are absurd. Many of the poems, even “The Bermudas,” fail to establish a consistent perspective: it is not always easy to visualize. Other poems are static: an idea is stated and reiterated in various terms but not developed. This is the case even in “The Definition of Love,” which says memorably in eight ways that his love is impossible, but does not specify why or how, does not supply the “occasion”; or in “A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure,” which despite its form is not dialogue: voices bump against each other. Intellectual development is often, as in Donne, by sleight of hand, pseudo-logic, false syllogism. There are thematic inconsistencies. In “Upon Appleton House” he suggests the natural order is superior to artificial order, but describes nature in terms of artifice. He condemns Palladian architecture in stanza six, but fifty-eight stanzas later evokes the woods, approvingly, in Palladian images. Moral value is sometimes assigned to rather than discovered in his images. And Marvell is not usually dramatic in presentation, unlike Donne or Herbert.
Yet because of some spell he casts, he is a poet whose faults we not only forgive but relish. Beneath an inadequate logic the poetry follows its own habits of association and combination. Two modes of discourse are at work, a conscious one, and something unwilled yet compelling. We cannot decide which of a poem’s effects are deliberate, which casual or accidental. They seem products of a not altogether untroubled leisure at Nunappleton. T. S. Eliot contrasts Marvell with Donne. Donne would have been “an individual at any time and place”; Marvell is “the product of European, that is to say Latin, culture.” The difference is in the use of the “I.” Donne’s “I” demands attention, Marvell’s directs it. In Marvell the flaws do not disappear beneath gesture; inconsistency and uncertainty are aspects of a mind concerned with subject. That subject is not self. However distinctively he appropriates a landscape or scene, it never becomes a paysage intérieur. The macrocosm is never displaced by the microcosm.
In “To his Coy Mistress” the poet begins with a cool, reasonable proposition. From the temperate beginning the poem gathers speed, rushing to a cruel resolution. Image follows image with precise brevity; each extends and enriches the idea. The imaginative center holds together a varied development. Marvell doesn’t always discriminate between the fresh and startling and the merely odd, yet what is odd is often delivered with such effective phrasing that it disarms us even in its absurdity, for instance the salmon fishers who “like Antipodes in shoes / Have shod their heads in their canoes.”
Marvell’s verse delivers sharp surprises in part because of its quietness. Surprises emerge, they are not insisted on. He seems always to be recognizing significance in what he sees. His whole mind is engaged, along with his senses. His intensity is awareness; even as he speaks he is aware of things he might have said. The classics shaped his poems, but scripture is never far away. He doesn’t discharge his poems but launches them quietly. They run less smoothly than Herrick’s but they run further and deeper. If drama is generated, as in “To his Coy Mistress,” it is by control of pace and imagery, not by situation. His verse is urbane, detached, with recurrent motifs and words and a recognizable tone that distinguishes it from the work of other Metaphysicals. He has his own themes, too. Wise passivity marks some poems, which leads to closeness with the natural world as his imagination relaxes and receives. Other poems strive for contact through passion or activity, a kind of contact in which individuality is lost in the teeming variety of the world. Underlying these themes is the knowledge that in love or action time can’t be arrested or permanence achieved. A sanctioned social order can be ended with an ax, love is finite, we grow old. Political reality drove the theme deep in him. We feel it obliquely in “The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn.” For an intelligence such as his, the lived experience of a crucial historical event was more powerful than any accident of private biography. Perhaps he is naturally a poet of aftermath. Like Herrick, he came late in his “literary period” and was overlooked by those who might have profited from reading him. Contrasting Marvell with Edmund Waller (his contemporary, but more a man of what was to come than of what then was) we can feel the difference. Except in his best poems Waller delivers us finished ideas; Marvell happens upon ideas. He has no settled opinions, except the fundamental ones. His poems balance particulars of which he is certain with conflicting generalities of which he is unsure, as in the line “courteous briars nail me through,” which dissolves the word “courteous” on the cruel verb and brings into its ambience “court” and crucifixion. Such lines, quietly delivered, lead us not to admire his wit but to apprehend his subject. It was already the age of Dryden, and Dryden took wit in a different direction. The age of Dryden: an age in which writers took up the pen to set down what they knew, not in order to explore the unfamiliar; an age of communication rather than discovery.
Devotional poets resisted the force of Dryden’s example longest. Aubrey was cousin of Henry Vaughan (162?–95) and his twin brother, Thomas. Aubrey settles an old score in his account. “Their grandmother was an Aubrey: their father, a coxscombe and no honester than he should be—cosened me of 50s. once.” The sons, unlike their father, were not temporal schemers. Their eyes were generally fixed on higher things. Henry provides “authentic tidings of invisible things.” His chief collection of poems, Silex Scintillans (Sparks from the Flint, 1650, enlarged 1655), was the mature work of a man led to passionate faith by bereavement, illness and the poems of George Herbert. The book’s title he explains: “Certain divine rays break out of the soul in adversity, like sparks of fire out of the afflicted flint.” His hermetic imagination is rarefied compared with Herbert’s, and comparison with Herbert is inevitable: as Henry declared, Herbert’s “holy life and verse gained many pious converts (of whom I am the least).” He frequently echoes in phrase, syntax and development specific poems by Herbert. Edmund Blunden sets them side by side in his poem “The Age of Herbert and Vaughan”:
In close and pregnant symbol
Each primrosed morning showed
The triune God patrol
On every country road,
In bushy den and dimble.
Blunden is truer to Vaughan than Herbert. Herbert knows an immanent God; Vaughan’s God is less immediately present. The poet approaches him through symbol but cannot readily perceive him in natural imagery:
Some love a rose
In hand, some in the skin;
But cross to those,
I would have mine within.
Marvell is the poet of green, a “green thought in a green shade,” his eye on a fruitful garden; Vaughan is the poet of white in its implications of moral and spiritual purity, skyscape, cloudscape: “a white, Celestial thought,” the white light of stars, or in his translation of Boethius’s “that first white age.” The most rapt English devotional poet, the most spiritually attentive, he lived in a spectrum between the pure white of infancy and a recovered whiteness of eternity:
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright,
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years
Driven by the spheres
Like a vast shadow moved...
“The World” does not sustain intensity throughout, dwindling to deliberate allegory. It examines the shadow, “The fearful miser on a heap of rust,” a vivid moment. The poem has the virtue of describing Vaughan’s chosen territory for discovery: areas beyond the senses, accessible only to intuition. “Invisible things,” things he evokes in “Faith” (“Bright, and blest beam!”), “The Passion” (“O my chief good!”), “Peace” (“My Soul, there is a country”) and elsewhere. His achievement is to bring the transcendent almost within reach of the senses.
There’s not a wind can stir,
Or beam pass by,
But straight I think (though far),
Thy hand is night;
Come, come!
Strike these lips dumb:
This restless breath
That soils thy name,
Will ne’er be tame
Until in death.
Such obliquity doesn’t obscure the material world; it illuminates what exists beyond it. Through human love it ascends to the divine, with the light of faith. Images of darkness belong to the world. Images of light—starlight, pure light—belong to the fields of heaven and eternity.
“My brother and I,” Henry wrote, “were born at Newton in the parish of St Brigets in the year 1621.” Vaughan’s father was a second son of a family in the old Anglo-Welsh gentry. Henry’s twin became a hermetic philosopher (“Eugenius Philalethes,” lover of forgetfulness) whose works were familiar in the next century even to a skeptical Jonathan Swift. A priest, Thomas was ejected from his living at Llansantffraed after the Royalist defeat in the Civil War. He died of mercury poisoning in an alchemical experiment in 1666.
More certain knowledge survives about Thomas than about Henry. Henry called himself “Silurist” to acknowledge his roots and his landscape, because his native Breconshire was once inhabited by the Silures. It is supposed that he went to Jesus College, Oxford, around 1638, took no degree, and turned up in London to study law in 1640. He became, we do not know by what steps, a medical doctor, and spent his later years practicing in his Welsh neighborhood. In the Civil War he probably served with Royalist forces and tasted their defeat, which coincided with personal bereavements. His first book, Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646), was not very distinguished work by a Son of Ben. Their conventional “Amoret” has more literature than flesh on her bones. His second book, Olor Iscanus (Swan of the Usk, 1651), revealed deepening seriousness. It begins in Wales, his true territory. London, its styles and concerns, are less than an echo. Almost best in the book are his translations of some of the verses from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, especially “Metrum 5,” with its rhythmic and thematic foretaste of two of his great poems, “The Retreat” and “Childhood”:
Happy that first white age! when we
Lived by the earth’s mere charity,
No soft luxurious diet then
Had effeminated men...
More than translation, this is a committed Royalist looking to a lost age. It was lost, and irrecoverable. He turns his attention elsewhere and suddenly finds “a country / Far beyond the stars.” The choice of the word “country” is significant. His imagination naturally turns to allegory; he is among the last Boethians, seeing into a spiritual future through a lens that most of his contemporaries found clouded and archaic. Remote from London and the hub of fashion, he was free to take bearings with his own instruments.
Silex Scintillans (1650) contains his best poetry. The debt to Herbert is great, but when an experience is sufficiently intense Vaughan’s own idiom, rhythm and themes make their own space in Herbert territory. His style is thick with biblical echo and allusion: for Christians steeped in scripture each poem has an immediate sense of familiarity, a resonance as intense as any in Herbert’s poems. Vaughan prefaces many pieces with biblical epigraphs, to underline their source and allegiance. His faith is fresh, the product of an abrupt spiritual conversion and notably lacking in doubt. The dramatic openings and developments, whether simple allegory, allegorical journey or emblem, relate it to and distinguish it from other Metaphysical work. His revelation is certain. At times he experiences a triumphant sense of election, demanding no proof beyond his own. The conversion came from reading Herbert. Vaughan was surprised by grace.
After 1655 he composed little durable verse. Thalia Rediviva (1678) revisits the secular world of his first books and adds little to his credit. What happened to his assured genius? Faith may have cooled, conscience (endlessly pining over past sins and excesses) may have smothered the holy Muse. Perhaps work as a doctor overtaxed him, or his brother’s death destroyed a crucial stability, or physical frailty undermined his imaginative resolve. Later in life he suffered litigation within the family and squabbles over property. The claims of a secular world clouded the spiritual sky. It was not to be a quiet old age. When he died in 1695, he had written no verse of moment for forty years. His interesting if derivative prose book, The Mount of Olives, dates from 1652. His memorable prose and verse belong, at most, to a decade in a life of seventy-odd years. Even that work, by an obscure Welsh doctor buried near the river Usk, was forgotten until the nineteenth century. First for his piety and then for his poetry, he was taken off the shelf and reedited. Since then his reputation has grown.
Silex Scintillans, C. H. Sisson says, is best read as a whole book. The best poems are set in the context of the uneven imagination that produced them. Private experience is communicated in the language of Anglican Christianity. Along with images of light come those of water—baptism, cleansing, rejuvenation. If light is far and starry, water is close, physical and metaphysical or mystical. Vaughan brings us “authentic tidings of invisible things” but also skillfully presents a created world in which he participated and lived a difficult life. It is not surprising that one of Sisson’s finest poems, “The Usk,” is rooted in the landscapes and concerns of Henry—and Thomas—Vaughan.
Vaughan died on the brink of the eighteenth century, the very last voice contained entirely within what many regard as the great century of English poetry, the crucial century of English history, in which the old order was finally violated, and the Restoration, rather than reestablishing continuities, produced a new dawn.