On the Mystical Poetry of Henry Vaughan [Reprint 2013 ed.] 9780674330658, 9780674330641

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ON T H E MYSTICAL OF H E N R Y

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POETRY

VAUGHAN

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ON T H E M Y S T I C A L

POETRY

OF

Henry Vaughan BY

R. A. D U R R

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS

·

1962

© Copyright 1962 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Ford Foundation fff

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 62-20246 Printed in the United States of America

FOR

CAROL

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS W

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It is a pleasure to own my indebtedness to all those w h o contributed, directly or indirectly, to the writing of this book. A n d it is a just convention that obliges an author to disburden his friends and helpers of all obligation for his book's failings, as I do here. I am especially conscious of owing much to the scholarly and critical examples of D o n Cameron Allen, Charles R. Anderson, Leonard F. Dean, Richard H . Green, Robert

W.

Stallman, Joseph H . Summers, and Earl R. Wasserman. T o D o n Allen my indebtedness is immediate and pervasive: he described the goal and set the standards for my first attempts to understand Vaughan. Insofar as I have fallen short, the responsibility is mine, not his. I am grateful to my colleagues at Syracuse for the encouragement they have given my work, and to the Administration of Syracuse University for a semester's leave which enabled me to revise the manuscript. Finally, I am happy to have the opportunity here to thank my parents, as without their support, tangible and intangible, I should never have been in a position to write about Henry Vaughan. A n d without my wife nothing could have been done. Syracuse, 1962

R.A.D.

CONTENTS Λ»\ VsV ///. V/r

PREFACE PAGE ΧΪ

INTRODUCTION PAGE I

Vaughan's Conversion, 3. Vaughan and Herbert, 9. Childhood Motif, 13. Vaughan and Nature, 17. Recent Studies, 20.

T H E MAJOR METAPHORS PAGE 2 9

The Growth of the Lily, 31. The Dark Journey, 60. The Spiritual Espousal, 74.

READINGS PAGE 7 9

Regeneration, 79. The Proffer, 99. The Night,

ix

111.

CONTENTS

APPENDICES PAGE I23

A. The Idea of the Divine Spark, or Seed, 125. B. The Book of the Creation, 131. C. Poetry and Mysticism, 134.

NOTES PAGE I39

INDEX PAGE 175

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PREFACE

P O I N T OF VIEW VV\ f f W W

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I would like here to declare certain assumptions and aims which lie behind my work on Henry Vaughan. First, I should make it clear that my principal aim has been to render Vaughan's major poetry available to the modern reader. However, most important of all requirements to this end, it seemed clear on the basis of my reading in the scholarship done on Vaughan to date, was to establish the poetic act securely in the scene, or context, to which essentially it relates. T o set the Silurist among the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poets of nature, as his Victorian commentators have done, is to set him out of focus; and to regard him as a cryptogrammic versifier of the occult and esoteric, as much of the scholarship of our own time has done, is to put him into a shade wherein significance is searched out with a flashlight. My own position, which I share with many others, is that the orientation best capable of discovering the inner consonance and total pattern of Vaughan's work is the Christian life of prayer: "What is prayer?" asks Meister Eckhart, and answers in the words of Dionysius the Areopagite: " T h e mind's ascent to God, that is what prayer means." I have sought, therefore, especially in the first chapter, " T h e Major Metaphors," while analyzing Vaughan's basic patterns and their meaning, to suggest their traditional context and provide a kind of running commentary from the writings of the XI

PREFACE

mystics. But I must explain that I have not endeavored to trace traditions back along the many highways of their course through time; I have not attempted to present "Vaughan's background" in historical survey. I have not thought in terms of a background or temporal developments at all. The word I use is context, or scene, or orientation; I have sought only to place the Silurist among some of his spiritual brethren, whether they lived in third-century Egypt, fourteenth-century Germany, or seventeenth-century England (though I have not ventured outside Christianity). As the other works of a poet best explain the poem at hand, so have I found that the writings of the mystics best interpret Henry Vaughan. Those seekers after God wrote from an experience, a vision, differing often in depth and comprehension from the poet's but of a nature essentially like that from which his poems draw their life. What is more, they have found it necessary, in communicating with us, to employ remarkably similar symbolisms, or analogies. In all this I do not mean to imply that one must be "conversant" with fifteen centuries of Christian thought properly to respond to Vaughan. Certainly I am not so conversant myself; I am neither a theologian, a medievalist, nor an expert on mysticism. My knowledge of Vaughan's context is a layman's knowledge, not a priest's or a scholar's. But that is the point: it needs no more than what a serious lay reader of Vaughan might be expected to bring to him—or be incited to acquire through the help of critics and scholars—in order to realize anew the significance and beauty of his work. So long as the context, the perspective, is the right one, it need not be exhaustively comprehensive or scholastically detailed—though of course it follows that the more we bring to him the more will he give us; the more detailed our knowledge, the more precise our perception. I am not unaware, therefore, that my quotations may appear eclectic and arbitrary. Why this passage from Augustine, the xii

PREFACE reader may ask, and not another from a better known work? Why in this place a citation from an obscure alchemist Vather than from a familiar Christian? Why throw together such unlikely figures as Saint Chrysostom, Meister Eckhart, and Robert Fludd, with so little allowance for distinctions and developments ? My reply must be that however random or arbitrary these quotations may appear, their choice is justified to the extent that they do indeed help make Vaughan's poetry live for us. If I chose one passage in Augustine over another it was because it was more direcdy relevant—in its imagery and structure, as well as in its meaning—to the poem or verse at hand. Similarly, an alchemist's expression of an idea common as well in orthodox mystical thought sometimes contained precisely the connotations the idea or image under analysis required to throw it into relief; and sometimes both Chrysostom and Fludd had something to contribute toward the clarification of a single problem. If I have seemed to ignore distinctions of meaning or emphasis existent among my authorities, it has been because I did not see that the question or symbol in Vaughan demanded that such distinctions be made. I have noticed, for example, that the Thomistic conception of synteresis emphasized the reasoning faculty, while Bonaventure and the Franciscans stressed the will; but Vaughan's incorporation of the idea and imagery of the Divine Spark does not involve such definition, and it would have been idle and possibly confusing for me to introduce it. One more question must be dealt with here: In what sense may one be entitled to refer to the poetry of Henry Vaughan as "mystical"? It is necessary first of all to make clear what one means by mysticism. There is now, fortunately, widespread agreement on the fundamental definition of the term, though at the turn of our century there had been only widespread confusion. The following are representative statements by modern students: xiii

PREFACE Mysticism is the immediate feeling of the unity of the self with God; it is nothing, therefore, but the fundamental feeling of religion, the religious life at its very heart and centre (Pfleiderer). Mysticism is religion in its most concentrated and exclusive form. It is that attitude of the mind in which all other relations are swallowed up in the relation of the soul to God (Caird). The inner depths of Christianity and the mysteries of the spiritual life are revealed within Christian mysticism. Christianity is the revelation of the mystery of the spiritual life (Berdyaeff). That we bear the image of God is the starting-point, one might say the postulate, of all mysticism. The complete union of the soul with God is the goal of all mysticism (Canon Overton). Dogmatic is the skeleton, Mysticism the life-blood of the Christian body (Lasson). The above statements are collected out of Inge's Mysticism in Religion and Christian Mysticism. The Dean himself defines mysticism as "the attempt to realize the presence of the living God in the soul and in nature, or, more generally, as the attempt to realize, in thought and feeling, the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal." Evelyn Underbill will not refuse the title of mystic to any whose "aim is union between God and the soul. This is the one essential of mysticism, and there are as many ways from one term to the other as there are variations in the spirit of man." Rufus Jones uses the word mysticism "to express the t y p e of religion which puts the emphasis on immediate awareness of relation with God, on direct and intimate consciousness of the Divine Presence. It is religion in its most acute, intense, and living stage" And D. T. Suzuki affirms that "though mysticism has been frequently misinterpreted and condemned, there is no doubt that it is the soul of the religious life, that it is what gives to faith its vitality, fascination, sublimity, and stability." E. A. Peers regards mysticisfn as "the flower of Christianity," and Alan Watts asserts more forcefully xiv

PREFACE that "it is not simply the flower of religion; it is the very seed, lying in the flower as its fulfilment and preceding the root as its origin. There is no 'higher religion' without mysticism because there is no apprehension of the meaning of reality without mysticism." Paul Tillich, finally, declares: "'Mystical' is, first of all, a category which characterizes the divine as being present in experience. In this sense, the mystical is the heart of every religion as religion." These definitions embody the conception of the nature of mysticism which I have taken to be descriptive of the nature of the religious life informing Vaughan's major poetry. I should like to emphasize two points: first that it is not demanded that the spiritual aspirant should have experienced full union in order to be recognized as a mystic, since union is the goal toward which he struggles; that the mystic is he who, with an all-consuming fervor founded upon an initial and partial experience of transcendent reality, makes the attempt; second, that the mystical experience is not necessarily set apart from orthodox "faith-religion" but is in fact its most profound and essential life. As Miss Underhill has maintained: "The view which regards the mystic as a spiritual anarchist receives little support from history; which shows us, again and again, the great mystics as faithful sons of the great religions." Or, as Rufus Jones asserts, "The sane mystic does not exalt his own experiences over historical revelation, he rather interprets his own openings in the light of the masterrevelations . . . This religion of first-hand experience is not a substitute for Christianity; it is Christianity alive and vocal in personal experience and in individual love." Moreover, wherever the conventional vocabulary and symbolism of their faith could be made to approximate their vision, the mystics have been content to use it. It is not surprising, therefore, that the testimonium Spiritus Sancti—especially regarding the early stages of their spiritual development—should appear to some to refer to "nothing but" the ordinary Christian life. To xv

PREFACE those who take a generous view of average Christian piety this must certainly seem to be the case. Vaughan's poetry, then, is seen to proceed from a typical, or dogmatic, adherence to scripture and doctrine (what Boehme was wont to call "titular Liplabouring Christianity") and is readily interpreted by the catechism of the Sunday schools. Of course Vaughan's poetry is traditional, deriving from the medieval and renaissance Christian tradition. Yet there is a vast difference between the religiosity of Giles Fletcher's Christs Victorie, and Triumph, say, and that of Silex Scintillans; and there are real distinctions to be drawn among the sacred poems of Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, Traherne, and Vaughan. To entitle what they wrote "Christian religious poetry" is one degree more accurate than to entitle it "poetry" and two degrees more accurate than to entitle it "literature." But it does Vaughan and his reader a disservice to include him in this kind of generalization, obliterating as it does his true distinction. I have sought in this study, therefore, to suggest the distinguishing quality of Vaughan's religious poetry by reading it in the context of that element of the medieval and renaissance Christian tradition that is called mysticism. It is not without significance in this connection that the materials of conventional piety employed by Rosemond Tuve in her reading of George Herbert—who was of course no ordinary Christian even in a time of unparalleled religious concern—are of very small use in reading Vaughan; whereas the writings of the mystics have a relevance which I trust my use of them will make obvious—a relevance which in itself might serve as ample notice of Vaughan's real affinity with the experience out of which they wrote. (I do not entertain the possibility that Vaughan was simply making a poetic device of the mystic terminology, that he had simply decided to write "in a new mode.") One finds in the poetry of both Herbert and Vaughan the Biblical conception of the heart as the Lord's temple. But the significance of the motif differs in the two poets. Herbert would have xvi

PREFACE Christ inhabit his heart in order that the agonizing spiritual conflict between him and the Lord might be finally resolved; he would have Christ engrave His law upon his stony heart in order that his resignation to His will be fixed and he thus released from the cross of cross-purposes: Ο fix thy chair of grace, that all my powers May also fix their reverence: For when thou dost depart from hence, They grow unruly, and sit in thy bowers. (The Temper, II) What Herbert longs for is not principally union with God of an immediate, experiential nature, but submission of his will to His ordained way, that he might abide peacefully in the church, with no more concern for the way that takes the town. In Vaughan, the heart is the temple of God in this sense too, but, more than that, it is the virgin womb in which the Christ Child is eternally begotten; his desire, reaching far beyond submission and a quiet faith, is to be reborn in God, to have God born in him. Such a desire is also very different from that which animates the Divine Poems of John Donne. The intense realization of personal sin in his work was not for him an aspect of the purgative process leading on to the joys of illumination, as it was for Vaughan. What Donne seeks is not to see His face, to die in Him, but to know that he is saved; he wants some surety that the black and wormy grave will not be all that awaits him at the end: I have a sinne of feare, that when I have spunne My last thred, I shall perish on the shore; But sweare by thy selfe, that at my death thy sonne Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore; And, having done that, Thou hast done, I feare no more. ( " A Hymne to God the Father") It may appear, however, that Crashaw, in his rich appreciation of the mystical, had taken his inspiration from the same xvii

PREFACE rare source as had the Silurist. But one comes quickly to agree with those who have considered that his ardor of devotion proceeded rather from appreciation of religion beauteously embodied than from hearing God's still small voice in the purged and humble heart—that he writes about the mystic life, not out of it. One does not find in Crashaw those essentials of the mystic quest—the overwhelming consciousness of personal corruption and longing to immerse one's self in God. (Indeed, one fears the nature of that final flight of the alone to the Alone—into the No-thing, the Abyss, far beyond the range of those magnificent analogies that had aroused his sensibility—would have confounded and dismayed his sensuous soul.) Of the poets mentioned, Traherne is perhaps closest to Vaughan in these matters, not only because of his similar conception of the meaning of childhood and the idea of the lost likeness that we can recover, but also because, without question, he writes out of a personal realization of illuminative joy, a realization more profound, I feel, than any Vaughan's writings reveal. His poetry, however, seems less accomplished, though it may be we have not yet read it correcdy. In all, then, I agree with Evelyn Underhill that Itrat-Husain's conclusions regarding Vaughan's mysticism are basically sound: that the experiences of the first three stages of the via mystica, awakening, purgation, and illumination, are readily identifiable in the poems, but that there is no sure evidence of the last two stages, the dark night and union. I have, as a matter of fact, taken Husain's workmanlike demonstration to have established the point: in my own study I do not attempt to go over that ground again but rather seek to delineate the poetical symbols and structures in which Vaughan transformed into poetry the archetype Husain abstracts from his work. I am unaware that anyone has succeeded in contending Husain's position on this matter. (I would myself, however, take exception to his characterization of Donne and Herbert as mystics.) xviii

PREFACE Frank Kermode, however, in a challenging article, regards it as irrelevant whether or not the poet had a vision of Truth, or was or was not a mystic, though he is himself certain that Vaughan "is in no sense at all a mystic" but merely "makes a poet's use of the mystic's language." Thus, tired of writing in the Petrarchan vein, Kermode seems to imply, or perhaps seeking something just a bit out of the ordinary, the country doctor, having studied the mystics under his brother's tutelage, decided to use their vocabulary for a while. There has been more than one reply to this—to me—astonishing charge. Ross Garner, in his recent book on Vaughan, has taken it up in a most penetrating way by focusing upon "The Night" to determine the nature and extent of mystical experience reflected in Vaughan's poetry. His conclusion that "The Night" does indeed grow out of the poet's experience but that it asserts no more than a knowledge of and longing for the Divine Dark, the ultimate realization of the mystical quest, is one with which I am in complete accord. And I think Garner's general position on this question of Vaughan's mysticism is sound as he expresses it in one place: "If mystical poetry, then, can be defined as poetry which arises from the psychological evidence of Christian experience and points toward that which lies beyond illumination, Vaughan wrote mystical poetry." E. C. Pettet, rather more hesitantly, describes as one of the three pervasive qualities of Silex Scintillans the evocation of "a strange otherworldliness that marks it off from all the other religious verse of his age"; but he is reluctant to term this quality "mystical." He will not allow that "the essential ecstatic experiences of mysticism" are reflected in Vaughan's poetry (though it is by no means established that ecstatic experiences are essential to mysticism). Nevertheless, and somewhat contradictorily, he has defended the reality of Vaughan's "decisive spiritual regeneration." I sympathize with those who find the word "mystical" distasteful. And surely, despite the present general agreement xix

PREFACE about the nature of mystical experience, it is possible to respond to Vaughan's distinctive qualities without agreeing that they are "mystical," if one assumes rather strict limitations to the term's applicability. Moreover, as I have acknowledged, there is scant evidence in the Silurist's writings to suggest he had known the two highest degrees of spiritual realization. Yet it does seem to me that "otherworldliness" is unnecessarily vague and general —it could describe any number of variously religious poets or idealists. "Mystical" is unfortunate, perhaps, but as I have defined the sense in which I accept and use it, I think it serves better to distinguish Vaughan's major poetry. Aware of the use made of the mystics' terminology by the meditative writers of Vaughan's age, and sensitive to the limitations that must be imposed upon its employment in reference to the poets' work—especially since so little of their work appears to derive from the higher, contemplative ranges of the devout life— Louis Martz has chosen the term meditative over contemplative or mystical to denote the nature of the religious poetry of the seventeenth century. Certainly the term quite accurately describes the formal arrangement of such works as Donne's Anniversaries. And some of Vaughan's poems also make use of a scaffolding that conforms to the general framework of a meditation. Nevertheless, I should not like to see Vaughan labeled a meditative poet. For that term does more than distinguish the beginning from the advanced levels of the mystic life. It denotes a mental exercise, a kind of syllogistic priming of the pump of piety, a formal regulation and arrangement of devotion, a goal of dutifulness and good works. And it is not in this spirit that Vaughan's poems live. They are not working up to the state of devotion (as perhaps may be said of some of his meditations and prayers in The Mount of Olives—which are in the Salesian mode), and they make no real issue of good deeds. They celebrate the joy of grace infused, the gift of the awakening to light and life; or they lament the lapses of illumination, deprecating man's foul corruptions xx

PREFACE that deprive him of that joy and light; they beg for His return, and long, with a poignancy not compatible with a calculated use of the mystical language, for that time, here or hereafter, when the striving soul will be wholly caught up into His love.

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ON THE M Y S T I C A L OF H E N R Y

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POETRY

VAUGHAN

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I

INTRODUCTION tit vvv

When finally almost two hundred years after his first publications Henry Vaughan was made available to modern readers in the edition of 1847 1 it was done, one suspects, less out of perception of his achievement than for the service another Christian poet might render a faltering church.2 At any rate, little of the commentary written about Vaughan in the nineteenth century, although most of it was highly enthusiastic, can afford the midtwentieth-century reader an insight into his poetry, nor does it reveal any precise comprehension of the nature of his religious concern. In both respects we have—especially in the last decade or so—gone far beyond Vaughan's early eulogists and critics. Theirs was another time, and they asked different questions. In general the poetry was considered descriptively picturesque or "fanciful," and the religion pantheistically "mystical" or, perhaps more vaguely, "pious." Grosart links him with Shelley in the former respect and with Wordsworth in the latter.3 John Brown, in 1882, was able to envision the Silurist "living from day to day in the eye of Nature . . . " 4 And although Francis Palgrave, at the end of the century, had still to lament that Vaughan was "scarce known more now than when he lived a country doctor in his wild native Brecon," it was commonly accepted among critics and scholars that "earliest in Vaughan of all our poets, we unquestionably find that delicate perception of the innermost ι

THE POETRY

OF H E N R Y 5

VAUGHAN

charm and magic of Nature . . . " and that, further, we have in him unquestionably "the lineal progenitor of Wordsworth." 6 By the time of the first World War this dogma of "Vaughan's mystical nature-poetry" had attained orthodoxy. Along with it there was established the conviction that Vaughan's spiritual and poetical flowering had found its sole and sufficient cause in the poetry of George Herbert, but that Vaughan, lacking the elder poet's sense of form, could not sustain "the magic of the opening lines" of his poems and so is distinguished not for "the mass of his work, but for a few unforgettable lines, and for a rare vein of thought." 7 Finally, it was assumed that Vaughan's poems about childhood made nostalgic reference to that period in his own life and expressed his frank desire to be a boy again. Since these conceptions have remained at the center of much of the modern commentary on Vaughan they will provide convenient focal points for our survey. Each new commentator in the first few decades of the twentieth century tended simply and faithfully to reword or elaborate the views of his predecessors, while venturing only rarely an interpretive assay of his own. Lionel Johnson, in 1911, agrees that Vaughan "shows us nature, as it indeed appears," but adds that beyond such literalness "he can show it 'apparelled in celestial light."' 8 And Edward Bliss Reed, in 1912, agrees that, indeed, "the decisive event in Vaughan's poetic development was his receiving a copy of Herbert's poems," but adds that "Herbert's enduring effect on Vaughan was gained not by furnishing him definite models for his verse but by stirring his spiritual emotions . . ."; and for Mr. Reed, too, "exquisite are the nature descriptions . . . " 9 A year later Ernest Rhys lamented that while Vaughan's "lyric openings are delightful . . . the expression flags at the end." 1 0 "And yet," Felix Schelling commented, "even with . . . his halting execution, [Vaughan] is at times a great if unequal poet, and his close observation of nature and his loving sympathy with all living creatures presages an age far in ad2

INTRODUCTION vancc in these respects of his o w n . " 1 1 A n d so it went through the twenties—even the unconventional Mr. Empson considering in 1929 that Vaughan truly was "an early romantic." 1 2 But by the 1930's it became apparent that bare statements of the old dogmas would not do, and critics grew more sophisticated in their exposition, if not often in their perception. A t the beginning of his essay on Vaughan, George Williamson, for example, moves with a fine circumspection. "In Henry Vaughan mysticism turns to Nature and finds there its Metaphysical imagery and its inspiration. Through his sympathy with Nature the conceit annexes another great domain of symbolism, for Vaughan made Nature his special province and explored its riches with peculiar insight." These phrases are carefully chosen. But near the end of the section language has loosened somewhat: " A s a poet of Nature Vaughan is partial to evening and night, to twilight regions where Nature speaks to him in pantheistic terms that anticipate Wordsworth, and where he may become reminiscent of childhood." 1 3 U p to the present, most critics of Vaughan continue to find occasion to remark upon his "responsiveness" to nature. In substance, they are in accord with George Macdonald, who was already certain of assent when in 1868 he exclaimed that he did not know a writer, "Wordsworth not excepted, who reveals more delight in the visions of Nature than Henry V a u g h a n . " 1 4 It is gratifying to come upon Douglas Bush's simple and precise statement that Vaughan's "central theme, of course, is the traditional idea, especially attractive to his age, of the exiled soul's longing to return to its heavenly home, the world of l i g h t . " 1 5

VAUGHAN'S

CONVERSION

Although in the last decades of the nineteenth century Vaughan's "long illness" and the death of his young wife had already assumed their place in discussions of his conversion, 3

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these "causes" of his change from secular to sacred verse were considered ancillary to the main fact that "he was led to a more spiritual way of thought by reading The Temple of George Herbert . . 1 6 Put more forcefully a little later: "The decisive event in Vaughan's poetic development was his receiving a copy of Herbert's poems." 17 H. C. Beeching, in the introduction to the Chambers edition of the poet in 1896, while warning against exaggerating "the extent of Herbert's influence," is nevertheless prepared to acknowledge that "Vaughan owed to him his religious life, and so the practice of religious poetry" 18 —which is a very grand allowance. These early commentators seem never to have tired of exclaiming upon the breadth and depth of Vaughan's indebtedness to Herbert. By the twenties, however, although The Temple might still be considered the paramount cause of the Silurist's conversion, critics began to reconsider the role of the poet's illness and the death of his wife and brother, and they began to cast about for other factors. Elizabeth Holmes adds his reading of the hermetic books,19 and Helen White, acknowledging the part played by Herbert, the illness, the hermetic writings, the Bible, and the deaths of his brother and friends, contributes the thesis that the frustration of his "London hopes" and the defeat of the royalist cause precipitated his withdrawal from a disappointing world.20 To Joan Bennett all Vaughan needed to make him "a poet who stands out from the contemporary galaxy of good versifiers," was "some central experience to which to relate his awareness of nature." She thus avails herself of the critics' agreement concerning Vaughan's relationship to nature and combines it with the other agreement concerning Herbert's influence; for, she affirms, Herbert's "main importance" was in helping Vaughan utilize his "awareness of nature" in verse.21 Itrat-Husain also goes through the growing list of causes—rather dutifully, one feels—and then abruptly states: "Vaughan seems to have early received some sign of favour from Christ, and this was really the cause of his 4

INTRODUCTION 22

conversion." But before following along the way this statement points, it is necessary to turn to E. L . Manila's vigorous opinions upon this question of the religious conversion of Henry Vaughan. 23 For Marilla, although he does not deny a change, seeks to minimize its importance and to diminish the difference between the sacred poetry and the earlier secular verse, which he has undertaken to champion24 Having determined to give all the "accessible evidence" a hard stare—the evidence consisting, for him, mainly of certain poems in Olor lscanus "obviously written" at the time of the composition of Silex Scintillans—he finds "untenable a previous assumption that Vaughan's turning from secular to exclusively religious themes was a result of a complete conversion before 1650." Not only did Vaughan write secular poems after his supposed conversion, Marilla argues, but on the other hand the body of secular verse in Olor lscanus contains "passages revealing strong moral convictions and deep concern about the current political and ecclesiastical turmoil." The point he is working toward is that the 1650 Silex is not really different from the Poems and Olor lscanus, but only "a logical sequence of Vaughan's increasing seriousness as revealed in the secular verse." Thus, while Marilla admits a kind of development between 1646 and 1655, this development appears in his view sufficiently trivial to permit our taking all Vaughan's verse as essentially of one piece, there being discernible only a progression through "logical" stages of maturation. Finally, the "principal force" in Vaughan's development during this period he locates in the Civil War and its political consequences. It becomes apparent that what Marilla means by this "spiritual development" is something much more like a tactical retreat or psychological regression, for, according to him, as soon as the Restoration reopened Vaughan's chances of "advancement" in the world, his "need of spiritual consolation" vanished and, as the letters to Aubrey in the seventies are said to reveal, the physician experienced a "re5

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newal of interest in life" with the consequence of the "passing of the poetic mood"; in Manila's own words: "the Restoration brought new opportunities, and continual professional success and prosperity thereafter dispelled the attitude induced by a long series of frustrations . . ." 2 5 Thus if Vaughan had been able to get his share of "professional success and prosperity" all along, he would not have found it necessary to withdraw from "life" into a "mood" of religion and poetry for consolation. I have represented Manila's views at this length not only because of the vigor with which they are advanced but principally because they manifest in heightened form an approach to Vaughan, and to other poets like him, which has darkened counsel from the beginning. I am not concerned to refute his specific notions, for these appear to me palpably unreal. (Moreover, his articles appear to have had no effect; most readers of Vaughan continue to recognize a climactic change in his life and work, sharply discriminating the character of his secular verse from that of his religious poems. They continue to agree with Douglas Bush, who affirms, "There is perhaps no more signal example than Vaughan's of spiritual and poetical rebirth.") 2 8 What I am concerned with is the maxim behind Manila's certitude—a maxim he has shared with the majority of Vaughan's commentators—that in dealing with a profoundly religious poet like Vaughan or with a phenomenon like conversion all "the available evidence" is encompassed by the few bare facts of his life and publication and what may be gleaned from biographical hints in the poems themselves. But it seems to me fundamental that if one would write on the question of Vaughan's conversion one must seek to understand that experience as fully as possible from the ample records and studies available to us. The conversion of Paul, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Suso, Boehme, Fox, and the many others who have left us descriptions of the event, must be recognized as part of the "available evidence." When we study such accounts, or read UnderhilPs or Starbuck's chapters on 6

I N T R O D U C T I O N 27

the awakening, we cannot fail to recognize the essential pertinence they bear to Vaughan's life and poetry. Conversion is seldom "complete" or final in the sense that it constitutes an immediate realization of the goal it has discovered. For the seeker it is final only in the sense that it marks a turning in a new direction; a sudden brief but irresistible glimpse of his true home in the Kingdom of Heaven. Suso, for example, after his first ecstatic experience, "cried out in his heart: 'Alas, God, where was I, where am I now?' and said: 'Beloved, this hour can never die in my heart.'" 28 And, in "Disorder and frailty," Vaughan confesses to his Lord: When first thou didst even from the grave A n d womb of darknes becken out M y brutish soul, and to thy slave Becam'st thy self, both guide, and Scout; Even from that hour T h o u gotst my heart; A n d though here tost By winds, and bit with frost I pine, and shrink Breaking the link ' T w i x t thee, and me; A n d oftimes creep Into th' old silence, and dead sleep, Quitting thy way AIL the long day, Yet, sure, my G o d ! I love thee most.

Alas, thy lovel29

The flesh is weak, and relapses sadly inevitable. The possibility that Vaughan wrote some secular verse after his initial turning can constitute no sufficient refutation of the manifestations of a spiritual awakening so unmistakable in the first Silex Scintillans. George Fox had been granted several "openings" and had sunk back as many times before he emerged into the steady conviction of his calling. By 1655, when Vaughan's strongly determined Preface appeared, he was undoubtedly more firmly fixed in his new resolution than he had been during the first years after his 7

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awakening; he now recognized the danger of any worldly or secular diversions from his spiritual efforts and was more singleminded in his strivings. Thus I do not object to the assertion that Vaughan's spiritual development continued to 1655; it seems inevitable that it did. I do object to Manila's conception of that development as a simple intensification along religious lines of certain serious concerns already existent, an expedient withdrawal from "real" living into a consoling "mood" of pious poetry until such time as worldly opportunity should excite a renewal of interest in "life." Nothing more should be necessary to disqualify this view than the reading of Vaughan's poems against the background of even a layman's knowledge of the great tradition of Christian mysticism. And that is the larger point of my objection: for a hundred years scholars have in general failed to read the poet on his own terms, in the light not of the lesser sun of our solar system but of the Sun of Righteousness. We have continued to look at him through presumptions more natural to the nineteenth century, where they originated, than helpful to us. And we have found in him no more than we expected to find, a "mystical naturepoet" with a special nostalgia for childhood, a poet of a few brilliant lines scattered among a mass of ill-formed and obscure poetry. Our discovery of the role of the hermetic philosophy in his writings has served at best to clear up a few specific areas of difficulty; it has not provided grounds for a conception of the work as a whole. With few and recent exceptions we have not understood Henry Vaughan; we have understood neither his meaning nor his manner. If we had we would long ago have lost interest in iterating the fact of Herbert's influence; 3 0 we would have gone beyond a few parallel passages in Vaughan and his brother, or Hermes Trismegistus and Agrippa, to the larger context of Christian mysticism, and we would have tried to comprehend not only intellectually but intuitively the nature of this rare experience of which those who have known it write with such 8

INTRODUCTION unanimity and fervor—an experience which Vaughan, to some degree at least, shared with them. In so doing we would have seen the problem of his conversion in its proper light; we would have recognized at once that he cannot, without extensive qualification, be called a nature poet; and we would have understood that his poems on childhood, for example, far from being puerile, are expressive of the highest spiritual awareness man has it in him to attain. T h e difference between the secular and sacred poetry of Henry Vaughan cannot be minimized; for a student of his poetry it is essential and to us of a living pertinence. "Men wondered at the sudden alteration that had come over him. One said this and another said that, but what had really happened to him no one imagined. For God had secretly drawn him to H i m in divine light, and this brought about a sudden conversion."

VAUGHAN AND

31

HERBERT

Except for Grosart and Dowden, who defended Vaughan's stature against the assumption, already prevalent, of Herbert's superiority, the majority of critics have been ready to accept the first estimates made of the two poets, and comparison of their manner and effect thus early became stereotyped. George Macdonald, in 1868, put it as well as anyone: " I n a word, [Vaughan] says more splendid things than Herbert, though he writes inferior poems. His thought is profound and just; the harmonies in his soul are true; its artistic and musical ear is defective. His movements are sometimes grand, sometimes awkward. Herbert is always gracious—I use the word as meaning much more than graceful." 3 2 These notions have found repeated and more or less subtle expression down to this day. Near the turn of the century Edith Sichel found Vaughan to be "more intellectual, more highly strung than Herbert; where the latter is pious, Vaughan is mystical; where the one is content to stand at the altar, the other dips his wings in its flame and 9

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soars above it"; but she concludes that "he is a poet of single lines and verses."83 "It is indeed," Grierson concurs, "only in short passages that Vaughan achieves adequate imaginative vision and utterance . . ." 84 In comparing the poets of the Donne tradition, George Williamson considered that "Vaughan is more like Crashaw than like Herbert or Donne" in that "his feeling lacks the precision and outline that we find in theirs"; 85 and Helen White echoes the charge when she asserts that "the precision of Herbert sets in unpleasant relief the vagueness of Vaughan, and the sustained ecstasy of Crashaw leads us to unreasonable expectations of his successor's much smaller-arced inspiration." 86 A paragraph from Joan Bennett will serve to sum up the general agreement upon the two poets: Vaughan is weak where Herbert is strong, and strong where he is weak. He lacks form, order, economy, he seldom knows where to stop; whereas the perfection of form is characteristic of Herbert's poetry. On the other hand Vaughan has a gift of song which Herbert often lacks. He can convey the ecstasy of joy or grief or worship by the verse, and he has a stronger instinct than Herbert for the magic of words and phrases. A selection of the best from Herbert would be a selection of poems, a selection of the best from Vaughan would include some single stanzas, lines, or even half lines.37 It seems to me that although such comparisons derive from a perception genuine to the extent that, by traditional criteria, Herbert's poetry is certainly well formed, they are misleading to the extent that they excite our expectation of finding similar qualities in Vaughan, and so lead us to judge him by those standards. I do not mean that we ought to be satisfied with only stanzas and lines, that we have no right to demand a structured whole. But I mean that we have no right to demand of Vaughan the \ind of form so readily discoverable in Herbert and then, not finding it, to disparage his artistry; for the two poets had undertaken to transform into art quite different experiences within the religious life, and the structural nature of their poems must differ accordingly. Neither one could have used the means of the other to io

INTRODUCTION achieve his end. The titles of their major books identify the qualities of their poetry. For Herbert it is The Temple, the church and its sacraments and symbols; his is the record of a devout churchman who had had to struggle to attain and hold his piety against the pull of the world. Therein lies the central tension of his poetry. But it is as though by the time his experiences reached poetry they had first gone through the formulating discipline of the church ritual; all is distanced, secure, and quiet. The texture of his poems is as smooth as an aged altar-stone, their curve of progression simple and clear, though varied and rich. He tells us he pounded the board, but it was a long time ago and he smiles to think of himself then. Vaughan's poems, however, are sparks from the flint; they are quick with immediate desire, joy, or grief. In them we are outside the church, in the bare little room of man's heart. We are back in the perennial individual experience from which churches grow.38 His poems seems less well formed than Herbert's, in part because the curve of their progression is not preordained and conventionally articulated. They move with the unpredictability of a spontaneous gesture but, rightly seen, with as much grace. They express Life ebullient, dynamic, unfixed, unformulated, "imperfect." (I do not mean that Herbert's poetry is in any sense less "real" or "sincere" but only that it is expressive of more common experience for which both the church and poetry had formulations ready-made, and though Herbert used them to his own ends they enable us to feel immediately at home with them.) A second, and initially more effective, reason for the charges of "vagueness" and "obscurity" against Vaughan is that his language is more pervasively and profoundly symbolic than that of any of his contemporaries, Herbert and Crashaw not excepted; and we, having lost touch with the traditional meanings of that language (and in the first place having failed to recognize it as symbolic), are unable either to perceive the significance of all the elements of his poems, or to trace their interrelationships and grasp their cumulative effect. II

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For when metaphors fade into abstractions and symbols into signs, the meanings they once illuminated and embodied they now conceal; they perform a hollow ritual. In time we forget even the discursive definitions substituted for their connotative richness. Again, conventional associations and arbitrary attributions which had served to lead the mind into a symbol's deep and nondiscursive life soon are lost to us, and our ignorance precludes all entry into archetypal realms. Rosemond Tuve has stated this fact with a fine assurance and exactness: As with all the humane learnings, great literature is somehow not superseded by other great literature which follows it; it retains a unique value which men are not ready to give up in the way they willingly substitute truer conceptions of how the blood circulates for the old ones, or new mackintoshes for the worn ones that no longer keep out the rain. Yet, though a great poem does not become untrue, or wear out, the inner core of value in it becomes obscured. It "dies," we say; we no longer feel that pulse of life in it that made it valuable. Few would dispute the notion that the good critic pierces through to that inner core in such a way that we can see again what made a book living and valuable. And this must be done anew, and done differently, in every age. . . . Oddly enough, the critic does this revitalizing service, quite often, by making us realize that the poet's conceptions are not mistaken but true, and by giving us the grateful and excited sense that here is something which will still keep us dry in a damp world. 39 Moreover, Herbert uses symbols in such a way as to enrich his representations of realities already well defined in rite and doctrine; they cluster around a core of rationalized meaning. But Vaughan's poems—the great ones, those that are uniquely his— are symbols: I mean that insofar as they are not descriptions of, or signs pointing to, his mystical life, but poetic transformations of that life, they are themselves the only satisfying formulation of the reality they represent, and they partake of that reality. 40 The burden of communicating significance rests almost wholly upon their symbolic nature rather than upon external rationalizations. Therefore it is helpful to make use of whatever analogues 12

INTRODUCTION to these symbolic structures we can find in order, first, to enable us to respond to them more accurately and fully, and second to help us analyze and translate into prose, to define, their effect. (Of course, on the one hand Anglican doctrine and ritual are no substitutes for Herbert's poetry, and on the other—as I have rather insisted—the many attempts to describe and explain the typical mystical experience are by no means irrelevant to Vaughan's embodiment of that experience. Both men have in common the essential fact that they wrote true poems which, as such, arc finally autonomous events. Beyond that, I am attempting to locate important differences in the kind of poetry they wrote—but these differences must not be taken as absolute.) CHILDHOOD

MOTIF

Vaughan's conception of childhood as blessed, the type and symbol of that spiritual state toward which he strove, has often appeared foolishness to scholars and a stumbling block to eulogists. It will provide a convenient focus for consideration of the most important problem in the course of modern criticism's understanding of the poet—the kind and extent of Vaughan's symbolism. The childhood motif received little more than passing notice until T. S. Eliot in 1927 wrote his review of Edmund Blunden's book on the Silurist.41 What is immediately clear about this review is that Eliot felt a decided distaste for the kind of poetry Blunden wrote and unfortunately confused his feelings in this regard with his apprehension of Vaughan. I believe the acridity of the following comments derives from this source rather than from his reading of Vaughan, which must have been cursory at best: ". . . this love of one's own childhood . . . is anything but a token of greatness. We all know the mood; and we can all, if we choose to relax to that extent, indulge in the luxury of reminiscence of childhood; but if we are at all mature and J

3

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conscious, wc refuse to indulge this weakness to the point of writing and poetizing about it; we know that it is something to be buried and done with . . ." One is not surprised, then, to find Eliot's estimate of Vaughan to be very much what everyone else's had been—that "he wrote fine lines" but, compared with Herbert's "clear, definite, mature, and sustained" emotion, Vaughan is "vague, adolescent, fitful, and retrogressive." 42 Nevertheless, the force of Eliot's judgment stimulated response, and though the childhood motif had elicited comment before, from that time on it became a familiar subject for Vaughan's critics. Those who undertook to explain or justify this motif chose devious channels, most of them at least heading toward the center of Vaughan's conception, if not arriving there. In 1934 both Joan Bennett and J. B. Leishman, for example, while assuming that Vaughan's desire to "retreat" was indeed a desire to return to a former biological stage—that is, while they accepted the idea literally—undertook to point out that such a wish is not necessarily puerile, that the child is in fact possessed of certain faculties or characteristics toward which the "mature and conscious" adult might do well to restrain his condescension. Clearly, they have in mind Wordsworth's magnificent insight. For Leishman explains that to Vaughan the soul of a child, "not yet corrupted by the ways of the world or dulled by the lethargy of custom," was capable of looking upon the Creation "as God intended all men to look upon it, as a wonderful and glorious thing, the garment of God." And Joan Bennett understands that to Vaughan and Wordsworth "it seemed that children, like stars or flowers, fulfill the law of their being unconsciously and inevitably." 43 Helen White like Leishman links the theme with Vaughan's iterations about a "first white age" and associates both ideas with the contemporary concern with primitivism. But in considering why it is that the poet's expression of this idea "is not as complete or as sustained or as explicit as his expression of his intuition of nature," Miss White assumes the reason to be that for the latter he "had ready to hand an account, an explana-

14

INTRODUCTION tion," in the hermetic theory.44 Are we to deduce from this that for his conception of childhood Vaughan had no "account" or "explanation," no tradition, ready to hand? 4 5 It would appear so. The fact is, however, that scholars had begun almost twenty years before to delineate more than one "explanation" lying behind this motif. What is especially interesting to me is that of the two major sources for Vaughan's conception—Christianity and hermeticism —which were suggested within a year of one another in two articles, the more esoteric was taken up and given a thorough rummaging by succeeding scholars. In 1918 Edward Chauncey Baldwin, in a discussion of Wordsworth, made the passing suggestion that if Vaughan's notions about children were not altogether original, they probably derived from the hermetic philosophy.4® And in 1919 Percy H. Osmond, in a brief aside on the matter, mentioned the Platonic doctrine of Reminiscence, earlier cited by Professor Harrison,47 and remarked that "with this Platonism Vaughan combines very beautifully our Lord's teaching that 'Except ye convert and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.'" 48 Let me state at once that it appears to me beyond question that the Bible and the long and full tradition stemming from it—especially the mystical— is the primary authority for Vaughan's conception of childhood. He was familiar with hermetical doctrine and symbol, to be sure, but most likely regarded them as only an eddy in the main stream of Christian mysticism. It strikes me as one of the oddest facts about the course of scholarship on Vaughan that, in the search for sources, in the effort to understand his symbols (once his images were recognized to be symbols), the Bible, the Fathers, the mystics, liturgy, and Biblical commentary have been, until recently, all but ignored. It seems to have gotten abroad, since we learned about his brother's alchemical studies, and as a result of Miss Holmes's book, that Vaughan is occult and to read him requires that one first read Hermes Trismegistus, Cornelius Agrippa, and The Hermetic Museum. Thus Osmond's comment

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bore scant fruit, but the road of discovery indicated by Baldwin was trod by dozens of investigators. In his paper, "The Source of Henry Vaughan's Ideas Concerning God in Nature," A . C. Judson found that source to be either the books and conversation of Henry's brother Thomas or the original treatises to which his twin referred him. 49 Judson's citation of parallel passages in the treatises and poems leaves little doubt as to the fact of influence and succeeds admirably in throwing light upon the poems and stanzas he deals with. L . C. Martin widens the esoteric net to include Rabbinical literature, contemporary writers, and Jacob Boehme. 60 His examples again are clearly relevant and often helpful. But he does not himself arrive at the necessary and important conclusion that the poet may not have had his eye focused nostalgically upon his own lost youth but may have been dealing with an idea of symbolic import. In 1941 Merritt Hughes published an article on "The Theme of Pre-existence and Infancy in 'The Retreate'" 5 1 and let it be understood that he was challenging all former views on the subject. Specifically, he found Harrison's statement about the Platonic origins of Vaughan's idea of the soul's pre-existence to be oversimplified. He denied Eliot's contention that "the nostalgia for a lost beauty" which inspired "The Retreate" was puerile, citing, like Osgood, the familiar verse from Matthew. But, however relevant and helpful his citations, Hughes did not advance our general comprehension of Vaughan's motif much beyond establishing the likelihood that it "fully corresponded to the best intellectual as well as poetical position" of the time. Indeed, as recently as 1954 the critic Malcolm Ross could write that "the child in Vaughan and Traherne is clad eternally in swaddling clothes" 52 —echoing the view expressed by Eliot nearly thirty years earlier. After all the painstaking scholarship that has been expended in the study of Vaughan's work, it is disheartening to discover that the religious nature of his childhood motif can still be wholly 16

INTRODUCTION missed, though back almost at the beginning George Macdonald had followed Vaughan without difficulty in this matter—had, in fact, not even thought it necessary to quote the Biblical passages he alluded to when explaining, in his general way, what Vaughan meant: " T h e movements of man's life," he begins, "are in spirals: we go back whence we came, ever returning on our former times, only upon a higher level, on the next upward coil of the spiral, so that it is a going back and a going forward ever and both at once. Life is, as it were, a constant repentance, or thinking of it again: the childhood of the kingdom takes the place of the childhood of the brain, but comprises all that was lovely in the former delight." 5 3 This is neither as precise nor as full an interpretation as the case requires, but it correctly assumes the Biblical source and the profoundly religious nature of the motif. T h e main purpose behind this survey of the problem of childhood in Vaughan has been to indicate the manner in which we have approached or retrogressed from perception of the symbolic significance of his tropes. It has been to suggest that a naively literal view of his figures cannot be sufficient for a comprehension of his work; nor is it enough simply to set him against the general background of his own time, since much of that background was unessential to his work and can only distort the image. Rather is it necessary to allow the poetry to shed its own light upon that area of the seventeenth century, or earlier, in which it had its life, to recognize in the country of the mind those works which are its spiritual analogues, if not necessarily its spiritual progenitors. 54 That we have at least begun this work is apparent from our efforts to realize the meaning of Vaughan's image of childhood.

V A U G H A N AND

NATURE

After the first two decades of the present century critics tended to qualify the prevalent view of Vaughan as a descriptive poet, *7

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or as a "mystical nature-poet," but most of these qualifications constituted only a kind of variation on a theme or, often, simply a heightened verbal sophistication; for these scholars continued to regard his poetry as related essentially to the phenomenal world, and its religious quality to be largely a consequence of his era. Vaughan was remembered and admired for his "intimate and religious feeling for nature." 65 Yet by the second quarter of the century some critics had come to see that neither the motive for, nor the object of, Vaughan's poetry could be found in nature. Robert Sencourt, for example, realized that "it must not be supposed that nature provided him with the same direct stimulus as the church's mysteries." More precisely, Sencourt strikes to the center of Vaughan's motivation when he suggests that "longing, driven by the recollection and the promise of the sweetness of holy love, drove Vaughan on his way." 86 Such insights help point the way. A few years later Elizabeth Holmes discovered that Vaughan presents "a Nature sub specie aeternitatis, almost without a local habitation," and she saw that such natural images as there are in his poetry are "representative of the poet's inner life" rather than descriptive of Brecknockshire. But her perception was not steady —she later called Vaughan "a seventeenth-century worshipper of Nature"—nor was it, for the most part, accurate or clear. She viewed Vaughan solely through the glass of the hermetical tradition and so could not quite bring him into focus. She is vague about his conversion and refers ambiguously to "a world-embracing, atoning Spirit" 67 revealed through Nature. Had she considered Christian doctrine, she could have spoken of the Holy Ghost and better understood those poems in which the pattern and symbols of regeneration are specifically those of the Christian baptism. I do not mean to imply that her study and the many source-finding essays preceding and following it have been without specific application to the poems, for they have.68 The cita18

INTRODUCTION tions from Thomas Vaughan given in A. C. Judson's article, and the alchemical texts brought forward by R. H. Walters, for instance, are extremely helpful. But due, partially at least, to their tangential, partitive approach most such investigations have failed to see Vaughan steadily or see him whole. J. B. Leishman comes close to the mark when he notes that nature for Vaughan was liber creatorum, "a system of divine hieroglyphs"; and he believes that Vaughan's "is the truest and highest kind of mysticism, not cloudy and obscure, but concrete and clear . . ." 59 Helen White seems less sure than Leishman what is the nature of Vaughan's imagery, for though she has accepted the assumption of his nature-mysticism, she has herself found almost no described nature as such in his poems. She sounds confused at first as she warns that "the modern reader who approaches Vaughan as a nature poet in the modern sense is likely to be disappointed. There is very little detail of nature in his verses." She supposes, then, that it must be "the larger and more general aspects of nature that engage Vaughan's attention," but recalls at once that "there is nothing of landscape, nothing of wide views or sudden perspectives." Her conclusion is that not nature in itself, "not the picture but the stimulus and the poet's reaction to it," is important. She has seen with her own eyes, and her perception is accurate. "Very seldom is any natural phenomenon, any moment of nature, viewed in its own literal light." eo In a short article whose main intent is to dispel the notion that Vaughan's poetry owes anything to the early Welsh tradition, Ruth Preston Lehmann indicates that she is fully aware of the true nature of Vaughan's imagery. "Most often natural objects are to him only a symbol," she remarks. "The flowers suggest divine influence, the dew and showers that make them grow are heavenly grace." 61 Her certainty is no doubt the consequence of an admirably thorough analysis of most of Vaughan's recurrent images, wherein repeatedly the evidence leads her to the conclu19

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sion that while the secular verse is essentially literal, the divine is essentially symbolic.®2

RECENT

STUDIES

Since 1945 several important studies of Vaughan have appeared. Itrat-Husain for the first time described with accuracy and inclusiveness what ought to have been meant by the long repetition of such phrases as "Vaughan's mysticism" or "mystical poetry." H e traces in Silex Scintillans three stages of the mystical life— awakening, purgation, and illumination—and accurately

con-

cludes that, as far as the poems reveal, the poet did not attain to union. 63 Even in doing this, he has done a great deal: he has set Vaughan firmly in a perspective capable of revealing the coherence of his work, transforming the theme of childhood, for example, from a stumbling block to a stepping stone along the way to a comprehensive grasp of the poet's work. For it makes it clear that Vaughan's conception of childhood "is related to his larger conception of the Fall, its effect upon human nature, and the state of innocence which man must acquire again to behold the face of God." Thus "childhood" in Vaughan is the symbol of spiritual attainment, not an indication of emotional regression; the term connotes "the qualities which a man should cultivate before he can hope to enter the Kingdom of God."

64

What Itrat-Husain has done in tracing the traditional stages of the via mystica in Vaughan's poetry had to be done before the poetry itself could be properly apprehended; to put it more precisely, he has abstracted the fundamental motive and the basic pattern Vaughan shares with the larger tradition of Christian mysticism, and so has placed Vaughan's special "act" unequivocally in the "scene" to which it organically relates; but he has done so by translating the poet's special language into the accepted generic language of mysticism. It is not enough, however, for the student of literature only to delineate the archetype in a 20

INTRODUCTION work; he must comprehend its universal pertinence through— and in terms of—the poet's own specific realization. In Poetry and Humanism, Μ. M. Mahood has performed a valuable service in attempting to outline and interpret against their traditional backgrounds several of Vaughan's symbols and image clusters. Her supposition that "by far the largest of Vaughan's English debts is to the Authorized Version" has opened an avenue for her into the heart of the matter; she very well understands that for him "life . . . is a pilgrimage to a known shrine, the journey into the Promised Land." 65 Though she makes use of alchemical and emblematic literature, Paracelsus and Agrippa, her main approach is through the Bible and the Christian tradition. Her chief contribution, perhaps, is to indicate, by analyzing various symbols, that while "the surface-meaning of Vaughan's lyrics is always plain . . . beneath lie complex undercurrents of meaning, each springing from some now unfamiliar source." Thus she interprets Vaughan's image of the veil generally as symbolic of the soul's estrangement from God, as an interposition between it and the Source of light and life; but involved in this generalization are specific implications: the veil is the flesh, the totality of our physical existence, the margin between the natural and supernatural realms, the veil of the Sanctuary which was rent at the supersession of the Old Law, and the shadow of time, eclipsing the light of eternity. She cites Agrippa and Quarles but principally Isaiah xxv.7, Hebrews x.20, and 2 Corinthians iii.14—ι6.ββ In dealing with individual symbols rather than with a general pattern, her essay complements Itrat-Husain's study. However, no thorough reading of a Vaughan poem was attempted until 1954, when Don Cameron Allen published his paper on "Vaughan's 'Cock-crowing' and the Tradition." 97 In that article he demonstrates that one of the ways to find entry into Vaughan's country is to make our approach down the kind of traditional avenue the poet himself trod. Along that road few are able to 21

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keep pace with Professor Allen, but he has left an example to follow. S. L . Bethel, after a biographical preface and an intelligent discussion of Vaughan's secular verses in which he acknowledges their frequent excellence and general high level of quality and finish, goes on to offer his own classification of the major poetry. "Speaking broadly, we may distinguish three main types of religious verse in Silex Scintillans: first, the poems of penitent devotion, in which God is personally addressed or the reader exhorted; secondly, doctrinal poems; and, thirdly, those poems which incorporate Vaughan's own 'nature-mysticism,' his intuitional grasp of the divine life infused throughout the cosmic order." 6 8 Certainly such divisions can be made, for the three kinds are pervasive in Vaughan; but I wonder how helpful they are. T h e first two are equally true of Herbert and others and the last could apply as well to several of the romantics. Louis

Martz has indicated

the inevitable influence

upon

Vaughan's work of the tradition of meditation flourishing at the time the poet wrote. 69 H e delineates the meditative tripartite structure underlying "I walkt the other day (to spend my hour)" and defines the "roving Extasie" of " T h e Search" in terms of his thesis. Mr. Martz's contribution to our understanding of Vaughan's time, providing as it does a new angle of vision, is large; but as it was not his purpose to interpret Vaughan in any fullness, his contribution to our understanding of the Silurist is necessarily slight. T h e two book-length studies of Vaughan that have recendy appeared mark the distance w e have come since the nineteenth century in our understanding of Vaughan's distinct nature and quality as a poet of Christian religious experience. T h e first, by Ross Garner, seeks to define the "basic philosophical attitudes which underlie Vaughan's expression of experience." These attitudes, he finds, 22

INTRODUCTION rest in the Alexandrian resolution of the immanence-transcendence dichotomy, the Augustinian notion of total depravity, and the allegorical habit of mind which feels in the created universe the uncreated universe beyond, and which may lead to a sacrificial act of the will. These premises, moreover, exclude from the tradition which directly influenced Vaughan dualistic thought, that which (descended perhaps from the Gnostic heresies) places the nature of evil in material substance and not in the apostate will. Second, they limit the influence of Hermeticism on Vaughan (defining Hermeticism as most characteristically dualistic, particularly in its mysticism of science) to the mechanics of metaphor and to the pious aphorisms which Hermeticism shares with the central current of Western Christian thought. And, third, they insist on the experiential nature of poetic re-creations, on a central core of experience as the principle of organization in Vaughan's religious poetry.70 With these findings, as summarized here, I have no important quarrel. Vaughan was most certainly Christian in his primary philosophical attitudes, and he most certainly was not a dualist. Indeed, it is something of a surprise to learn that the possibility of his being regarded as a dualistic thinker is in question at all; it had seemed to me, in view of the persistent convention of Vaughan's "nature poetry," that the liability of his being taken for a pantheist presented a more serious problem. In any event, Garner has obviated either misconception, if perhaps at the cost of some tediousness: in outlining the orthodoxy of Vaughan's assumptions he moves very far away from the unique quality of Vaughan's poetry; and one wonders how relevant or necessary the argument is. Probably the most valuable, and controversial, part of Garner's book is his treatment of the question of the nature and extent of the hermetical influence upon Vaughan. He disclaims "the majority opinion" that the hermetic influence is "fundamental and all-pervasive" in the Silurist's work, and demonstrates that hermctic ideas and images functioned for Vaughan as analogies or parallels to Christian truth rather than as doctrine. In doing 23

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this much, Garner has genuinely helped to clarify a critical point. But in his eagerness to advance this view, and perhaps because of his rather rigidly categorical procedure, he tends to establish distinctions as divisions; he seems to be unaware that the currents of Christian and hermetic doctrine and symbol, which during the seventeenth century had actually commingled in a highly complex way, have been forced apart by a twentieth-century discovery of a basic heresy in hermeticism. Garner's authorities have found that in hermeticism "currents which spring from irreconcilable philosophical bases are mingled without apparent awareness of their repugnance; views which presuppose a rigid dualism of matter and spirit as evil and good are juxtaposed with views which find the transcendence of God through His immanence." These authorities, we should note, recognize that the hermetists themselves appear to have been unaware that they maintained contradictory doctrines (one of which was, moreover, quite compatible with Christian thought and Henry Vaughan), that hermeticism was not a systematized philosophy but a religious tendency; and Garner himself recognizes that "by the seventeenth century . . . citing Hermes Trismegistus had a history almost as old as the Christian era." That is, both the hermetists themselves and many good and pious Christians—especially in Vaughan's day of fervent and eclectic seeking—were ignorant of the fact, discovered in the twentieth century, that one of the two doctrines of the hermetic philosophy is irreconcilable with the Christian position on the goodness of the creation. It seems to me perfectly apparent that the clearly defined "repugnance" between hermeticism and Christianity which Garner sees, and upon which he bases his more extreme insistence in his anxiety to discount the hermetical influence upon Vaughan, is an instance of that sort of "hindsight" Garner discerns in our simplified view of the relationships among the sects of Vaughan's day. 71 Vaughan was entirely capable of absorbing elements of the amorphous hermeticism of the time into his fundamentally Chris24

INTRODUCTION tian belief without feeling heretical (though I agree that he most likely incorporated such elements as analogy and parallel insight rather than as dogma), just as it is possible for a man today to incorporate aspects of Freudian or Jungian psychology or Existential philosophy into a fundamentally Christian view of life. Garner's efforts to qualify the prevailing assumptions about the importance of hermeticism in Vaughan lead him in effect, if not in precise terms, to proceed farther than the case requires or allows. This is especially true of his attempt to prove that Thomas Vaughan was an hermetical dualist and therefore—ergo—disqualified as an influence upon his brother. Garner's argument is full of begged questions, wrenchings, and arbitrary conclusions. One passage he cites from Thomas's work to prove his heretical dualism is in fact a celebration of Christianity as the "only true philosophy and the only true religion" because "no philosophy hath perfectly united God to His creature but the Christian." 72 Thomas is hailing Christianity for its "mystery of the Incarnation"—"that mysterious kiss of God and Nature," as he puts it— in the manner of his poet brother ("But life is, what none can express, / A quickness, which my God hath Kist"); 73 and Garner is accusing him of dualism! He finds further evidence of hermetical heresy in Thomas's interpretation that "by the Tree of Knowledge is signified some sensual nature repugnant to the spiritual." Garner assumes that "sensual nature" equals "matter," the principle of evil in the dualist system, and contrasts with Thomas's statement one by Augustine positing two antagonistic wills within him, "one new and the other old, one carnal, the other spiritual." 74 But Vaughan's "sensual nature . . . wherein our worldly, sinful affections—as lust, anger and the rest—have their seat and predominate" (my italics) seems to me more readily equated with Augustine's "carnal will" than with the Gnostic hermetist's "evil matter." Furthermore—and relevant in this connection—Garner assumes throughout the book a wider, more clearly defined, and more 25

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consistent breach between orthodox Christian monism and heretical dualism than the course of Christian thinking will support. From Jesus' own "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world" (i John ii.15), and similar texts, through the medieval debates between the body and soul and sermons on contemptus mundt, the distinction between amor carnis and amor spiritus was always liable to, and was frequently accorded, a dualistic interpretation; it is a commonplace that, despite the doctrine of the Incarnation and orthodox monism, for coundess Christians the created world, nature, the body, were suspect and tacidy understood to constitute the devil's own domain. Certainly Thomas Vaughan's avowed hermetical affiliation colored—"tinctured," one might say—his expression of what he believed to be Christian truths, and no doubt there are passages in his work that have a dualistic ring; but Gamer's dismissal of him as being in the "dualistic current" of hermetical thought and "therefore" of no relevance as an influence upon his brother is unwarranted and arbitrary. Readers of Henry Vaughan cannot afford to be wholly ignorant of hermetical ideas and images if they wish to savor the fullness of his poetry, though they might well feel obliged to re-estimate the character and range of hermetical allusion in the light of Garner's argument. E. C. Pettet's Of Paradise and Light appears to have been intended as a general introduction to Silex Scintillans, and it serves that function admirably. Its first chapter, a rebuttal, in effect, of Kermode's thesis that Vaughan's mysticism was vicarious, firmly acknowledges the experiential source of the poetry—"what chiefly inspired his religious poetry (quantitatively, and in his greatest lyrics) was the emotional experience of his regeneration and devotion"—and describes the prevailing quality of "that world of imagination which was the other primary source of his poetry." 7 5 Subsequent chapters cover in some detail Vaughan's absorption of images and phrases from the Bible and from the poetry of George Herbert. In both respects, Pettet rejects the charge of 26

INTRODUCTION imitativeness, affirming that Vaughan had made his "borrowings"—often patently subliminal—thoroughly his own. In the chapter dealing with the hermetic influence, Pettet asserts that "there is no doubt that Henry Vaughan did read his brother's treatises," and offers several instances of the Silurist's poems that contain "clear echoes from them." He is conscious that in Vaughan the hermetic element is neither predominant nor distinct, and that there is a "close fusion of hermetic and Christian ideas"; but he believes that "if we know nothing of hermeticism, we shall sometimes miss certain overtones of Vaughan's language." Te Pettet further reflects our growing sophistication about the essential Vaughan when, in the chapter on "The Book of Nature," he conceives that "certain writers have made far too much of [Vaughan] as a poet of Nature," since "the inspiration of country sights and sounds even for that small group of lyrics in Silex Scintillans that may be loosely termed 'Nature poems'" is quite small. He concedes that Vaughan read in Nature certain important "lessons," but he considers that "Nature enters his lyrics chiefly through metaphor and illustration." While the readings of several of the poems he offers—"Regeneration," "The Morning-Watch," "The Night," and "They are all gone into the world of light"—are not remarkably intensive or exhaustive, they are sensitive and, I believe, generally sound. He devotes considerable attention to Vaughan's prosodic effects throughout and has an interesting chapter on them.77 Pettet's chief contribution to our realization of Vaughan's excellence, however, I find in his careful tracings of complex and constantly recurring motifs and images, which, emanating as they do from a basically simple vision and thematic concern, convey a total effect of what Coleridge deemed the principle of truth and beauty: multeity in unity. Especially in the chapter on "The Unity and Continuity of 'Silex Scintillans,'" Pettet has demonstrated this quality of Vaughan's work with greater thoroughness and precision than any other commentator to date. This as*7

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VAUGHAN

pect of his book has a special value, for it is of fundamental consequence to our appreciation of Vaughan to recognize that Silex Scintillans "is essentially a poetic wor\, not a collection of miscellaneous lyrics: it makes an impact, perhaps its profoundest impact, as a whole." 78 The second part of this same chapter advances and supports the extremely interesting and welcome thesis that the two parts of Silex Scintillans are distinct in their predominant tone, or mood, and that this distinction reflects an advance, during the five intervening years, in Vaughan's spiritual development. With a critical circumspection characteristic of the book, Pettet refuses to define the distinction as a "sharp and continuous antithesis." 79 There are, to be sure, essential continuities, yet I am convinced that he is correct in discovering a greater sense of assurance, resignation, and consequent peace, in Part II. Those who have lived with Vaughan for some time will be glad to think he was nearing Home.

28

II

T H E MAJOR M E T A P H O R S

T h e traditional stages and symbols of the Christian life of prayer are readily discoverable in Vaughan's work, and they are at once the center and circumference of his poetry. They both constitute its deepest meaning and establish its proper context. But Vaughan, as poet, has embodied the universal sequence in patterns of his own arrangement, and as the old symbols function in his poems they become revivified with fresh nuances. It is only in terms of his unique individuation that we realize the beauty and power of his conception and enter into the boundless life of the archetype; we have to allow the poems to formulate their own gestalt rather than to describe them in terms of a pattern and meaning in the abstract. In what way, then, does Vaughan's poetry symbolically transform his archetypal religious experience ? What are the figures in his carpet? Basically, they are only three, and each of them serves to embody a single theme: regeneration. First in its pervasiveness is the metaphor of God's seed growing secretly in the ground of the soul, now watered by the dews and showers of grace, drawn and opened to the Sun of Righteousness, now buffeted by the storms of affliction that blast the weeds of worldliness, and withered by the frosts of sin under the clouds of His withdrawals, but always the seed lying green and secret, awaiting the ray that bids it grow. Second is the symbolism of the quest, the pilgrimage 29

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home to the house of light, a night journey through the land of darkness toward the East and morning, an ascent, sometimes guided by the saintly stars and sometimes through total blackness, of Mount Carmel. The way is long and hard, through desert and ravine, while the night birds hover and call, the feral fires lead astray, and storms rage; but having once glimpsed its shining spires, the pilgrim cannot rest until he enters that shady city of palm trees. Last in point of predominance and frequency is the familiar symbolism of courtship and marriage. The heart is the Bridegroom's chamber, the temple ordained for His marriage to the soul, but He must stand outside, dew in His hair, and knock. For the heart has calcified in the ways of the world, and the spouse dwells entranced by its false lights. As is depicted in the emblem prefixed to the 1650 edition of Silex Scintillans, the chamber must be prepared for its Guest by being purged with the fires of remorse and love and cleansed by the tears of repentance which are the distillation of the incendium amoris thus ignited. Only then may He enter and bestow the kiss and the ring intended for no one but His bride. Thus, Vaughan's poems involve all of the three great classes of symbolism outlined by Evelyn Underhill—all three being, as she says, "but partial and inadequate translations of the one Indescribable Truth." 1 Of course, these clusters do not exist in the poetry in rigid definition; Vaughan does not usually assign them separate poems but most often compounds his symbolism, as the well-known last stanza of "The World" (p. 467),2 for example, combines both the journey and marriage symbols with a reminiscence of Plato's cave and the image of souls as birdlike creatures. In Vaughan of all poets one looks least for sharp delineations; his images, though precise, are fluid in their quality of easy fusion and transition. Nevertheless, as the total work settles in the mind, these three extended metaphors emerge as central and coherent to the whole, affording an order, a pattern, within which separate poems may 30

THE MAJOR

METAPHORS

live a richcr life and the free play of the various symbols woven into them receive government. T H E GROWTH OF T H E L I L Y There is hardly a poem of Vaughan's which does not incorporate some element of his plant symbolism and such related images as shower, frost, pruning, dew, and so forth. Entire poems, and these often among his finest, are built upon it; and key passages in poems whose primary concept is pilgrimage or marriage have recourse to this central metaphor. "The seed growing secretly" (p. 510), "Love, and Discipline" (p. 463), "Unprofitablenes" (p. 441), "Mount of Olives" (p. 476), "I walkt the other day (to spend my hour)" (p. 478), and "The Revival" (p. 643), for example, all render the spiritual life in terms of plant life. And "Regeneration" (p. 397), though expressing spiritual progress predominantly as a pilgrimage, also involves the imagery of souls as flowers. The first stanza of "Disorder and frailty" (p. 444) has implicidy as its unifying principle the journey motif, the second the flower metaphor, and the third the image of rising and falling mists, while the final stanza, in a manner more subtle than simple iteration, fuses elements of all three. My purpose now is to indicate more precisely the character and range of this cluster in Vaughan's major poetry and something of its life in its full existence in the Christian tradition, so that when we come to focus upon individual poems we may see them with perspective and in a clearer light. Seed As the plant that grows to flower and fruit begins in the seed, so ought we to begin with Vaughan's imagery of the seed, in which abides "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower." We will encounter difficulties almost immediately since 31

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in some places the seed appears to symbolize a Divine element innate to the soul: the Neoplatonic ev, the early-Hebraic ruach (Spirit), as distinguished from nejesh (soul), or the New Testament pneuma (Spirit), as distinguished from psyche (soul), making possible man's union with God. For this union the Middle Ages devised a variety of terms, such as apex mentis, vertex mentis, scintilla, seelenburg, jün\elein, fund, substance, and so forth. In other places the seed appears to signify the word or doctrine of Christianity effecting conversion.3 Vaughan himself nowhere makes positive distinctions between the two concepts— indeed, they seem at times fused in his imagination; nevertheless, the difference may often be inferred from the contexts in which the images occur. In examining Vaughan's use of this fundamental symbol, then, we will take note of this apparent confusion, not to impose it as final upon the poetry, but, foreseeing a problem, to move through a superficial duplexity into a unity we might not otherwise have reached. The imagery of seed and flower is in Vaughan so fundamental, pervasive, and protean that it would be idle to attempt to analyze all of its occurrences. But in examining some of the more central instances we will be able to realize its essential nature. Divine Seed in

"Coc^-crowing"

To begin with a well-known poem, "Cock-crowing" (p. 488) gathers together many of the connotations of the seed image and is helpfully explicit in its statement. God has placed His seed in the creatures, and they are constant to it and to Him.4 Being singular and whole in their undeviating accordance with the Principle of their being, it seems that they are in direct contact with God, insofar as their nature allows, and must know the path unto the house of light. Yet Man, the one creature made in His image, is inconstant and sways to the pull of every worldly attraction. Vaughan, then, in pleading for the restorative grace of the Holy Spirit, bases his "argument" on the contention that 32

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the contacta essentia is possible between man and God because there is in man a spark of the Divine fire, a seed of the Tree of Life: Seeing thy seed abides in me, Dwell thou in it, and I in thee. In isolation, these lines might be referred as readily to the little grain of mustard seed and the parable of the sower as to the doctrine of the inviolably God-like element in the soul. They could as legitimately be read in terms of conversion in faith as of innate divinity. But in context their meaning is defined. The "tincture" and "touch" of Life with which the creatures are imbued is not, of course, the consequence of any "conversion" but is inherent in their unchanging natures; and Vaughan's use of image in the third stanza relates it directly to that tincture and touch as something innate to man. God's noblest creation has in him intrinsically the Ground of union with the Creator; for when man was made the Lord breathed His own spirit into him.5 Therefore the poet cries out: If a meer blast so fill the sail, Shall not the breath of God prevail? All creation may watch and wait, remaining dumbly faithful to its Source; but man alone has within him the seed that could grow into the flower and fruit of God's own garden; he alone was granted and still retains under the fleshly dross a full and pure glance of the primal Light, a spark of the Divine fire. How far, then, must he have fallen from his proper dignity if now he finds the creatures closer to their Maker than he! They have, indeed, become his teachers: "All things here shew him heaven . . . trees, herbs, flowres, all / Strive upwards stil, and point him the way home": All have their \eyes, and set ascents; but man Though he knows these, and hath more of his own, Sleeps at the ladders foot . . . 33

(p. 461)

THE

POETRY

Gospel Seed in "The

OF

HENRY

VAUGHAN

Match"

It is evident, on the other hand, that the grain sown in " T h e Match" (p. 434) refers rather to the little grain of mustard seed than to the Divine element of the soul breathed into mankind at its creation. " T w o Lifes I hold from thee, my gracious Lord," Vaughan writes. T h e one is his existence in the world, and the other will be his Life eternal in the next world, made possible by the dear purchase of his Saviour. In realization of this immense gift, Vaughan begs his Lord to help him preserve it: Setde my house, and shut out all distractions That may unknit My heart, and thee planted in it . . . Christ planted in the heart here signifies the gospel truth at last taking root in the converted conscience. "For by seed here H e means His doctrine, and by land, the souls of men, and by the sower, Himself." 8 A s St. Bernard says, "It is planted in faith and it takes root in love; the soil in which it grows is hoed by discipline of life, fertilized by tears of penitence, and watered by the preaching of the Word." 7 A passage in The Mount of Olives is explicatory of this range of meaning: Ο thou most mild and merciful Lamb of God! the onely, and the Almighty sower! grant, I beseech thee, that the seed which falls this day [in church] upon my heart, may never be choak'd with the Cares of this world, nor be devoured by the fowles of the aire, nor wither away in these times of persecution and triall: but so Cherish it with the Dew of thy divine spirit, that (as in a good and faithful ground) it may bring forth fruit unto eternal life, to the glory of thy great name, and the Comfort of my poor soul, which thou hast bought with thy most precious and saving blood. (p. 149) Citing the parable, Vaughan reminds us that whether the seed flourishes or not depends upon the nature of the soil on which it falls. In " T h e Match" he expresses his gratitude to Herbert for helping to ready the land, and he speaks of himself as the sower 34

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METAPHORS

in the sense that his tears of repentance have softened the hard earth so that the grain may penetrate and grow. His part is the readiness; as Meister Eckhart declares, "The instant the spirit is ready God enters without hesitation or delay." 8 We arc partners in the planting; and Dante has offered plain directions: Take the harrow of fair humility, and breaking up the clods caked by the heat of your wrath, make level the acre of your minds, lest haply the celestial shower, anticipating the seed ere ye have sown it, fall from on high in vain; that the grace of God leap not back from you like the daily dew from a rock: but rather, that ye conceive like a fertile valley, and thrust forth the green, the green, that is, that bears the fruit of true peace . . . (Epistle 5) But if, by an extension of the metaphor, we may be called sower, our part is weak and finally altogether ineffectual without the hand of His mighty sustenance. And let this grain which here in tears I sow Though dead, and sic\, Through thy Increase grow new, and quic\. "It is He who does everything; He forms and reforms. He forms by Himself alone, but He reforms with our co-operation. For it is His grace with the co-operation of our will that brings it about." 9 Vaughan has used the terms of seed and planting in other places to denote specifically the consciously determined Christian life, as, for example, in the exclamation, "O plant in me thy Gospel, and thy Law" (p. 465), and in "Disorder and frailty," where he again asks God to protect the seed's frailty and foster its growth: Let not perverse, And foolish thoughts adde to my Bil Of forward sins, and Kil That seed, which thou In me didst sow, But dresse, and water with thy grace Together with the seed, the place . . . 35

(p. 446)

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OF H E N R Y

VAUGHAN

Although such passages as these would appear to derive from the New Testament parables of conversion, it is not certain that Vaughan has not the primal seed in his mind also, in a way that I trust will become clear shortly. But while the imagery of seed seldom provides grounds for sharp delimitation, the weight of emphasis, especially when taken in conjunction with the motif of the soul's pre-existence, tends to reinforce the strong likelihood we found in "Cock-crowing" and "Vanity of Spirit" that Vaughan wrote in that most venerable of Christian traditions positing "a peece of Divinity in us," as Sir Thomas Browne puts it, a "something that was before the Elements, and owes no homage unto the S u n . " 1 0 Divine Seed in "The Sap" "The Sap" (p. 475), too, seems clearly to invoke this tradition. Man's spirit is a celestial blossom that is planted by God in the ground of the heart, and which, if true to its nature, grows upwards towards the Sun of Righteousness. Come sapless Blossom, creep not stil on Earth Forgetting thy first birth; 'Tis not from dust, or if so, why dost thou Thus cal and thirst for dew? It tends not thither, if it doth, why then This growth and stretch for heav'n? But though the soul's birth in the body is a sleep and a forgetting, 11 though the flesh creeps "on Earth," forgetful of its Divine source, nevertheless that "Peece of Divinity," those "traces, and sounds of a strange kind" at the core of the soul, remain inviolable and "sapient of their Origin": Who plac'd thee here, did something then Infuse Which now can tel thee news. Since his fall "in the first mans loyns," however, man has become a "sapless Blossom" unable to grow to heaven unless his Saviour nourish him with the sap of His own blood; the life of the branch

36

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or fruit, man, is the sap of the true Vine. 12 But there is always the hope of a renewed flow from the trunk to the branch because man "contains within himself the seed of his own purification and regeneration," that "sperma of St. John, the seed of God which remains in us," as Thomas Vaughan says; 1 8 or because, in Henry Vaughan's words, There is at all times (though shut up) in you A powerful, rare dew.

When once grief and love have activated this inherent "dew" so that it has purified the contaminated earthly vessel, then will the Life revitalize; Christ will recognize His own and enter the soul. The "Blossom" then will be no longer "sapless"; for as "man in his original was a branch planted in God," so now again, in the words of Thomas Vaughan, there will be "a continual influx from the stock to the scion . . . " 1 4 Regeneration is the effect of God's action upon His own Essence in man. " H e is not unmindful of the kinship and the persistent likeness between Himself and her [the soul], but graciously admits her who resembles Him in nature into the fellowship of the Holy Spirit." 1 5 Parallel Image of Tarnished Gold The meaning of Vaughan's seed imagery may be further clarified by considering briefly a parallel image and its related ideas. "Corruption" (p. 440), focusing on the unregenerate world, emphasizes the tarnishing of the original gold, the clouding of the radiant image. St. Bernard had frequent recourse to this imagery: "Thus the apostle says, 'Their foolish heart was darkened,' or, as the prophet proclaims, 'How is the gold become dim, the finest colour changed!' The gold bewails its tarnished state; but it is still gold. The perfect colour may be changed; but the base on which it is made up remains the same. The soul's essential simplicity is unshaken; but it is hidden out of sight beneath a thick cloak of duplicity—that is to say, of human fraud, hypocrisy and sham." 1 6 37

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Sure, It was so. Man in those early days Was not all stone, and Earth, He shin'd a little, and by those weak Rays Had some glimpse of his birth. He saw Heaven o'r his head, and knew from whence He came (condemned,) hither . . Though Man is no longer seen to shine, the accumulated dross o£ sin and corruption having blanketed the Light within him, yet we know that the Light is not out, that "weake beames" and fires, "like a young East, or Moone-shine night," may still be witnessed in the depths of the soul and may yet shine forth: For the plain teaching of Scripture in regard to the unlikeness to God which has been brought about by sin is not that the original Godlikeness in the soul has been effaced, but that another likeness has been superimposed upon it. The soul has not put off her native form; she has put on a strange form over it. The latter is added and it hides the first; but the first is not lost and cannot be destroyed.17 The Image is there at the center of the soul, but hidden under the corruptions of the flesh; the Spark smolders but cannot burst into flame until the heaps of filth smothering it are raked away; the living Seed of the Spirit lies dormant under the husk of the natural man. The ground, or center, or apex, of the soul is intrinsically and inviolably Divine: it is "gold," however bedimmed its luster. In the symbolism of vegetative growth, the origin, essence, and motive force of spiritual evolution—of the growth of the Lily—is the Divine seed, however wilted the plant may appear. And as God's refining action may restore the gold's original brilliance, so may His gospel word, his "dew," revive the withered plant. The possibility of confusion resides in the circumstance that both the Divine element in the soul and the gospel word were likened to a seed in Christian symbolism and in Vaughan's poetry. Thus in any given passage of Christian literature or of Vaughan's poetry it is not always certain which meaning of "seed" is in38

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tended. But both are of God, signifying His generating or regenerating power. Thus we can understand that the two kinds of seed in Vaughan's work are intimately related. The primal seed of divinity inalienable to man's soul may lie dormant until the grace of the Holy Spirit, pouring down upon him through the agency of the gospel word, the acceptance of, or faith in, the good news of our salvation in Christ, activates its power.18 As the alchemists of his day put it, drawing upon the kindred image of the divine spark, "In the same manner [as a spark is struck from a flint], the heavenly light slumbers in the human soul, and must be struck out by outward contact, namely, by the true faith, through reading and hearing, and through the Holy Spirit whom Christ restored to us . . ." 1 9 Or, more relevantly, in the imagery of the seed: It is a seed that can never die in itself, though it may be as it were dead in man, or unto man, . . . who, having slain that whereby God gives life, is dead in trespasses and in sins, and cannot live any more, till God breathe upon and quicken the seed in him, and him by this seed. 20

John Ellistone, translator of the "Teutonic Theosopher," very clearly sums up the nature of the relationship between the original and the second sowing of the Seed in man; it was ours at creation, but it must be "revived": "And therefore whosoever will be nurtured and trained up by Sophia, and learn to understand and speak the Language of Wisdom, must be born again of and in the Word of Wisdom, Christ Jesus, the Immortal Seed: the Divine Essence which God breathed into his Paradisaical Soul must be revived, and he must become one again with that which he was in God before he was a Creature . . ." 21 Thus the people prayed: Ο Lord Jesu Christ, the light of all them that put their trust in thee, and the only physician of our souls: the light of mind, which thou hadst put into us by creation is dimmed, defaced, and in a manner extinguished, by the fall of our first father Adam . . . Create thou a pure heart in us, and renew a right spirit in us. . . . Repair that heavenly image, which is defaced in us through sin . . 2 2

39

THE

POETRY

Relevance of "Retreat"

OF

HENRY

VAUGHAN

Motif

It is because the primal seed, man's essential life and being, is divine, and hence inviolable, that the seed of the gospel word may effect regeneration: like unto like. W h a t responds to the word of God is the word of God. It is God Himself W h o leads us bac\ to Himself. Hence, Vaughan's "retreat" has nothing to do with a literal nostalgia for boyhood, nor is it comparable to what we mean by psychological regression. It is a withdrawal from the contentious world and its distractions, back along "that ancient track," the narrow way, to that "state!" that spiritual condition, wherein we know ourselves to be the image and likeness of God. It is the sign of our innate capacity to respond to the call of the Word: Follow the Cry no more: there is An ancient way All strewed with flowres, and happiness And fresh as May; There turn, and turn no more . . .

(p. 434)

'Tis not th'applause, and feat Of dust, and clay Leads to that way, But from those follies a resolv'd Retreat.

(p. 463)

Old A d a m sinned and lost the likeness. But those who have gone through the death of the separative, self-willing ego, those whose "old man was crucified with Christ" (Rom. vi.4), are reborn of the Spirit, "out of God," as Estius would put it; "by regeneration and adoption made the son of G o d . . . " 2 3 Childhood, or to use Boehme's term, "Childship," is the image and symbol of the spiritual condition for which we strive, not to which we relapse. '"As Christ hath taught us," Boehme explains, "when he sayth, Unless ye be converted and become as a Child, ye shall not come into the Kingdom

of God. That is, that the Life

turn itself again into God out of whom it proceeded, and forsake 40

THE

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METAPHORS

all its owne Imaging and Lust, and so it cometh to the Divine Vision again . . ." 24 It cometh again: our journey is a return to a place where we had once been. "Thus," as the excellent and knowing Severinus understood, all things long for their first State, And gladly to't return, though late. Nor is there here to any thing A Course allow'd, but in a Ring; Which, where it first began, must end: And to that Point directly tend. (p. 631; Vaughan's trans.) And what impels this retreat and return of the soul is that "spiritual, metaphysical grain" in its depths, that "seed or glance of light, simple and without any mixture, descending from the first Father of Lights." 2 5 This is the Cause why ev'ry living Creature affects an endless being. A grain of this bright love each thing Had giv'n at first by their great King; And still they creep (drawn on by this:) And look back towards their first bliss. For otherwise, it is most sure, Nothing that liveth could endure: Unless it's Love tum'd retrograde Sought that first life, which all things made. (Boethius, in Vaughan's trans., p. 633) It is in this sense that Dionysius called God "a Motive-Power leading all things to Himself." 2 6 "The seed growing secretly" (p. 510) is the Spirit of Christ, that "spiritual, metaphysical grain" in the soul. Its growth depends, however, upon the periodic showers of grace, the "souls bright food," without which life "is loose and spills." Slowly and sadly doth it grow, And soon as left, shrinks back to ill; Ο feed that life, which makes him blow And spred and open to thy will!

41

THE POETRY

OF H E N R Y

VAUGHAN

But the world beckons, the flesh is weak, and relapses are frequent.27 The world Is full of voices; Man is call'd, and hurl'd By each, he answers all, Knows ev'ry note, and call . . .

(p. 413)

The flower shrivels and dies, yet the root, the seed, remains green and secret in the land of the living. Dear, secret Greenness! nurst below Tempests and windes, winter-nights, Vex not, that but one sees thee grow, That One made all these lesser lights.

(p. 511)

"Out of sight is the root," says Augustine: "fruits may be seen, root cannot be seen. Our root is our love, our fruits are our works; it is needful that the works proceed from love, then is thy root in the land of the living." 28 This love is eros, the inborn drive to God; and it is God Who is Love planted in the soul. "It was with me as when a seed is hidden in the earth," Boehme tells us; "it grows up in storm and rough weather, against all reason. In winter time, all is dead, and reason says: 'It is all over with it.' But the precious seed within me sprouted and grew green, oblivious of all storms, and amid disgrace and ridicule it has blossomed forth into a lily." 29 And St. Bernard assures us that "we also, if we are found humble, shall grow as the lily and flower before the Lord to all eternity." 30 Thus Vaughan affirms his faith: Then bless thy secret growth, nor catch At noise, but thrive unseen and dumb; Keep clean, bear fruit, earn life and watch Till the white winged Reapers come!

(p. 511)

Flou/er and Fruit The injunction to bear fruit carries us onwards in our understanding of the maturing life of the branch planted in Christ, and the relevant text is John xv.if: 42

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I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman. Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit. This passage and the garden and vine imagery of the Song of Songs provided the basis for much of the symbolism of flower and fruit in descriptions of the Christian life. St. Bernard tells us that "a wise man regards his life and soul and conscience as a vineyard, and will leave nothing in it uncared for." The wise man who is a living branch in the Lord's garden is a fruitful branch, St. Bernard continues. "And Paul enumerates the fruit they bear as follows: 'The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, forbearance, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faith, moderation, selfcontrol and charity.' These are the things in which our progress consists; those are the fruits which the Bridegroom accepts." 31 One of St. Teresa's favorite images was of the soul as a garden. "The beginner must think of himself as of one setting out to make a garden in which the Lord is to take His delight, yet in soil most unfruitful and full of weeds. His Majesty uproots the weeds and will set good plants in their stead." 3 2 Dante frequently describes the influx of spirit into the soul in terms of the sun's rays infusing warmth and life into a flower, and he speaks of God as the "Eternal Gardener" {Par. xxvi.65). In the sphere of Saturn he sees God the Sun, as Logos, emitting "that warmth which giveth birth to the holy flowers and fruits" ("quel caldo / Che fa nascere i fiori e' frutti santi" Par. xxii.47-48). Such imagery occurs frequently in his poem. Nierembergius is echoing St. John in this stern admonition translated by Vaughan: You expect grapes from your vines, Sc corn from your fields, but no Fruit at all from your selves: Were you made to be good for nothing? for shame be your own dressers, Manure your selves, and prune your vain and noxious affections. Man himself is his own pretious Soile, his own fruitfull field, and thriving Plant: let him that expects fruits from extraneous things, taste first of his own. Good worses are the apples of this Heavenly Plant. (p. 262) 43

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Vaughan's writings are full of the consciousness of the Lord's gracc and of man's miserable ingratitude and failure to return His love, to bear fruit. "O Jesus Christ, the lover and the redeemer of all humble and penitent souls! Thou that feedest among the Lilies untill the day breaks and the shadows flee, what is there in my heart where onely tares and thistles grow, that thou canst feed upon" (p. 161) ? Yet, in His infinite love, when the plant would wither and die in the world's harsh climate, always He sends down His "glance" of grace. But, ah, my God! what fruit hast thou of this? What one poor leaf did ever I yet fall T o wait upon thy wreath? Thus thou all day a thankless weed doest dress, And when th'hast done, a stench, or fog is all The odour I bequeath.

(p. 4 4 1 )

A Parallel Image This last image expresses the same conception as the flower and fruit cluster and is an example of an image which recurs in Vaughan depicting the descent of God's love and the nature of man's returns. The ideal interchange is expressed in these lines: So from Lahai-roi's Well some spicie cloud Woo'd by the Sun swels up to be his shrowd, And from his moist wombe weeps a fragrant showre, Which, scatter'd in a thousand pearls, each flowre And herb partakes, where having stood awhile And something coold the parch'd, and thirstie Isle, The thankful Earth unlocks her self, and blends A thousand odours, which (all mixt,) she sends Up in one cloud, and so returns the skies That dew they lent, a breathing sacrifice. (p. 409)

Bishop Joseph Hall has observed the similar phenomenon of mists arising from the sea and eventually returning to it, and he draws a similar conclusion: "So it either is, or should be, with spiritual gifts. Ο God, thou distillest thy graces upon us, not for 44

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our reservation, but conveyance. . . . Take back, Ο Lord, those few drops, thou hast rained upon my soul; and return them unto that great ocean of the glory of thine own bounty, from whence they had their beginning." 3 3 But most often the ingrate man is lax and half-hearted, as in "The Showre" (p. 412): 'Twas so, I saw thy birth: That drowsie Lake From her faint bosome breath'd thee, the disease Of her sick waters, and Infectious Ease. But, now at Even Too grosse for heaven, Thou fall'st in teares, and weep'st for thy mistake. I.

Ah! it is so with me; oft have I prest Heaven with a lazie breath, but fruitles this Peirc'd not; Love only can with quick accesse Unlock the way, When all else stray The smoke, and Exhalations of the brest. The Biblical command to love and seek God with a whole heart is clear, fundamental, and pervasive. "And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment" (Mark xii.30). "And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart" (Jer. xxix.13). If God is withdrawn from us, it is the fault, as Augustine knew, of our divided will. " I had only to will to go—but to will powerfully and wholly, not to turn and twist a will half-wounded this way and that, with the part that would rise struggling against the part that would keep to the earth." 3 4 All creation is singularly intent on heaven, but giddy man is loose and aims at all things else. I would I were a stone, or tree, Or flowre by pedigree, Or some poor high-way herb, or Spring To flow, or bird to sing! 45

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Then should I (tyed to one sure state,) All day expect my date; But I am sadly loose, and stray A giddy blast each way; Ο let me not thus range I Thou canst not change.

(p. 432)

T h e Sun of Righteousness would draw man to H i m , but the creature is lazy; his ardor is weak, and the secular night most easily snufis it out, despite his brave assertions. I threaten heaven, and from my Cell Of Clay, and frailty break, and bud Touch'd by thy fire, and breath; Thy bloud Too, is my Dew, and springing wel. But while I grow And stretch to thee, ayming at all Thy stars, and spangled hall, Each fly doth tast, Poyson, and blast My yielding leaves; and sometimes a showr Beats them quite off, and in an hour Not one poor shoot But the bare root Hid under ground survives the fall. Alas, frail weed! Thus like some sleeping Exhalation (Which wak'd by heat, and beams, makes up Unto that Comforter, the Sun, And soars, and shines; But e'r we sup And walk two steps Cool'd by the damps of night, descends, And, whence it sprung, there ends,) Doth my weak fire Pine, and retire, And (after all my hight of flames,) In sickly Expirations tames Leaving me dead On my first bed 46

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Untill thy Sun again ascends. Poor, falling Starl

(p. 445)

Pruning Vaughan's liability to distraction, his weak inconstancy and lukewarm love, even after he has awakened to the Light, are the chief sources of his self-contempt and the reason he welcomes the strict pruning of his Gardener's hand. For he would have assented to Joseph Hall's hard judgment that "a barren soul is both miserable and deadly. God says of it, as the Lord of the Soil said of the fruitless fig tree, Exscindatur; Cut it up, why \eepeth it the ground barren?" In the advice the bishop offers such a soul we hear one of Vaughan's dominant notes. "If then we find ourselves in this condition," Hall counsels, "let us do, as Solomon says the fashion of the barren womb, cry Give, Give; and never leave importunate cravings, till we find the twins of grace striving in the womb of our souls." 3 5 Though the Silurist alludes to another Biblical passage, this was one of his own "Rules and Lessons": let him not go Until thou hast a blessing, then resigne The whole unto him; and remember who Prevail'd by wrestling ere the Sun did shine.

(p. 436)

How many times we hear his prayers and pleadings, his repentant groans, and, as he called it, his "begging." Ο what am I, that I should breed Figs on a thorne, flowers on a weed! I am the gourd of sin, and sorrow Growing o'r night, and gone to morrow . . .

(p. 449)

His sense of his own unworthiness fills him with the courage of despair, and, like Jacob, he will not let Him go: Ο let my Crie come to thy throne! My crie not pour'd with tears alone, . . . 47

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But with the bloud of all my soul, With spirit-sighs, and earnest grones, Faithful and most repenting mones, With these I crie, and crying pine Till thou both mend and make me thine.

(p. 474)

God's way of mending is hard; for fruitfulness is the result of pruning. " I speak of pruning," says St. Teresa, "for there come times when the soul feels like anything but a garden: everything seems dry to it and no water comes to refresh it, and one would think that there had never been any kind of virtue in it at all. . . . Then is the proper time for weeding and rooting out the smaller plants, and this must be done, however small they may be, if they are useless; for we know that no efforts of ours are availing if God withholds from us the water of grace, and we must despise ourselves as nothing and as less than nothing. By doing this we gain great humility and then the flowers will begin to grow afresh." 3 6 Affliction is as necessary to man's spiritual flourishing as grace. " O come, and welcom!" Vaughan cries. "Come, refine . . ." Man blossoms at thy touch; and he When thou draw'st blood, is thy Rose-tree.37

(p. 642)

Thus, not dew alone is healthful for this plant, but "a fruitfull Change of frosts, and showres": Blest be thy Dew, and blest thy frost, And happy I to be so crost, And cur'd by Crosses at thy cost. The Dew doth Cheer what is distrest, The frosts ill weeds nip, and molest, In both thou work'st unto the best. Dew and

(p. 464)

Shower

Dew is always beneficent in Vaughan, and so, usually, is its correlative, shower; both denote the influx of the Holy Spirit into the heart, rendering the dry land fruitful. 48

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Waters above! eternal Springs! The dew, that silvers the Doves wings! Ο Welcom, welcom to the sad: Give dry dust drink; drink that makes glad!

(p. 641)

This was the "Prayer for mental illumination" of Thomas ä Kempis: "Pour forth thy grace from above, imbue my heart with heavenly dew, supply fresh streams of devotion, to water the face of the earth, that it may bring forth fruit good and excellent." 38 Frequently the life-giving dew is linked with Christ's blood, as implicitly in "The Morning-watch" (p. 424): Ο Joyes! Infinite sweetnes! with what flowres, And shoots of glory, my soul breakes, and buds! All the long houres Of night, and Rest Through the still shrouds Of sleep, and Clouds, This Dew fell on my Breast; Ο how it Blouds, And Spirits all my Earth! . . . The somewhat odd use of "blouds" in this passage reflects the close association in Vaughan's mind between dew as the symbol of God's sanctifying grace and blood as symbolic of His highest gift and ultimate grace in the incarnation and sacrifice of His Son. 39 As the dew to the flower, so H e came to man. But there is also the association between His blood nourishing us as members of His Body and the sap that sustains us as branches of the true Vine. What perhaps makes for a difficulty, however—such as we encountered in discussing "The Sap"—is Vaughan's way of using dew, which properly "descends" from without, and sap, which wells up from within, as interchangeable terms, and then, moreover, allowing blood to stand for either. But, unless we require a kind of syllogistic precision of correspondence, the confusion must be no more than momentary; for if, through repeated readings of Vaughan's whole work and that of his spiritual brethren, we understand the basic pattern of his thought and the essential 49

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meaning of his symbols, we will have little difficulty in following the fusions of his imagery. Nor—if we will but lend ourselves to such fusions—is their effect merely confusing or obscure. The interpenetration of dew, sap, and blood functions to create an image having dimensions, as it were, a depth and breadth not characteristic of more "consistent" tropes. There is the image of man as a plant drooping for want of water, and hence sapless and dry; but behind this there are the suggestions of the Vine sending its sap pulsing through its branches, some being bent or broken and withering, and again there is the image of the mystical body of Christ, whose members have their life from the coursing of His blood; and in the idea of tasting and drinking the "balm" there is the further suggestion of the Eucharist. All these connotations combine and fuse into the final "image" of "The Sap" which, as we have seen, derives its ideational force and integrity from Vaughan's assumptions concerning the soul's origin and essential nature. The earthly plant has always contained the heavenly Dew, or Sap, but needed the Dew of His grace, the blood of His sacrifice, to make it rise and "stretch for heav'n." The growth of the lily is of, by, and into the Lord, as Hilton knew: "For He creates this desire in you, and it is He who desires in you, and who is also the object of your desire. He is everything and He does everything, if you could but realize." 40 This was, I believe, the ultimate profundity of George Herbert's faith: We say amisse, This or that is: Thy word is all, if we could spell.

("The Flower")

The sap stretches the plant up towards the Sun when the Sun and the Dew of Heaven activate its force. Even the wranglings and abuse of the devil's disciples serve this end, Boehme assures us, "for by their plaguing and persecuting, they press out the Sap through the Essence of the Children of God, so that they move and stir themselves in the Spirit of God, with praying and 5°

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continual sighing, in which Exercise of their Powers the Spirit of God moveth himself in them." 4 1 "What, therefore, thou claimest for thyself," St. Ambrose admonishes, "thou takest from the Son of God, seeing, indeed, that thou canst not be in the image of God, save by help of the image of God." 42 Tears Tears may also be called dew and are related to grace, since they denote the Lord's compassion or man's repentance. In "Jesus weeping" (p. 502) Vaughan fears that this "soul-quickning rain, this living water" is poured to no avail upon the "dead hearts" of the "stiff-necked Jews"; and he pleads that instead his Lord turn to those, among whom the poet himself stands, whose joy and very life depend upon His grace: My dear, bright Lord! my Morning-star! Shed this live-dew on fields which far From hence long for it! shed it there, Where the starv'd earth groans for one tear! Man may take his example in this as in all else from his Saviour and, forsaking pleasures, learn to grieve and weep: A grief, whose silent dew shall breed Lilies and Myrrhe . . .

(p. 505)

It was one of Vaughan's principal "admonitions" that "when all the world is asleep, thou shouldst watch, weep and pray and propose unto thy self that Practise of the Psalmist, / am weary of my groaning, every night wash I my bed, and water my Couch with my tears; for as the Dew which falls by night is most fructifying, and tempers the heat of the Sun; so the tears we shed in the night, make the soul fruitful, quench all Concupiscence, and supple the hardnesse we got in the day" (p. 143). Frost In the imagery of plants and weather, frosts sometimes serve a useful purpose when they are identified by the poet with the need

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for affliction and purgation; but they are more often associated with sinfulness and the hard, frozen heart of the unrepentant. The ward of the first stanza of "Regeneration," when subject to the sensuous life, thought all the world was vernal and primrosed, but at his awakening he came to see that in truth the world— the world of his soul and its inner weather—was wintry and barren. Frost and surly winds had blasted the infant buds of the divine life in him. Man in his corruption "sits down, and freezeth on" (p. 440), nor are half-hearted penitents in any different case, since "loose, parcell'd hearts wil freeze" (p. 434). The fault is man's, for God's love is constant: And nothing doth thy love allay But our hearts dead and sinful cold.

(p. 486)

Yet in His boundless charity He is ready to kindle man's "cold love" (p. 484) 43 if the sinner will but open to Him in humility. Thus Vaughan prays, Ο come and rend, Or bow the heavens I Lord bow them and descend, And at thy presence make these mountains flow, These mountains of cold Ice in me!

(p. 493)

Sir Thomas Browne describes the action upon the heart by "the Spirit of God, and scintillation of that noble and mighty Essence" in similar images: when thy absent beames begin t'impart Againe a Solstice on my frozen heart, My winter's ov'r, my drooping spirits sing, And every part revives into a Spring.44 And at such times our poet would concur with Augustine when the saint acknowledges the true source of spiritual revival: "I know that it is only by Thy grace and mercy that Thou hast melted away the ice of my sins." 45 As Thomas ä Kempis says, "truly we are inconstant, but through thee we are confirmed: we wax cold, but by Thee we are inflamed." 46 This imagery is nat52

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ural and inevitable. In the winter, in the days of frost and ice, the sun is pale and distant, and everything is as though dead; but with the sun's return in the spring the earth thaws and blossoms and eventually gives forth fruit—"the Land of the Living . . . buds and sprouts, hath her fiery spiritual flowers, which we call souls . . ." 47

Fire Fire, like the sun, is a source of light and heat; and, as Joseph Hall observes, "fire and light have so near affinity, that they are scarce ever separated." 48 In Christianity, as in most of the religions of the world, fire is closely associated with divinity.49 The Old Testament God of Justice "is a consuming fire" (Deut. iv.24), and H e shows Himself in a burning bush (Exod. iii.2) or enveloped in flames (Isa. vi.4; Ezek. 1 4 ) . When He descends on Sinai it is in the midst of flames, lightning, and thunder (Exod. xix.18); fire issues from His mouth (Ps. xviii.8), a fiery stream goes out before H i m (Dan. vii.io), and in guiding the Israelites through the wilderness He appeared in a pillar of fire (Exod. xiii.21). His word is compared to fire (Jer. xxiii.29), and even His ministers, the angels, are likened to a burning fire (Ps. civ.4). The Lord appeared to St. John with eyes of fire (Rev. i.14) and is to appear in the midst of flames at His second coming (2 Thess. i.8). Christ is "like a refiner's fire" (Mai. iii.2); and "he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire" (Matt, iii.12); "and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is" (1 Cor. iii.13). The Holy Spirit also, in its work of purifying and enlightening the soul and igniting therein the love of God, is associated with fire. " I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance," John the Baptist told the people, "but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire" (Matt, iii.n). When the Holy Ghost descended upon Christ's disciples H e came like tongues of flame or sparks of fire (Acts ii.3). 53

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Vaughan's mind was deeply imbued with this symbolism. He considers heaven a "firie-liquid light" (p. 421), or calls fire "the Suburb of Heaven" (p. 266), and wishes Adam had "liv'd still in league" with its "chaste fire" (p. 513). An angel is God's "minister in fire" (p. 494), and when man is graced he is "touch'd" by the fire and breath of God (p. 445).150 Moreover, there is always in the depths of the soul, though covered over and all but smothered, a spark of the first Fire whose weak light might flash to the sight of the introspected conscience (p. 418). Those souls, finally, that have reached their Maker's throne "there shine, and burn" (p.426). But Vaughan's most powerful use of the imagery of fire is related to the refining and thawing of the foul and frozen heart and to the consequent ignition of the living flame of love, an imagery obviously related to that of the spring thaw. Until "the Refiners fire breaks forth" man is too gross and soiled for heaven (p. 483), and so Vaughan pleads, "O then refine my heart, / My foul, foul heart!" (p. 493): touch with one Coal My frozen heart; and with thy secret key Open my desolate rooms; my gloomie Brest With thy cleer fire refine, burning to dust These dark Confusions, that within me nest, And soyl thy Temple with a sinful rust.

(p. 455)

This is the purgatorial fire which St. Catherine of Genoa felt in her soul "cleansing whatever in her needed cleansing, to the end that when she passed from this life she might be presented to the sight of God, her dear Love. By means of this loving fire, she understood in her soul the state of the souls of the faithful who are placed in Purgatory to purge them of all the rust and stains of sin of which they have not rid themselves in this life." 6 1 Such a fire is not wrathful but is the flame of the love of God; it consumes only the dross in order that the gold might shine in its 54

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true purity. "For as material fire burns and destroys all material things with which it comes into contact, so spiritual fire, which is the love of God, burns and destroys all carnal love and pleasure in the soul . . ." 62 This is the fire of love which "tames" the "fierce, wild blood" (p. 434), the Dove brooding over the quieted waters; it both makes possible and is the presence of Divinity. "This flame of love is . . . the Holy Spirit. A n d this flame the soul feels within it, not only as a fire that has consumed and transformed it in sweet love, but also as a fire which burns within it and sends out flame, as I have said, and that flame bathes the soul in glory and refreshes it with the temper of Divine life." 53 More precisely, in the language of St. Bernard, "you may know that H e is present with you . . . if you find yourself glowing with love for Him. For Scripture says, not only that a fire goes before Him, but that H e is a fire . . . Recognize, then, in the power that changes your heart and the love that inflames you the Presence of the Lord."

54

Thus, in "White Sunday" (p. 485), Vaughan celebrates the original infusion of the "Prophetic fire" of grace into the apostles; and his spirit yearned continually to return "back to the burning fountain whence it came, / A portion of the Eternal . . ." And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.65 Storms Storms function in much the same way as frosts and the purgative fire. T h e sudden storm in "Regeneration" is fierce, for the complacent soul needed a sharp blow to awaken it to the actuality of its own wretchedness and so set it on its way. Storm'd thus; I straight perceiv'd my spring Meere stage, and show, 55

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My walkc a monstrous, mountain'd thing Rough-cast with Rocks, and snow . . .

(p. 397)

This is the "use" Vaughan recognizes in " T h e Storm" (p. 423) and, as we have seen, in all affliction; it thrashes foul and stagnant water into wholesome activity. 66 Lord, then round me with weeping Clouds, And let my mind In quick blasts sigh beneath these shrouds A spirit wind, So shall that storme purge this Recluse Which sinfull ease made foul, And wind, and water to thy use Both wash, and wing my soul. In other places, however, storm and tempest signify the noisy bustlings of the world, of that "false life" which is "a dark contest of waves and winde; / A meer tempestuous debate" (p. 538). "So Close / A n d knit me to thee," he prays the Lord, . . . so shew me home That all this fome And frothie noise which up and down doth flic May find no lodging in mine Eie, or Eare, Ο seal them up! that these may flie Like other tempests by.

(p. 468)

This is the motif—seen so often among the emblemists—of the world as a stormy sea on which our bark is tossed, a dark and stormy wood in which w e wander. A n d Vaughan's prayer is to that Man who, in Isaiah's prophecy, "shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest" (xxxii.2). For the flower of divine life can find little sustenance in this bleak and alien land. Farewell you Everlasting hills! I'm Cast Here under Clouds, where stormes, and tempests blast This sully'd flowre Rob'd of your Calme, nor can I ever make

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Transplanted thus, one leafe of his t'awake, But ev'ry houre He sleepes, and droops, and in this drowsie state Leaves me a slave to passions, and my fate . . .

(p. 4 1 1 )

On the Everlasting Hills the flower blooms unmolested in the constant warmth of the Sun, but in the post-lapsarian land of darkness it is subject to the elemental passions and can only wait and watch for the returns of His quickening ray. How rich, Ο Lord! how fresh thy visits are! 'Twas but Just now my bleak leaves hopeles hung Sullyed with dust and mud; Each snarling blast shot through me, and did share Their Youth, and beauty, Cold showres nipt, and wrung Their spiciness, and bloud; But since thou didst in one sweet glance survey Their sad decays, I flourish, and once more Breath all perfumes, and spice; I smell a dew like Myrrh, and all the day Wear in my bosome a full Sun; such store Hath one beame from thy Eys. (p. 441) Before his awakening and conversion, he now knows, he had "wander'd under tempests all the year, / Went bleak and bare in body as in mind"; but since once having known His love, though storms recur, that knowledge sustains him. I am so warm'd now by this glance on me, That, midst all storms I feel a Ray of Thee. The

(p. 476)

Heliotrope

As its life derives from the sun, so does the flower, the heliotrope,57 look always toward its warmth and radiance, and turn with it in its courses. Souls dedicate to God are like those knowing fiow'res, Which in commerce with light, spend all their hours: Which shut to Clouds, and shadows nicely shun; But with glad hasts unveil to ^iss the Sun. (p. 640) 57

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"These flowers are true clients of the sun," Bishop Hall exclaims: "how observant they are of his motions and influence! At even, they shut up; as mourning for his departure, without whom they neither can nor would flourish; in the morning, they welcome his rising, with a cheerful openness; and at noon, are fully displayed, in a free acknowledgment of his bounty. Thus doth the good heart unto God . . ." 58 Those flowers in "Regeneration" who are "broad-eyed / And taking in the R a y " at high noon are the souls of those who have awakened to the Source of their life and, like herbs that even in the night time sleep "unto the East," or like "some fowles" that are early up and watching for "the Returns of light" (p. 429), "are fully displayed" to His love. True hearts spread, and heave Unto their God, as flow'rs do to the Sun.

(p. 436)

And at· His withdrawals, Arwaker knew, they wilt: For Thee I pine, for Thee I am undone, As drooping Flow'rs that want their Parent Sun?9 When the dark comes on, Vaughan counsels, Then from the Damps, and A\e Of night shut up thy leaves, be Chast; God prys Through thickest nights; Though then the Sun be far Do thou the works of Day, and rise a Star . . . (p. 439) Stars and

Star-Flowers

T o "rise a star" is to become one of the Lord's righteous, who in the dark night of this world may point the way to wandering souls who seek Him. Constant hearts, star-flowers (p. 640), are in contact even in the dark night of this world with "the Emanations of the Deitie" (p. 616), the stars. ("For from the Heaven the Stars have their first Kindling, and are . . . as an Instrument, which God useth to the Birth or Geniture [the spiritual birth in Christ].") 60 The "resdess, pure desire" of the star-flower is the magnet which works upon these powers and draws them down:

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For where desire, celestiall, pure desire Hath taken root, and grows, and doth not tire, There God a Commerce states, and sheds His Secret on their heads. This is the Heart he craves; and who so will But give it him, and grudge not; he shall feel That God is true, as herbs unseen Put on their youth and green.

(p. 490)

Most souls, however, are like the flowers in "Regeneration" who sleep in the face of the Sun's full revelation, "who blindly run / After false-fires, and leave the Sun" (p. 653). These, without knowing it, live in the shadow of death, for to sleep without Him is to die, "Yea, 'tis a death partakes of hell" (p. 488). Vaughan, having been awakened to the Light of Truth, is horrified to witness the hordes of those still blind and groping for the wall; to these he cries, "Awake, awake," And with his healing bloud anoint thine Eys, Thy inward Eys . . .

(p. 456)

Then comes the light! And those who open to and grow in the rays that reach them here, shall one day "rove in that mighty, and eternal light / Where no rude shade, or night / Shall dare approach . . ."; and they shall there no more Watch stars, or pore Through melancholly clouds, and say Would it were Day! One everlasting Saboth there shall runne Without Succession, and without a Sunne.

(p. 402)

Here in this world, however, no full nor constant intimacy with Light is possible to the flower; the "melancholly clouds" of mortality obscure the Sun's rays, and the secular night regularly intervenes. Even the soul that has blossomed into the lily cannot enjoy the absolute nature of that Power which feeds its growth; 59

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yet it has known that measure of enlightenment possible to its mortality and has had a foretaste of beatitude. It can watch and wait now quietly and in deep joy until in the fullness of time the L o r d shall come into His garden and gather the lilies. T h e imagery of the growth of the lily from seed to flower, of the branch planted in God bearing the fruit of H i s own table, forms Vaughan's central symbol of the deep religious life he lived. It is a fully formed symbol; we have been able here to realize only certain of its nuances of meaning. Growing and twining as it does vitally and naturally throughout the work, engaging elements of other image clusters, and finally involving a total landscape of the soul, it marks the real profundity of its experiential source and witnesses to the unselfconscious mastery of the poet. If our own time has placed a value upon the organic in art, then surely the major poetry of Henry Vaughan on this count alone deserves a higher place than it is generally accorded.

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T h e pattern of spiritual regeneration in Christ, of dying to one's ego (the old m a n ) , and being reborn one's true Self, or Christ (the new m a n ) , lends itself to many symbolic transformations; in Vaughan, the imagery of the night journey, of the pilgrimage home to the house of light, 6 1 follows in emphasis that of seed and plant in the individuation of the archetype. Languor

Animi

" W h a t maketh the heart of a Christian heavy?" St. Augustine asks. "Because he is a pilgrim, and longeth for his country. If thy heart be heavy on this score, although thou hast been prosperous in the world, still thou dost groan . . . because thou seest that thou art set in a pilgrimage . . ." 8 2 In a simile of Vaughan's: As Birds rob'd of their native wood, Although their Diet may be fine, 60

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Yet neither sing, nor like their food, But with the thought of home do pine; So do I mourn, and hang my head . . .

(p. 464)

For there can be no rest, no final peace and joy here, for that soul that has seen even the borders of light of his native country and knows then that he is an alien, a wayfarer, and a stranger, until he reaches that land beyond the stars. M y Soul, there is a Countrie Far beyond the stars, Where stands a winged Centrie All skilfull in the wars, There above noise, and danger Sweet peace sits crown'd with smiles, A n d one born in a Manger Commands the Beauteous files, H e is thy gracious friend, A n d ( O my Soul awake!) Did in pure love descend T o die here for thy sake, If thou canst get but thither, There growes the flowre of peace, T h e Rose that cannot wither, T h y fortresse, and thy ease; Leave then thy foolish ranges; For none can thee secure, But one, who never changes, T h y God, thy life, thy Cure.

(p. 4 3 0 )

"Man was a citizen of Jerusalem," is the Christian teaching, "but sold under sin he became a pilgrim." 63 When once he learns this truth, his whole endeavor must be to return to that heavenly city. For, as Thomas ä Kempis tells us, "thou hast not here an abiding city; and wheresoever thou be, thou art a stranger and pilgrim: neither shalt thou ever have rest, unless thou be most inwardly united unto Christ." 64 Therefore, writes William Cowper, the traveller prays continually for a sustaining "glance" of the king61

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(lom toward which he travails, for a renewal of the initial act of grace: "Though the time be not yet come wherein I shal appeare in thy presence and see thee; yet Lord, let me haue in this land of my Pilgrimage those glances of thy sweet and louing countenance that may sustaine me." 65 In his passage to heaven, says Joseph Hall, man's "weak nature is ready to faint, under the very conceit of the length and difficulty of this journey"; 66 and this would be so even without the many trials and dangers that beset the way, "for so much doth he love his supernal country," declares Augustine, "that the earthly pilgrimage is of itself the greatest tribulation." 67 Hardest of all for Vaughan was his conviction, during periods of relapse or spiritual dryness, when he could see nothing but darkness without and emptiness within, that he had no right to beg for illumination and guidance, that he had already too much abused God's mercies and squandered His gifts. I have deserv'd a thick, Egyptian damp, Dark as my deeds, Should mist within me, and put out that lamp Thy spirit feeds . . .

(p. 433)

Yet he knows that God's charity is boundless and, since he cannot otherwise endure the journey, he pleads that the clouds and mists of his unknowing may be banished or that he may be brought the short way straight into the land of light itself: Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill My perspective (still) as they pass, Or else remove me hence unto that hill Where I shall need no glass.

(p. 484)

Thomas ä Kempis knew the same desperate longing and found like symbols to express it. "O that that day might once appear, and that all these temporal things were at an end! To the Saints it shineth glowing with everlasting brightness, but to those who are pilgrims on the earth it appeareth only afar off, and as it were through a glass." 68 Vaughan's is that true languor animi of 62

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the mystic, that overwhelming need either to feel His presence here or be with Him there where He is All in All. "O when will that blessed and desired hour come, that Thou mayest satisfy me with Thy presence, and Thou mayest be unto me all in all. As long as this is not granted me, I shall not have full joy." 69 "Hide not Thy face from me," Augustine exclaimed. "Let me see Thy face even if I die, lest I die with longing to see it." 70 Perhaps Vaughan's most powerful utterance of this longing, which is a keynote in his total harmony, is to be found in the last two stanzas of "Cock-crowing" (p. 489). Only the fleshly veil, his mortality, stands between him and his Lord, and he cries out: Ο take it off! make no delay, But brush me with thy light, that I May shine unto a perfect day, And warme me at thy glorious Eye! Ο take it off! or till it flee, Though with no Lilie, stay with me! Regio Dissimilitudinis But in the land of darkness out of which Vaughan wrote, "that unfortunate region, where the Inhabitants sit in the shadow of death: where destruction passeth for propagation, and a thick black night for the glorious dayspring" (p. 217); "mad man" has lost all contact with the Sun and, caring not, "sits down, and freezeth on" (p. 440). Yet in "those early days" he had felt the pull and drawing home and known himself an exile. And, as first Love draws strongest, so from hence His mind sure progress'd thither.

(p. 440)

For "things here were strange unto him"; "they seem'd to quarrel with him," and "this made him long for home." It is just so with the enlightened soul even in the days of darkness. Whatever had delighted in his former sleep of ignorance he now finds empty and foolish; he understands that in the pursuit of material pleasures there can be no rest. "Theirs is an endless road, a hopeless maze,

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who seek for goods before they seek for God." 7 1 Man in his insanity has mistaken the object of his quest and is trapped in the "circuit of the impious." The divine life of the soul, "being descended from the house of light" (p. 169), longs only to return there, but the old man is led astray by every wandering lust. Nevertheless, when all the fruits of the world have turned to dust and ashes in his mouth, he will be driven, exhausted, unto the bosom of Abraham. Hadst thou given to this active dust A state untir'd, The lost Sonne had not left the huske Nor home desir'd; That was thy secret, and it is Thy mercy too, For when all failes to bring to blisse, Then, this must doe.

(p. 414)

This was the teaching of St. Bernard. "It is our nature's law," he writes, "that makes a man set a higher value on the things he has not got than upon those he has, so that he loathes his actual possessions for longing for the things that are not his. And this same law, when all things else in earth and heaven have failed, drives him at last to God, the Lord of all, Whom hitherto alone he has not had. Once God is found the soul has rest. . . ." 7 2 "Why dost thou here gaze about, since this is not the place of thy rest?" asks Thomas ä Kempis of the Christian pilgrim. "In Heaven ought to be thy home, and all earthly things are to be looked upon as it were by the way." 7 3 "Use the world: let not the world hold thee captive," the Bishop of Hippo cautions. "Thou art passing on thy journey thou hast begun; thou hast come, again to depart, not to abide. Thou art passing on thy journey, and this life is but a wayside inn." 74 The Narrow Way The call the pilgrim has responded to is clear. "Thus saith the Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths,

LORD,

64

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where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls" (Jer. vi.16). "Enter ye in at the straight gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because straight is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it" (Matt, vii.13-14). Vaughan saw with clear eyes what is the difference between these roads: Ο supreme Bliss! The Circle, Center and Abyss Of blessings, never let me miss Nor leave that Path, which leads to thee: Who art alone all things to me! I hear, I see all the long day The noise and pomp of the broad way; I note their Course and proud approaches: Their silks, perfumes and glittering Coaches. But in the narrow way to thee I observe only poverty, And despis'd things: and all along The ragged, mean and humble throng Are still on foot, and as they go, They sigh and say; Their Lord went sol

(p. 65ΐ) 7δ

The call is clear, but the way is hard. It is an imitatio Cristi. The response to the call, the turning, simply sets one in the right direction; the journey, or as Boehme would say, the "process," lies all before him. And part of that process is the mortification of the old man; it is purgation and suffering. "Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it" (Matt, xvi.24-25). On the necessity of this dying to the self and "the world"—to the ego's avaricious, proud, and fearful response to experience—the mystics are unanimous. John Tauler, for example, explains the Way of the Cross by means of an internal dialogue. "A man once thought that God drew some men even by pleasant paths, while others were drawn by the path of

65

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pain. Our Lord answered him thus, 'What think ye can be pleasanter or nobler than to be made most like unto Me? that is by suffering. Mark, to whom was ever offered such a troubled life as to Me? And in whom can I better work in accordance with My true nobility than in those who are most like Me? They are the men who suffer." 76 Road of Trials The spiritual re-enactment of the life of Christ is the Way, "the way which from this dead and dark abode / Leads up to God" (p. 467). Vaughan knows very well that the path through the vale of sin and death is a road of trials, that his Guide will lead "through a wildernes, / A Sea, or Sands and Serpents" (p. 468), but it is as nothing to him, for his only care is to attain Jerusalem. When the pilgrim in Walter Hilton's allegory asked which was the right road, his mysterious director told him that there was "one road by which he would guarantee that a man should reach the city, Jerusalem, and never lose his life on the way. He would be robbed and beaten and suffer great distress, but his life would be saved." And the pilgrim replied, "As long as my life is spared and I come to the place I desire, I do not mind how much I have to suffer on the way." 77 It is, in fact, all to the good that the road be long and dangerous, for the primrose path conducts only to the everlasting bonfire: had our Pilgrimage bin free, And smooth without a thorne, Pleasures had foil'd Eternitie, And tares had choakt the Come.

(p. 417)

In Noctem Corporis "Though then we travel Westward, though we embrace thornes and swet for thistles, yet the business of a Pilgrim is to see\ his Countrey. But the land of dar\nesse lies in our way" (p. 169) . . . A land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness. (Job x.22) 66

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And what is this darkness, this night, that lies in the way? It is not death as the world understands that word, for to the Christian pilgrim death marks an end to the journey and is a short-cut to the gate of true life. This night is the night of our ignorance and sin, of our fallen mortality in noctem corporis, as Pico di Mirandola says.78 "Night," writes Augustine, "is that low estate wherein is the trouble of mortality; night is in the proud who deal exceeding wickedly; night is the fear of the ungodly who forsake the law of the Lord; night is, lastly, the house of this pilgrimage until the Lord come and bring to light the hidden things of darkness . . ." 7 9 And in this house, Vaughan writes, the pilgrim rests at best uneasily. So for this night I linger here, And full of tossings too and fro, Expect stil when thou wilt appear That I may get me up, and go.

(p. 464)

Yet the glorious end and final rest for which he yearns and labors is by no means certain of attainment. The journey is more than long and hard; it is dangerous. As the frail flower growing from the immortal seed was often blasted and withered by the world's harsh climate, so is the wayfarer beset by snares and temptations as he wanders in the wilderness of this world. "And what else is the World," asks Vaughan, "but a Wildernesse Ρ A darksome, intricate wood full of Ambushes and dangers; a Forrest where spiritual hunters, principalities and powers spread their nets, and compasse it about" (p. 146) . . .80 At every turn the world, the flesh, and the devil make proffer of their goods, beckoning onto the broad and pleasant-seeming primrose path. Friends and wellwishers, of whom St. Teresa continually warned her disciples, gently chide and scold and sometimes scowl. They "mean well," but they are really kindred to the enemies Walter Hilton described to his pilgrim, who, "threatening and menacing you on the one hand, and flattering you and offering false pleasure on the other," never cease trying "to make you give up your 67

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purpose and turn back." If they see "that you seek only one thing and are deaf to all they have to say, that you keep firmly to your prayers and other spiritual exercises," then "they will be angered and begin to attack you more vigorously. They will rob and beat you and put you to all the shame they can. You will begin to experience this when all your actions, however good they may be, are judged to be bad by other men, and taken amiss." 8 1 These distractors and insidious counselors are the feral birds and feral fires (p. 660) recurrent in Vaughan's verse, the False stars and fire-drakes, the deceits of night Set forth to fool and foil thee . . . , (pp. 519-520) with which we shall have more to do when we come to read "The Proffer." But these "evil spirits that are full of tricks to deceive you" are not the only or the worst danger. As this journey is a spiritual progress, an inner work, so ultimately the traveler has most to fear from himself, from the recalcitrances of the habitual self. "These enemies," says Hilton, "are principally the desires of the flesh and vain fears which arise in your heart because of the corruption of human nature." 82 The external perils of the way, the mystics taught, loom up portentously only because we are ignorant, and hence weak. The tempters, those subtle, poisonous fowls, would beck and call in vain were we not liable to temptation. More dreadful than the night around us are the death and darkness within us, if our eye be not single. "O light of light, the all-seeing light that shineth in darknesse, and the darknesse comprehendeth it not, what will become of me, when I shall appear before thy glorious and searching Eye! What an habitation of darknesse and death wilt thou finde within me" (p. 160) ? This thought of inner defilement bears a terrible significance for these seekers in the days of their pilgrimage as well as at the day of judgment; for, as Vaughan knew, only the pure in heart can hope to see God, here or hereafter. "What communion can there be betwixt light 68

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and darhjiesse, purity and pollution, perfection and deformity" (p. 161) ? Yet in these times of corruption, he felt, sin triumphs, and man is sunk below The Center, and his shrowd; All's in deep sleep, and night . . .

(p. 440)

The Sun shines, Reality is radiant with light; but the old man is a creature of darkness, and he cannot see it. He gropes along crooked paths and stumbles at noon day as in the night. Thus is it for all "who leave the paths of uprightness, to walk in the ways of darkness" (Prov. ii.13) . . . "But the wicked," Vaughan recognized, "neither know, nor understand, they walk in darknesse, and from the inward darknesse of their minds they passe at last into the outward, eternal darknesse" (p. 1 5 1 ) . Ο foolish man! how hast thou lost thy sight? How is it that the Sun to thee alone Is grown thick darkness . . .

(p. 462)

" O most miserable and undone soull to whome thy Sunne is set; that everlasting glorious Sun! which in thy holy Elects never setteth, but is alwaies at the height, full of brightnesse and Consolation. A heavie night sits in the noone-day upon those souls that have forsaken thee" (p. 1 5 1 ) . . . Ο fools (said I,) thus to prefer dark night Before true light, To live in grots, and caves, and hate the day Because it shews the way, The way which from this dead and dark abode Leads up to God . . .

(p. 467)

The Way is Christ; and at His incarnation He mixed an eyesalve for His purblind, fallen creatures, that they might see the Light shining in the darkness and thereby find the way unto the Father. Augustine describes how "by His very nativity H e made an eye-salve to cleanse the eyes of our heart, and to enable us to see His majesty by means of His humility. . . . He healed our 69

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eyes; and what follows: 'And we beheld His glory.' . . . There had dashed into man's eyes, as it were, dust, earth; it had wounded the eye, and it could not see the light: that wounded eye is anointed . . ." 83 Arise, arise, And with his healing bloud anoint thine Eys, Thy inward Eys; his bloud will cure thy mind, Whose spittle only could restore the blind. (p. 456)

The pilgrim is he who, "having the eye-salve of faith," 8 4 is enlightened and thus sets his life's aim to follow the way he has seen, to walk the "path of the Just," which is "as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day of eternity" (p. 150; [Prov. ii.13]). Faith is the "bright, and blest beame" (p. 450) which points the pilgrim's path. But yet how often the traveler falters and relapses, and loses the road—how often may he tell the tale of how Christ one day When I went quite astray Out of meer love By his mild Dove Did shew me home, and put me in the way.

(p. 462)

For despite Love pushing from within and Love drawing from without, still the stubborn ego holds back. That little gate And narrow way, by which to thee The Passage is, He term'd a grate And Entrance to Captivitie; Thy laws but nets, where some small birds (And those but seldome too) were caught, Thy Promises but empty words Which none but Children heard, or taught. This I believed: And though a friend Came oft from far, and whisper'd No; Yet that not sorting to my end I wholy listen'd to my foe.

70

(p. 448)

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The pilgrim would that he were unto his Father as an obedient child who hears and walks only by His word: Ο be pleas'd To fix my steps, and whatsoever path Thy sacred and eternal wil decreed For thy bruis'd reed Ο give it ful obedience, that so seiz'd Of all I have, I may nor move thy wrath Nor grieve thy Dove, but soft and mild Both live and die thy Child.

(pp. 468-469)

He would be a child of God, "for sure that is the narrow way" (p. 521). But because he is weak and foolish he requires constant guidance. Guiding Stars The stars, therefore, are of mighty use to man journeying through the dark night: they are the lesser beacons leading to Jerusalem, the "Pillar-fires" that go before him; for the lives of the saintly, either before or after they take their place in heaven, are sure guides unto Truth: Stars are of mighty use: The night Is dark, and long; The Rode foul, and where one goes right, Six may go wrong. One twinkling ray Shot o'r some cloud, May clear much way And guide a croud. Gods Saints are shining lights: who stays Here long must passe O're dark hills, swift streames, and steep ways As smooth as glasse; But these all night Like Candles, shed Their beams, and light Us into Bed.

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(p· 423)

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In Vaughan, not only the saintly but the soul or spirit of man generally is associated with stars. Each enclosed spirit is a star (p. 497); the pious soul at night is likened to a clouded star, or the soul is a star shining in a tomb (pp. 425, 484; cf. p. 486); the idea of man's fallen nature calls up the image of a fallen star (p. 483); and souls "well drest" shine in the sky like stars (p. 487). This kind of identification, and various theories concerning stellar influence and its function in God's universe, were of course widespread in the Renaissance.85 Valentine Weigel, for example, states simply that "man, as to his body, is composed of the Elements, and as to his soul, of the Stars." 86 Paracelsus believed "it is clear that there is some star in man, in birds, and in all animals," and that "whatever these do, they do by the impulse of the higher influence which is received from the constellation . . ." 87 The hermetic philosophers posited a sidereal spirit in man which acted as a bridge between the soul and the body; and Thomas Vaughan explains that "by means of the Medial Soul, or the ethereal nature, man is made subject to the influence of stars . . ." 8 8 Thus Boehme taught that each creature bears the character, or "hieroglyph," of its star.89 All of these physicomystical theories involving a "commerce" between man and the heavens would have been of interest to Vaughan, for whom the loss of the old intimacy between creature and Creator was a source of continual lamentation and who sought always for "traces" {vestigia) and ladders. Nevertheless the central significance of the star symbol in his poetry seems clearly to derive from a well-known Biblical verse, which was to be absorbed into Christian thinking: "And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever" (Dan. xii.3). St. Ambrose is specific: "Is He not good, Who exalted earth to heaven, so that, just as the bright companies of stars reflect His glory in the sky, as in a glass, so the choirs of apostles, martyrs, and priests, shining like glorious stars, might give light throughout the world." 90 72

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"Gods Saints are shining lights," writes Vaughan, and he appears to have thought of the souls of all the blessed and enlightened spirits, who set the example of the Christian life, as saintly guiding stars; 9 1 they are sparks of the Sun of Righteousness,"2 Who is man's primary Guide and ultimate pattern of perfection. Thus in his joyful vision of his loved-one's place in the after-life, he cries out: Ο bright and happy Kalendar! Where youth shines like a star All pearl'd with tears, and may Teach age, The Holy way . . .

(p. 512)

And he addresses his departed friend as Fair and yong light! my guide to holy Grief and soul-curing melancholy . . .

(p. 513)

The very order and regular obedience of the stellar spheres is for the struggling pilgrim, so apt to be misled by his own fallen, disordered nature, by his own "wandering stars," a sign and an inspiration. He humbly invokes their aid: Thus by our lusts disorder'd into wars Our guides prove wandring stars, Which for these mists, and black days were reserv'd What time we from our first love swerv'd. Yet Ο for his sake who sits now by thee All crown'd with victory, So guide us through the Darknes, that we may Be more and more in love with day . . . 93

Similarly, the pilgrim in the Pia Desideria, night over treacherous ground, cries out:

(p. 470)

traveling on a dark

Oh! who will help a wretch thus gone astray! What friendly Star direct my dubious way? And the voyager in Henry Hawkins' Partheneia Sacra, knowing his sin to be the reason why "the glorious Sunne withdrew his beames of light," turns to the stars: 73

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Starre of the Sea, the Sun hath given thee light; Til he brings day, guide me in sinnes dark night. I seeke, what Sages heertofore have donne, Guided by thee a Starre, to find the Sunne. ("The Starre") This, then, is the nature of Vaughan's dark journey, the pilgrimage from the City of Destruction to the Heavenly Jerusalem, from Egypt to the Promised Land, from the dismal swamp of evil to the sunlit summit of Mount Carmel, from the blind and stormy night of sin westward through the land of darkness to the transcendent light of the East and morning. But it should not be forgotten, despite these symbols of pilgrimage, that the journey is inward, or, rather, that it is no journey at all, but a process, a spiritual transformation occurring in time rather than in space. Nosce

teipsum is the watchword, and the house of light we

journey to, God's house, Bethel, "that dread place, that awful Cell" (p. 527), is the "narrow, homely room" (p. 516) of man's own heart.

THE SPIRITUAL

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A n d it is there, deep in the center of the heart, that the Bridegroom seeks His nuptials with His spouse.94 T h e heart ideally is "man's secret region and his noblest part"; it is "holy ground" (p. 610). " W h a t lowliness, what loftiness," exclaims St. Bernard, "to be at once the tent of Kedar and the shrine of God, an earthly dwelling and a heavenly palace, a clay hut and a royal hall, a mortal body and a temple wherein dwells the Light, scorned by the proud and yet the Bride of Christ. 95 But in actuality sin and corruption have gained entrance, and it has become "an habitation of darknesse and death" (p. 160). T h e Lord stands outside and knocks, but the soul is surfeited and sleepy and "shuts his door, and leaves God out all night" (p. 438). "Many a time hast thou knockt, and I have shut the doors against thee, thou hast often called, and I would not an74

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swer. Sleeping and waking, early and late, day and night have I refused instruction, and would not be healed. And now, Ο my God, after all this rebellion and uncleannesse, wilt thou come and lodge with me" (p. 161) ? Vaughan was certain what must be the only answer to this question. "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me" (Rev. iii.20). The poet's brother cites this passage and reminds his reader that "God is not God afar off but God at hand." 96 "Willingly would I speak My word," a Kempis has Christ avow, "and reveal My secrets unto thee, if thou wouldest diligently observe My coming, and open unto Me the door of thine heart." 97 And Meister Eckhart asserts that "when nature reaches its highest point, God gives grace. When the human spirit is ready, God enters it without hesitation or waiting. It is written in the Revelation that our Lord told the people: Ί stand at the door and knock and wait. If any man let me in, I will sup with him.' You need not look either here or there. He is no farther away than the door of the heart." 98 But to arouse oneself from Acrasia's bower, to free oneself from the siren song of the worldly choir, so as to hear the knock and the call, and then to open the door, now stiff with rust, is not the work of a moment. Donne knew what was involved. "Awa\e thou that sleepest, sayes the Apostle . . . : from the dead, says he, from the practise of dead works; and then Christ shall give thee light; life, and strength to walk in new wayes. It is a long work, and hath many steps."99 For the necessity, Thomas Vaughan warns, is no less than this, that "thou must prepare thyself till thou art conformable to Him Whom thou wouldst entertain, and that in every respect." 100 Christ will come unto thee, and show thee His consolations, if thou prepare for Him a worthy mansion within thee. . . . Ο faithful soul, make ready thy heart for this Bridegroom, that he may vouchsafe to come unto thee, and dwell within thee. For thus saith He, 'If any love 75

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Me, he will keep My words, and We will come unto him, and will make our abode with him' [John xiv.25]. 101 Therefore it was Vaughan's admonition before Holy Communion to "enter into thine owne bosome, examine what thou hast there, and if thou findest any sons of darknesse lurking under those fig-leaves, conceal them not, but turne them out of doors, and wash their Couch with thy teares; have a care that in the Bridegroomes bed, instead of myrrhe and flowers thou strowest not thornes and thistles" (p. 157). For, as St. Bernard says, "Christ Who willed to be conceived and reared at Nazareth [which the saint took to mean 'flower'] delights in flowers; and the celestial Bridegroom, drawn by their sweet breath, gladly and often visits the chamber of the heart that He finds decked with fruits and strewn with flowers."102 Yet, as always, the work of preparation, of cleansing, though it demands of the soul its highest efforts, is not ultimately within its own powers to accomplish. "The house of my soul is too small to receive Thee," St. Augustine laments: "let it be enlarged by Thee. It is all in ruins: do Thou repair it. There are things in it that must offend Thy gaze, I confess and know. But who shall cleanse it? or to what other besides Thee shall I cry out: From my secret sins cleanse me Ο Lord . . . ?" 1 0 3 We must hear and heed the call, but the fire that can purge is of the Refiner only: Ο thou that lovest a pure, and whitened soul! That feedst among the Lillies, 'till the day Break, and the shadows flee; touch with one Coal My frozen heart; and with thy secret key Open my desolate rooms; my gloomie Brest With thy cleer fire refine, burning to dust These dark Confusions, that within me nest, And soyl thy Temple with a sinful rust.

(p. 455)

When the purgation has been completed and the Bridegroom has bestowed His ring and kiss 104 upon the bride, then is the mar76

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riage consummated. Then is "CHRISTS Nativity," for the heart is the Temple, and it is the womb of Christ: I would I had in my best part Fit Roomes for thee! or that my heart Were so clean as Thy manger was! But I am all filth, and obscene, Yet, if thou wilt, thou canst make clean. Sweet Jesu! will then; Let no more This Leper haunt, and soyl thy door, Cure him, Ease him Ο release him! And let once more by mystick birth The Lord of life be borne in Earth.

(p. 442)

This is the fourth, the culminating, grade in Richard of St. Victor's treatise—the birth in the soul that follows betrothal, marriage, and wedlock. 105 Christ is the Bridegroom, and H e is also the Son. As in alchemy, the coniunctio must issue in the birth of the filius, the Stone, Who is Christ. "When the Father begets his Son in me," Eckhart declares, " I am that Son and no other. . . . He who knows the truth knows very well that the word 'Father' implies the immaculate birth and the having of sons. Thus we are all in the Son and are the Son." 1 0 6 "Shortly, then," in the words of Bishop Hall, "if we would be sons and daughters of God . . ." we must see, that we be born again: not of water only; so we are all sacramentally regenerated; but of the Holy Ghost. If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; 2 Cor. v.17. We must not be the men we were. And how shall that be effected? In Christ Jesus I have begotten you, through the Gospel; saith the Apostle, 1 Cor. iv.15. He hath begotten us by the word of truth; James i.18. This word is that immortal seed, whereby we are begotten to God. Let this word, therefore, have its perfect work in us: let it renew us in the inner man; mortifying all our evil and corrupt affections, and raising us up to a new life of grace and obedience.107 77

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This is the lily that grows from the Divine Seed, the fruit of the Tree of Life; and this is the Jerusalem of our pilgrimage, where we are reborn the children of light. Regeneration is the theme and pattern, the center and circumference, of Henry Vaughan's whole work.

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Regeneration A Ward, and still in bonds, one day I stole abroad, It was high-spring, and all the way Primros'd and hung with shade; Yet, was it frost within, And surly winds Blasted my infant buds, and sinne Like Clouds ecdips'd my mind.

Storm'd thus; I straight perceiv'd my spring Meere stage, and show, My walke a monstrous, mountain'd thing Rough-cast with Rocks, and snow; And as a Pilgrims Eye Far from reliefe, Measures the melancholy skye Then drops, and rains for griefe, 3· So sigh'd I upwards still, at last 'Twixt steps, and falls I reach'd the pinacle, where plac'd 79

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I found a paire of scales, I tooke them up and layd In th'one late paines, The other smoake, and pleasures weigh'd But prov'd the heavier graines; 4· With that, some cryed, Away; straight I Obey'd, and led Full East, a faire, fresh field could spy Some call'd it, Jacobs Bed; A Virgin-soile, which no Rude feet ere trod, Where (since he stept there,) only go Prophets, and friends of God. 5· Here, I repos'd; but scarse well set, A grove descryed Of stately height, whose branches met And mixt on every side; I entred, and once in (amaz'd to see't,) Found all was chang'd, and a new spring Did all my senses greet; 6. The unthrift Sunne shot vitall gold A thousand peeces, And heaven its azure did unfold Checqur'd with snowie fleeces, The aire was all in spice And every bush A garland wore; Thus fed my Eyes But all the Eare lay hush. 7· Only a little Fountain lent Some use for Eares, 8o

READINGS And on the dumbe shades language spent T h e Musick of her teares; I drew her neere, and found The Cisterne full Of divers stones, some bright, and round Others ill-shap'd, and dull.

8. The first (pray marke,) as quick as light Danc'd through the floud, But, th'last more heavy then the night Nail'd to the Center stood; I wonder'd much, but tyr'd A t last with thought, My restless Eye that still desir'd As strange an object brought; 9· It was a banke of flowers, where I descried (Though 'twas mid-day,) Some fast asleepe, others broad-eyed A n d taking in the Ray, Here musing long, I heard A rushing wind Which still increas'd, but whence it stirr'd N o where I could not find; 10.

I turn'd me round, and to each shade Dispatch'd an Eye, T o see, if any leafe had made Least motion, or Reply, But while I listning sought My mind to ease By knowing, where 'twas, or where not, It whisper'd; Where I please. Lord, then said I, On me one breath, And let me dye before my death I Cant. Cap. 5. ver. 17. 81

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Arise Ο north, and come thou South-wind, and blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God" (John iii.3). It is the truth of this teaching that informs "Regeneration" 1 and that lies at the heart of Vaughan's whole work, as it lies, in the thought of men like Boehme, at the heart of Christianity.2 "What were the scriptures written for and why did God create the world and the angelic natures?" asks Meister Eckhart. "Simply that God might be born in the soul." 3 Paul's "until Christ be formed in you" (Gal. iv.19) is their text, and it is Vaughan's text. H e strongly desired that the birth might be in this life, and he labored to that end. "Regeneration" depicts, as in a vision, all the stages of his spiritual life; and it ends upon his supplication for the final consummation in the mystic death which is rebirth in God. We begin at the beginning, before the awakening and conversion. A Ward, and still in bonds, one day I stole abroad . . . He is a ward who lives in thralldom to his "body" {psyche), to his egotistical sense of separate existence with all its lusts and anxieties, in ignorance of Christ and the freedom of the spiritual life he may realize through Him. He is a ward, for, under the control of the world, the flesh, and the devil, in the state of unredeemed corruption inevitable to man since the Fall, he has not come into his maturity and inheritance. "For the soul," writes St. John of the Cross, "on account of original sin, is truly as it were a captive in this mortal body, subject to the passions and desires of nature, from bondage and subjection to which it considers its having gone forth without being observed as a 'happy chance' . . . " 4 "I stole abroad . . ." but to what? Being unregenerate, he knows only one direction; he is sleepwalking down the broad way, the seeming-pleasant primrose path: 82

READINGS It was high-spring, and all the way Primros'd, and hung with shade . . .

In truth, however, the spring-time of the carnal state is "meere stage, and show," for as man's real country is of the Spirit in which he walks by faith and not by sight, so is his real concern with inner, not with outer, weather. Those who walk the highways of Old Adam, whatever their perverted, outward-looking eyes report, are traveling the endless circuit of the impious through a wasteland wherein April is the cruelest month. In that dead land, the Seed cannot push through the frozen earth, or, if it does, what infant buds its power may shoot forth are quickly blasted by the frosty winds that blow when sin clouds the Sun of Righteousness: Yet, was it frost within, And surly winds Blasted my infant buds, and sinne Like Clouds, ecclips'd my mind.

"Even as vapours darken the air and allow not the bright sun to shine," explains St. John of the Cross; "or as a mirror that is clouded over cannot receive within itself a clear image . . . ; even so the soul that is clouded by the desires is darkened in the understanding and allows neither the sun of natural reason nor that of the supernatural Wisdom of God to shine upon it and illuminate it clearly." 5 Storm'd thus; I straight perceiv'd my spring Meere stage, and show, My walke a monstrous, mountain'd thing Rough-cast with Rocks, and snow; And as a Pilgrims Eye Far from reliefe, Measures the melancholy skye Then drops, and rains for griefe . . .

As our spirit was at first from the breath, the Spirit, of God, so is the storm that occurs here, initiating the way of the second birth, from Him. For it represents the sharp blows and buffetings sometimes necessary to the spirit's awakening from its egotistical 83

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dream. The soul had stolen abroad and met with the grace of God in the only form effective to this first opening. For though this storm is not equivalent to the "rushing mighty wind" of the Pentecostal descent (Acts, ii.2), since that full and fiery infusion of the Holy Spirit does not come, if it comes at all, until a far higher stage of spiritual awareness, it is like the Pentecostal storm both in the sudden violence and final effect of its coming and in the fact that it constitutes an act of grace. Both symbolize the spirit, the breath of God (ruach, pneuma) that blows out all the false lights of the conceptualizing mind to reveal Reality. The moment of awakening to the fact that "the world did only paint and lie" (p. 476) and the entrance unto the via purgattva are coincidental, for what is revealed in that moment is the deformity, the "monstrousness," of the illusory egotistical mode of being. Though the clouds of ignorance and sin be rent for only an instant, once the shining summit of the Mount is seen, the soul cannot thereafter finally rest, though it may relapse and lose the way, until it reaches there. But, as always, the way is an imitation of Christ and lies through His sufferings. Thus Richard of St. Victor warns the pilgrim: "Whoever you are who would go up into the mountain, follow Christ. The way that leads to the summit . . . is difficult, remote, and unknown to many." 6 The lower reaches of the mountain of self-knowledge are steep but, unlike the former false spring, they are real; and they lead upwards: So sigh'd I upwards still, at last 'Twixt steps, and falls I reach'd the pinacle, where plac'd I found a paire of scales, I tooke them up and layd In th'one late paines, The other smoake, and pleasures weigh'd But prov'd the heavier graines . . . This episode can be understood in either of two ways, though one of them will, I believe, appear the more likely and prove 84

READINGS more consonant with the rest of the poem and with Vaughan's work as a whole. The first possibility is that the vanity 7 and worldly pleasures of his former unconverted life outweigh his recent suffering.8 The second possibility is that, as in the fifth book of The Faerie Queene, multitudes of "wrongs could not a little right downe way" (ii .45-46). Relevant also to this second alternative is the emblem in Quarles wherein all the materials of the world prove lighter than a bubble (Emblems, 1,4). If this reading is accepted, it is immediately clear that the pilgrim has crossed an important threshold in his journey. The syntax of the verses, however, especially the But, tends to support the first alternative, and strongly suggests that what is meant is that his spiritual development is as yet insufficient for him to be taken up into communion with God. As Augustine says, "weight does not necessarily tend towards the lowest place but towards its proper place. Fire tends upwards, stone downwards. . . . Things out of their place are in motion: they come to their place and are at rest. My love is my weight: wherever I go my love is what brings me there." 9 The pilgrim's heart is not "heavy" enough at this time to carry him up to God. Now we also notice that "late paines" implies, besides "recent," tardy—perhaps too late to tip the scale against the long accumulation of vanities and grossness. Harvey's ode, "The Weighing of the Heart," may serve our purpose here. Christ refuses the pilgrim's heart, admonishing: The heart that in my sight As current coin would pass, Must not be the least grain too light, But as at first it stamped was. Weep then thine heart till it be better grown And, when it is full, I'll take it for mine own.10 The pilgrim is not yet to enter the new Jerusalem; union is still a long way ofT. The magnum opus has not even reached the albedo, the silver stage of the moon, which in mysticism is called

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illumination. That the traveler is nevertheless directed to the path that leads toward the East and Victory instead of being turned back by the mysterious voice evoked in line 2 5 1 1 is no real contradiction. A fundamental value of the purgative way is the excruciating realization it fosters that what one has been, the old man, is a tissue of error, and must die wholly before the new man can be born. Were the pilgrim unable to see and despise his old vanities, he could not progress; his humiliation is the condition of his humility. "I am nothing, I have nothing," is the watchword of Hilton's pilgrim. The episode of the scales, revealing as it does the seeker's spiritual emptiness, engenders his humility. Thus, either reading leads "full East" to Jacobs Bed. With that, some cryed, Away;

straight I

Obey'd, and led Full East, a faire, fresh field could spy

Some call'd it, Jacobs

Bed;

A Virgin-soile, which no Rude feet ere trod, Where (since he stept there,) only go Prophets, and friends of God.

This stanza has reference to the scene in Genesis (xxviii), more commonly alluded to as Jacob's Pillow, where the patriarch dreams he sees the angels of God ascending and descending a ladder joining heaven and earth: 1 2 A n d Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not. A n d he was afraid, and said, H o w dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

For Christians, Christ is the gate of heaven, the door and the way; and by His own authority He is the ladder of Jacob's dream: 1 3 Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man. (John 1 . 5 1 )

86

READINGS Since the Saviour is also the Cornerstone, 14 by an easy transition H e is also Jacob's pillow. "Who is the stone placed under Jacob's head, but Christ the head of man?" asks Augustine. "And in its anointing the very name of Christ is expressed, for, as all know, Christ means anointed." 1 5 The voice that cried Away and directed the neophyte to this place has thus guided him to the only possible Way and Gate to heaven. It has told him that his pilgrimage is to, by, and through Christ, that as Jesus is the ladder, ascent is made by Him. "Ecce scalam," says Donne, "Behold the life of a Christian is a Iacobs Ladder . . ." ( L X X X Sermons, 43). But where may we find this Ladder, where does our Lord reside, where is God's house? Augustine knew: " W e ascend Thy ways that be in our heart . . . " l e "Neither shall they say, 'Lo here! or, lo there!' for, behold, the Kingdom of God is within you" (Luke xvii.21). And Vaughan had learned, for when he was getting ready to go journeying "out of Doores" over the earth in search of Christ, he thought he heard a voice that said: Search well another world; who studies this, Travels in Clouds, seeks Manna, where none is.

(p. 407)

Christ's dwelling place was once some "happy, secret fountain,/ Fair shade, or mountain," but now it is only the "narrow, homely room" of man's heart (p. 516). "Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you" (1 Cor. iii.16) ? "The first true worship of the worlds great King," Vaughan tells us in "Jacobs Pillow, and Pillar" (p. 527), "from private and selected hearts did spring." But when He in His great love enlarged His light, men, growing familiar, became contemptuous and set up laws to pull His honor down. Therefore, once again the place to find Him is in "the meek heart": A heart is that dread place, that awful Cell, That secret Ark, where the milde Dove doth dwell . . . Thus is the solemn temple sunk agen

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Into a Pillar, and conceal'd from men. And glory be to his eternal Name! Who is contented, that this holy flame Shall lodge in such a narrow pit, till he With his strong arm turns our captivity. This "faire, fresh field" of man's heart, 17 this Bethel, is A Virgin-soile, which no Rude feet ere trod, Where (since he stept there,) only go Prophets, and friends of God. Vaughan has his eye on a scene, an image, which is far more real to him than any prospect of his Welsh countryside. He sees the spot vividly, but in a light that never was on land or sea. It is sacrosanct, for while the world and its children may trample the outer regions of the heart, its center is accessible to none but the godly. As it is spiritual, it can know only spirits. He calls it "Virgin-soile," and we know that he does not use such a phrase carelessly. How can "the heart" bear connotations of the Blessed Virgin? Because it is the womb wherein the Father eternally begets His Son. Thus Meister Eckhart: I say: had Mary not borne God in ghostly fashion first, he never had been born of her in flesh. The woman said to Christ, 'Blessed is the womb which bare thee.' To which Christ replied, 'Blessed not alone the womb which bare me: blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it.' It is more worth to God his being brought forth ghostly in the individual virgin or good soul than that he was born of Mary bodily.18 W e have to look forward a moment in order to be more precise; for in this virginal territory of the heart Vaughan has situated a sacred grove.19 Here, I repos'd; but scarse well set, A grove descryed Of stately height, whose branches met 88

READINGS And mixt on every side; I entred, and once in (Amaz'd to see't,) Found all was chang'd, and a new spring Did all my senses greet . . . This spot—enclosed, secret, womb-like—is the focal point of the fair fresh field, the very innermost sanctuary of the soul. It is what Augustine calls the apex, and Plotinus the center, or essence; or, in the terms of the Areopagite and of Tauler, the root, abyss, or ground. It is Eckhart's spark, or seed, the tabernacle of the soul, wherein, as he says, "God blooms and thrives in all his Godhood and the spirit in God"; it is here "the Father bears his only Son no less than in himself, for verily he liveth in this power, the spirit with the Father giving birth therein to his very Son, itself this self-same Son . . ." 20 The birth of the Divine Child in the soul of man has often been expressed in terms of Mary's conception and birth. Tauler, for example, devotes his "Sermon xix" to describing how it is that the eternal birth in our souls is the same birth as that which the Virgin knew. For, as Eckhart points out, since "likeness only, is the cause of union . . . man must be maiden, virgin, to receive the virgin Jesus." 2 1 "Regeneration" means "CHRISTS Nativity" (p. 442) in the tabernacle of the soul of man: And let once more by mystick birth The Lord of life be borne in Earth. This is Vaughan's plea, his whole desire. But as we shall sec in this poem—and as we are perhaps forewarned in the outcome of the weighing of the heart—the desire is not realized. In entering the grove he has achieved a rare illumination, but not all the stones in the fountain ascend quick as light, nor are all of the flowers open to the Sun's ray; and the poem ends not in the joy of fulfillment but in supplication for the full mystical death that is the birth of the Child. As Eckhart says, "If thy heart is 89

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heavy, except for sin, thy child is not born. In thine anguish thou art not yet mother: thou art in labour and thine hour is nigh. . . . The birth is not over till thy heart is free from care . . . " 2 2 Within the grove the pilgrim is greeted by a new and eternal spring, for in this numinous place God is perpetually verdant; this is a paradise where winter never comes. "For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone . . ." (Song of Songs, i i . n ) . To the writer of Vaughan's day, "winter" bore a clear significance: "Hymens [sic], afflictus status in hoc mundo; vel, totem [sic] tempus quo sub Satana, morte & peccato eramus, alieni a vocatione, & in peccatis jacentes." 23 The soul's winter death of sin is passed now for the pilgrim. The spring, which is the rebirth of the land and symbolizes Christ's resurrection,24 also denotes the soul's conversion, its spiritual resurrection from the body of its death, 25 as it exclaims with George Fox: "Now was I come up in spirit through the flaming sword into the paradise of God. All things were new, and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter." 2 8 The unthrift Sunne shot vitall gold A thousand peeces, 27 And heaven its azure did unfold Checqur'd with snowie fleeces, The aire was all in spice And every bush A garland wore; Thus fed my Eyes But all the Eare lay hush.

The Sun that shoots vital gold into the grove, now that the clouds of sin have parted, is Christ the Philosopher's Stone tincturing the heart with heavenly wisdom. 28 Here the Divine Spark glances forth, potent to transform the whole, if it be God's will and man's entire wish. The alchemists explain: "From God the Father was born his own Son Jesus Christ, who is God and man, and is without sin, and who also had no need to die. But he died 90

READINGS of his own free will, and rose again for the sake of his brothers and sisters, that they might live with him without sin for ever. So, too, is the gold without flaw, and is fixed. . . . Yet, for the sake of its imperfect and sick brothers and sisters, it dies and rises again, glorious and redeemed, and tinctures them to eternal life, making them perfect like to pure gold." 29 Therefore, the Rosicrucian magus Robert Fludd exclaims: That is the true alchemy of which I am speaking, that which can multiply in me that rectangular stone, which is the cornerstone of my life and my soul, so that the dead in me shall be awakened anew, and arise from the old nature that had been corrupted in Adam, as a new man who is new and living in Christ, and therefore in that rectangular stone.30 The air here being "all in spice" is an inevitable element of the scene, for Christian literature consistently associates sweet odors with the presence of Divinity (as in the sacraments). In "CHRISTS Nativity" (p. 442) the newly risen Sun breathes perfumes and "doth spice the day"; when the poet awoke to God in "Mount of Olives" (p. 476) he felt a "rich air of sweets" blow upon him; "freed souls dwel by living fountains / On everlasting, spicy mountains"; and Christ is Himself the incense that Vaughan offers up in his prayers (p. 145). There are many precedents in the Bible: "Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense . . ." (Ps. 141). The Song of Solomon is, of course, full of the imagery of incense, spice, and "sweet smelling myrrh," and so, therefore, are the writings of the mystics. "Draw me," begs the languid soul; "we will run after thee because of the savour of thy good ointments." And St. Bernard avows that "the nearer anyone approaches Him by worthy living and purity of heart, the sweeter and the fresher fragrances will he perceive." 81 Teresa describes how, when the soul has been drawn thus close to Him, though it is not yet in union but only "absorbed" and "amazed," it experiences a fragrance as if in its "interior depths there were a brazier on which were cast sweet perfumes . . ." 3 2

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As always in Vaughan, even the bushes are aware of His presence and have put on their garlands in His honor. Garlands are the crowns of the blessed (p. 493), but they may fitly adorn the landscape here because this spot is a piece of heaven in the earth of man. "These are the garlands," writes St. John of the Cross, "which the Bride says have to be made, and this is to gird and surround oneself with a variety of flowers and emeralds, which are perfect gifts and virtues, in order to appear worthily with this beauteous and precious adornment before the face of the King . . , " 3 3 We notice that Vaughan calls attention to the circumstance that while his eyes were being fed with the scene "all the Eare lay hush." Only a little Fountain lent Some use for Eares, And on the dumbe shades language spent The Musick of her teares; I drew her neere, and found The Cisterne full Of divers stones, some bright, and round Others ill-shap'd, and dull. By now we are certain that this fountain is Christ, the well of living waters in us and the font of our spiritual baptism. The "Musick of her teares" is the Word that the Father speaks in our hearts which we must hear and heed that we may be born again as sons of God.34 Thus Donne preaches that "the first thing that we can consider in our way to God, is his word. Our regeneration is by his word: that is, by faith, which comes by hearing . . ." ( L X X X Sermons, 46). And Crashaw notes in his "Hymn of Saint Thomas" that it is the ear "which lets in Faith." Eucherius, whom Vaughan translated, asks, "Is it the Eye alone that we live by? Is there nothing usefull about us but that wanderer? We live also by the eare, and at that Inlet wee receive the glad tydings of Salvation . . ." (p. 326) 3 5 We should also recall, 92

READINGS in connection with our observations upon the meanings of "Virgin-soile" and grove, that it was by the ear Mary conceived the Word of God, as in the many medieval pictures of the Annunciation that depict the Dove pointing its beak towards her ear. The Latin hymn, "Gaude virgo mater Christi / Que per aurem concepisti," is in this tradition, and was early put into English thus: Glade us maiden, moder milde, Thurru thin herre thu were with childe . . . 3 e Eckhart renders these associations more explicit when, in speaking of the "coming of our Lord Jesus Christ as he is born today at this holy season of the Virgin Mary his blessed mother and again as he is born of grace in the perfect soul . . . ," he explains the birth by grace as the Father's Word spoken in the soul when it is perfecdy still and silent. It must be silent, dead to the world and to itself, because "while the soul is speaking her own word . . . , the Father cannot speak his Word in her; while the soul is begetting her own son . . . , the Father is not able to beget his Son in her to her best advantage." 3 7 The fountain is the center of the grove, as the grove is the center of the fair field of the heart. In itself the fountain represents the total pattern of regeneration which the poem unfolds. For baptism in Christ is at once a death—a purgation and mortification—and a birth. In this "fountain of purgation" (p. 163) Old Adam falls away, And the new lives, born for eternal sway.

(p. 365)

This "wholesome water," as Cyril of Jerusalem calls it, is "both a womb and a mother." 88 And thus the priest in the Sarum ritual prays: May [the Holy Ghost] fertilise this water prepared for the regeneration of man by the secret admixture of His light that by a holy conception a heavenly offspring may come forth from the spotless womb of the divine font as a new creature, and may all who differ in sex and age be begotten by parent grace into one and the same infancy.38 93

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In a similar way, no doubt familiar to Vaughan, the Mercurial Fountain, or "bath of regeneration," in alchemy is thought of as the uterus containing the aqua benedicta in which the foetus spagyricus, or lapis—who is Christ, the universal Elixir—is gestated. "How precious and how great a thing is this water," Artiphius exclaims. "For without it the work could never be done or perfected; it is also called vas naturae, the belly, the womb, receptacle of the tincture, the earth, the nurse." 40 Thus in a manner paradoxical and perhaps confusing to our syllogistic minds, Christ is both the alembic, the womb, and the Aurum Philosophicum, the Child, formed therein: man is reborn in Christ, and that is to say the Divine Child is born in man. But now we notice that the cistern contains two kinds of stones, "some bright, and round / Others ill-shap'd, and dull." The first (pray marke,) as quick as light Danc'd through the floud, But, th'last more heavy then the night Nail'd to the Center stood; I wonder'd much, but tyr'd At last with thought, My restless Eye that still desir'd As strange an object brought . . .

The image is a kind of unexplicated emblem to the pilgrim; he moves through his vision, as Dante moved through his, in wonder and frequent amazement—and the reader must be his own guide and interpreter. The stones are souls, or elements of one soul; we need not make a choice, for in either case the meaning implicit for the pilgrim and the reader will be the same. Peter (ii-4f.) tells us that those who believe will become as lively stones in the mystical building of which Christ is the Cornerstone. In Anima Magia Abscondita, Thomas Vaughan represents Truth—"that true and indubitable Stone and treasure of Philosophers"—as proclaiming: "For we are become even as stones, having eyes and not seeing, . . . Ο miserable race of men . . . Be ye trans94

READINGS muted . . . be yc transmuted from dead stones into living philosophical stones." 41 Thus some men have been rejuvenated by Christ, the fountain of living waters; they are quic\ and dance through the flood.42 But others have been obdurate and, like "dead stones," sink to the center and depth of that night of sin and death their kind inhabit.43 They are still wards of the carnal life, children of the world and darkness, and not of the light and God. Their weight is not spiritual and so bears them down, rather than up, and they sink "to a dead oblivion" (p. 461). The pilgrim has been shown a mute parable of the spiritual life by that Wisdom, that synteresis, that "something" infused into him which is able to tell him "news" (p. 475). The poem moves on now toward its conclusion. The ninth stanza repeats the implications we found in the scales episode and the emblem of the "divers stones." It was a banke of flowers, where I descried (Though 'twas mid-day,) Some fast asleepe, others broad-eyed And taking in the Ray . . . The buds of divinity "blasted," in the first stanza, by the carnal climate have here blossomed in the vital warmth of the Sun. These flowers are the gifts of God, the virtues and perfections flourishing in the soul under His grace; 44 they do not symbolize the full union of the soul with God but only a certain stage along the way. They are points of contact with Him, pledges of the possibility of fulfillment. Like the stones in the cistern, however, not all of these flowers are awake and open to Divine influence. Forgetful of their gracious origin and insensible to the need of heavenly sustenance, some are fast asleep even at noonday, the apex of the Sun's strength and glory, the Lord's intensest revelation.4® This is the hour, according to St. John of the Cross, "which is in Eternity," when the Father ever begets His Son.46 But though "Christ, the everlasting Sun, Who dwells in the highest part of the spirit" 95

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—in the grove of the plateau we have climbed to—"breaks forth and shines and illumines" in His charity; yet "he to whom this shall happen must see inwardly with understanding eyes." That is, Ruysbroeck goes on, "the man who now will feel the shining of the everlasting sun which is Christ Himself must see . . . with a gathering together of all his powers, and he must be lifted up with all his heart to God . . ." 47 The necessity to love and desire with the whole heart, to watch and wait eagerly, and at His coming to receive and return His love, His gifts, is fundamental to the contemplative life. So long as the soul is not wholly unfolded to the Divine rays, ultimate union is not possible. Those sleeping flowers frustrate the soul's high aim. "For blessed are they who watch for Him [Luke xii.37]," exclaims Clement of Alexandria, "but a man asleep is worth nothing, any more than if he were not alive. . . . He that is illuminated is therefore awake towards God; and such an one lives." 48 Augustine agrees, "Is not he that sleepeth more like death? and who are they that sleep? They whom the Apostle Paul rouseth, if they choose but to awake. For to certain he saith, 'Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light [Eph. v.14].' " 4 9 Vaughan's verse is full of the consciousness of how "sleep doth sins glut" (p. 436). In the days of "Corruption" (p. 440) "all's in deep sleep, and night," and despite the voice of Love that calls and pleads, man "sleep'st on" (p. 444) or creeps "into th' old silence, and dead sleep" (p. 445). The outrageous nature of this defection when, while all things else "strive upwards stil," man "sleeps at the ladders foot," moves Vaughan to exclamation: Was't not enough that thou hadst payd the price And given us eies When we had none, but thou must also take Us by the hand And keep us still awake, When we would sleep, Or from thee creep, Who without thee cannot stand? 96

(p. 458)

READINGS T h e stars in their courses also afford a mute admonition: Silence, and light, and watchfulnes with you Attend and wind the Clue, No sleep, nor sloth assailes you, but poor man Süll either sleeps, or slips his span.

(p. 469)

Therefore the devout heart prayed: "Grant mine eyes sleep, but let mine heart watch perpetually unto thee, that the weakness of the flesh cause me not to offend the L o r d . " 6 0 This was Vaughan's prayer: Make my soul to thirst for thee, and my flesh also to long after thee. And at what time soever thou shalt awake me from this bodily sleep, awake also my soul in me, make thy morning-star to arise in my heart, and let thy spirit blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. (p. 153) "Unfold, unfold! take in his light," Vaughan cries in " T h e Revival" (p. 643), as though addressing these sleeping

flowers:

The Joys, which with his Day-star rise, He deals to all, but drowsy Eyes: And what the men of this world miss, Some drops and dews of future bliss. Hark! how his winds have chang'd their note And with warm whispers call thee out. T h e winds of the final verse of our poem have indeed changed their note from the surly, afflicting blasts of the first stanza: I heard A rushing wind Which still increas'd, but whence it stirr'd No where I could not find; I turn'd me round, and to each shade Dispatch'd an Eye, T o see, if any leafe had made Least motion, or Reply, But while I listning sought My mind to ease

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By knowing, where 'twas, or where not, It whisper'd; Where I please. Lord, then said I, on me one breath, And let me dye before my deathl This is the wind which, if it blows through the soul's garden, brings to all its flowers "some drops and dews of future bliss." For it is the breath of the Holy Spirit of God. "And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind . . . and they were all filled with the Holy Ghost . . ." (Acts ii.2). The pilgrim has learned a great deal in his visionary journey; he has come great lengths in his ascent; and now he must learn that it is not within his own powers to attain the goal. "Know, that to find him is not in thy power but in his," says Meister Eckhart. " H e discovers himself when he chooses and he hides himself too when he will. This is what Christ meant when he said to Nicodemus, 'The spirit breatheth where he will . . . ' " 5 1 Therefore, there was not a wind could stir, but straight Vaughan thought His hand was nigh (p. 420). What he longs for is that "death more mystical and high," that foretaste of beatitude granted to some pure souls "that know to die / Before death come" and "walk to the skie / Even in this life"; but, as Vaughan well understood, "all such can / Leave behinde them the old Man" (pp. 482-483). T o leave behind the old Man, absolutely to die to self and world, this is the ultimate requirement of spiritual progress; for it is only in that death that Christ can be born in the soul. The verse from the Canticles Vaughan appended to his poem repeats its closing supplication. "Arise Ο North, and come thou South-wind, and blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out." And in the words of John of the Cross: "By this breeze the soul here denotes the Holy Spirit, Who, as she says, awakens love; for, when this Divine breeze assails the soul, it enkindles it wholly and refreshes it and revives it and 98

READINGS awakens the will and upraises the desires which aforetime had fallen and were asleep, to the love of G o d " : For the virtues that the soul has acquired in itself it is not always actually feeling and enjoying; because, as we have said, they are present in the soul during this life like flowers enclosed in the bud, or like aromatic spices covered over, the fragrance whereof is not perceived until they are uncovered and shaken, as we have said. 52 T h e note of profound longing for this Divine influx upon which "Regeneration" ends is resonant everywhere in Vaughan's work, as it is in all of the mystics. It is inevitable that it should be, "for there is shown to them in glimpses an immense good and it is not granted to them; wherefore their affliction and torment are unspeakable." 5 3 I cannot reach it; and my striving eye Dazles at it, as at eternity. ii The Proffer Be still black Parasites, Flutter no more; Were it still winter, as it was before, You'd make no flights; But now the dew and Sun have warm'd my bowres, You flie and flock to suck the flowers. But you would honey make: These buds will wither, And what you now extract, in harder weather Will serve to take; Wise husbands will (you say) there wants prevent, Who do not so, too late repent. Ο poys'nous, subtile fowls! The flyes of hell That buz in every ear, and blow on souls Until they smell 99

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And rot, descend not here, nor think to stay, I've read, who 'twas, drove you away. Think you these longing eyes, Though sick and spent, And almost famish'd, ever will consent To leave those skies, That glass of souls and spirits, where well drest They shine in white (like stars) and rest. Shall my short hour, my inch, My one poor sand, And crum of life, now ready to disband Revolt and flinch, And having born the burthen all the day, Now cast at night my Crown away? No, No; I am not he, Go seek elsewhere. I skill not your fine tinsel, and false hair, Your Sorcery And smooth seducements: I'le not stuff my story With your Commonwealth and glory. There are, that will sow tares And scatter death Amongst the quick, selling their souls and breath For any wares; But when thy Master comes, they'l finde and see There's a reward for them and thee. Then keep the antient way! Spit out their phlegm And fill thy brest with home; think on thy dream: A calm, bright day! A Land of flowers and spices! the word given, If these be fair, Ο what is Heavenl This poem strikes and sustains a note seldom heard in Vaughan's work. For it is stern, tough, and unusually powerioo

READINGS ful, in places fibered with a Roman indignatio, and in places even caustic.54 But it is typical of the Silurist's greater poems in incorporating images and motifs recurrent in the body of his work and fusing them into a single and coherent statement. Its basic metaphor, like that of "Regeneration," is the pilgrimage of man, the soul's journey to God, but again, as in "Regeneration," the imagery of seed and flower plays a part. The scene as we may imagine it is late in the evening, after the sun has gone down but before full darkness. The old pilgrim pauses along the way, watching the black shapes of the night birds flitting against the sky. We are in the country of the mind, and what we hear is an internal monologue, a mute address and declaration of the dedicated heart. Be still black Parasites, Flutter no more; Were it still winter, as it was before, You'd make no flights; But now the dew and Sun have warm'd my bowres, You flie and flock to suck the flowers. These black parasites are the World's partisans, flocking about the flowers of heavenly gifts and virtues growing in the regenerate heart. They come now that the heart is blossoming, drawn by the odor of its goodness. For, as St. John of the Cross says, the devil, "when God grants the soul recollection and sweetness in Himself, becomes very envious and greatly afflicted because of that blessing and peace which have come to the soul"; and he contrives then "to hinder it from obtaining that blessing . . ." and "attacks it from without, in its sensual part, and sets there distraction or inconstancy . . . " 8 6 In the former long, cold season of the unconverted wasteland of the soul, when the Divine seed lay as dead beneath the hard soil, the parasites felt no lure and made no flights. Now, however, after the dews of grace have watered the heart's field and the Sun of Righteousness has thawed the frozen earth,58 they come ΙΟΙ

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dropping down to suck the flowers that have bloomed; and their touch is poisonous and withering. But they are subtle and would deceive the soul, coming in the guise of bees,57 as though to gather sweetness and light, and even feigning gladness at its flourishing. But they are in fact the flies of hell 5 8 that seek out weak spots where to lay their own corrupting seeds that spoil the soul's wholesomeness. Vaughan, however, knows these "noonday devils," as Walter Hilton calls them, very well. 59 He sees through their disguise as they come smiling and helpful with advice, and his tone is caustic as he anticipates and mimics their proffer: But you would honey make: These buds will wither, And what you now extract, in harder weather Will serve to take; Wise husbands will (you say) there wants prevent, Who do not so, too late repent. The pilgrim must not live so wholly withdrawn into himself, they urge, nor so relentlessly for God in neglect of "the needs of nature" and the services he owes his fellows and the commonwealth—indeed, in neglect of what he owes himself. For a man of such large capacities and perseverance must surely win great honor and reward in the larger world of affairs. He should take care to provide for his future wants and not expend his whole endeavor toward a single end, worthy though it is; he must be a wiser husband of his energies and virtues, putting them to some practical use lest he find cause to repent in "harder weather." This is what the pilgrim's subtle enemies urge to tempt him from the way. "They will put before you all your acts and virtues," Hilton warns, "and impress upon you that all men praise you and speak your holiness, and that they love and honor you for your holy life. They will do this in the hope that you will believe them, and that you will take delight in this false pleasure and rest in it. But if you are wise, you will hold all such nonsense falsehood 102

READINGS and flattery, that your enemy offers to you like a poisoned drink mixed with honey." And again they will tell you, continues Hilton, that "it is a dangerous thing for a man to leave the world and give himself wholly to the love of God, and to seek nothing else. Many unknown dangers may overwhelm him. Return therefore and give up this desire, which you will never be able to achieve, and act like other men in the world." 60 But Vaughan had early been given the answer to these blandishments and worldly counsels. It was at the height of his "youthfull, sinfull age," when his "prime delights" had been just those "glorious deceptions, gilded mists, / False joyes, and phantastick flights" with which the world would tempt him now. He had recklessly "cull'd flowres" to make "posies," and "crown'd" his head with roses—never minding that there was another kind of crown and garland for which all those wasted blossoms should have been reserved and cherished. At that time he had eagerly accepted the demonic proffer made in the second stanza of our poem, and, as he says in The Mount of Olives, his heart had been "a nest of unclean birds, where they have not onley laine, but hatched and brought forth their viperous young ones" (p. 161). But he had met with a "dead man" who, employing the very imagery used by the soul's false friends, pronounced this stern rebuke: Desist fond fool, be not undone, What thou has cut today Will fade at night, and with this Sun Quite vanish and decay. Flowers gather'd in this world, die here; if thou Wouldst have a wreath that fades not, let them grow, And grow for thee; who spares them here, shall find A Garland, where comes neither rain, nor wind. (p. 493) This dead man was a messenger of God, for he spoke the very promise of the Word of Life: "Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life" (Rev. ii.io).

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Now, much later in life's short day, when the pilgrim, having made great progress, is approaching home, he sees the world's redundant cajoleries for what they are and marks them down in no uncertain words: Ο poys'nous, subtile fowls! T h e flyes of hell That buz in every ear, and blow on souls Until they smell A n d rot, descend not here, nor think to stay, I've read, who 'twas, drove you away.

Fly and fowl here fuse into an image of a monstrous malice and deceit, the "false-fires," (p. 653) of the land of darkness, the False stars and fire-drakes, the deceits of night Set forth to fool and foil thee . . .

(pp. 5 1 9 - 5 2 0 )

In "Disorder and frailty" (p. 445) the idea is again symbolized as flies in the act of spoiling the tender buds that seek to grow towards heaven: But while I grow A n d stretch to thee, ayming at all T h y stars, and spangled hall, Each fly doth tast, Poyson, and blast M y yielding leaves . . .

Thus he cries out against the "subtilties of vice," its show of false pleasure—but as much in contempt of his own weakness as in anger at its deception: Ο bitter curs'd delights of men! Our souls diseases first, and then Our bodies; poysons that intreat With fatal sweetness, till we eat; H o w artfully do you destroy, T h a t kill with smiles and seeming joy!

(p. 5 1 3 )

What draws the hellish fowls is the savor of a soul in sacrifice to God: "I've read," Vaughan tells them, "who 'twas, drove you 104

READINGS away." This was the righteous Abraham. When he had laid out his sacrifice to the Lord, the parasitic fowls came swooping down and would have devoured it or carried it off, but "Abram drove them away" (Gen. x v . n ) . When the Christian soul has, in imitation of its Saviour, taken up His cross whereon to sacrifice the natural and sinful man of the flesh—the illusory "I," "me," "mine" —then the distractions of the world, the flesh, and the devil descend upon h i m 6 1 and must be driven off lest the covenant of the Seed be voided. For the sacrifice of Abraham alluded to was that which bound this covenant (Gen. xv.i8), the promise made to the patriarch, "who is the father of us all" (Rom. iv.16), that the children of his strong faith should be the sons and heirs of the Father through the Seed Jesus Christ (Gal. iii.16). The promise pertains, therefore, to those who, like Abraham, are of steadfast devotion, who drive off the distractions and inquietude of the flesh; for "they which are the children of the flesh, these are not the children of God: but the children of the promise are counted for the seed" (Rom. ix.8). Such is the promise of grace the pilgrim hears resounding in his heart, silencing the notes and calls of the proffering choir. "Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage" (Gal. v.i). The Seed, the Word of God, has taken root in the pilgrim's heart; and soon the Lord will come into His garden to gather the lilies into a crown of everlasting glory. Not until then is the soul free of the flights and buzzings of the fowls and flies of the worldly night, the wicked ones who seek to carry away that which was sown in the heart (Matt. xiii.i9), e2 or to sow their own corrupting seed in the wounds they make. "Watch over my heart, Ο Lord," Vaughan pleads, "and hedge it in with thy grace, that the fowles which descend in the shadows of the Evening may not pick it out . . ." (p. 150). Vaughan, in " T h e Bird" (p. 496), describes how in the country of the soul there are "Birds of light," like the cock, whose 105

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songs of praise "make a land glad" as they chirp "their solemn Matins on each tree"; but also "in the shades of night some dark fowls be, / Whose heavy notes make all that hear them, sad." The Turtle then in Palm-trees mourns, While Owls and Satyrs howl; The pleasant Land to brimstone turns And all her streams grow foul. The turde-dove is the emblem of the soul faithful to God and constant in its adoration,es the allegoria of the pilgrim of our poem that doth seek and love The things above, Whose spirit ever poor, is meek and low; Who simple still and wise, Still homewards flies . . .

(p. 525)

As the palm is the Tree of Life, symbolic, like the lily, of the pure soul rooted in and growing up to God, so should there be "no voyce in those shades of Palme, but the voyce of the Turtle, which is alwayes groning" (p. 182). When the dark fowls in the shadows of the night are screeching, then especially does the turde mourn, for it is afflicted, and, feeling more poignantly its estrangement from heaven, yearns for its home. "Nor is it a little matter that the Holy Spirit teaches us to groan," writes Augustine, "for He gives us to know that we are sojourners in a foreign land, and He teaches us to sigh after our native country; and through that very longing do we groan. He with whom it is well in this world, or rather he who thinks it is well with him, who exults in the joy of carnal things . . . has the cry of the raven; for the raven's cry is full of clamor, not of groaning." 64 The "nycticorax," the nocturnal bird, has long been used to signify, as in "The Proffer" and "The Bird," the ungodly soul, the hater of light.65 Bishop Hall's meditation "On the sight of a bat and owl" is representative: 106

READINGS These night-birds are glad to hide their heads all the day: and if, by some violence, they be unseasonably forced out of their secrecy, how are they followed and beaten by the birds of day I With us men it is contrary. The sons of darkness do, with all eagerness of malice, pursue the children of the light, and drive them into corners, and make a prey of them: the opposition is alike; but the advantage lies on the worse side. Is it, for that the spiritual light is no less hateful to those children of darkness, than the natural night is to those cheerful birds of day? or is it, for that the sons of darkness, challenging no less propriety in the world than the fowl do in the lightsome air, abhor and wonder at the conscionable, as strange and uncouth? Howsoever, as these bats and owls were made for the night, being accordingly shaped, foul and ill-favored; so we know these vicious men, however they may please themselves, have in them a true deformity, fit to be shrouded in darkness; and, as they delight in the works of darkness, so they are justly reserved to a state of darkness . ββ But these vicious men can no longer prevail upon the pilgrim's weakness; he knows them and their wiles too well, having suffered often under their malign influence. H e speaks to them with contempt, out of a profound conviction and an unwavering faith: Think you these longing eyes, Though sick and spent, And almost famish'd, ever will consent To leave those skies, That glass of souls and spirits, where well drest They shine in white (like stars) and rest His mind is fixed on heaven, his forehead turned to the hills. The black shapes of the feral birds provoke only his anger and disdain as they flit before his vision of those saintly souls who, shining like stars in the sky, draw and guide him on. Do they suppose that now, toward the end of his road of trials, when he can see the borders of light of his native land, he will cast away his crown for the toys and baubles that delight the glory-seekers of the world's broad way ? 107

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Shall my short hour, my inch, My one poor sand, And crum of life, now ready to disband Revolt and flinch, And having born the burthen all the day, Now cast at night my Crown away? No, No; I am not he, Go seek elsewhere. I skill not your fine tinsel, and false hair, Your Sorcery And smooth seducements: I'le not stuff my story With your Commonwealth and glory. In the days of prodigious darkness Vaughan saw all about him, men who, under the "Commonwealth," had learned to bring princes to their graves by new ways (p. 170), and the "darksome Statesman" of "The World" (p. 466), "hung with weights and woe," and the "fearful miser on a heap of rust," though apprising the seeker after God as fool or dreamer, are nevertheless a trifle ill at ease about him, disturbed in their assurance of their own worth and wisdom, and even vaguely envious of the quiet nature of his faith, the light of joy they witness on his face. These men of worldly power therefore wish to have him quit the way and join their ranks. Being dead in their souls, they would kill the life they see in him. There are, that will sow tares And scatter death Amongst the quick, selling their souls and breath For any wares; But when thy Master comes, they'l finde and see There's a reward for them and thee. The enemies of light would sow tares among the good wheat, but it is to no avail, for at the harvesting, when the "white-winged reapers come," the wheat will be gathered into the barn but the tares consumed in the fire (Matt. xiii.24f). 108

READINGS Even as I have seen, they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same. By the blast of God they perish, and by the breath of his nostrils arc they consumed. (Job. iv.8, 9) This is the word given, and the knowledge that the pilgrim climbs by: "Be not deceived; God is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" (Gal. vi.7). "What is become now of these great Merchants of the earth" —those alluded to in the poem as "selling their souls and breath / For any wares"—Vaughan asks, "and where is the fruit of all their labours under the Sun? Why, truly they are ta\en out of the way as all others, and they are cut off as the tops of the eares of corn. Their dwelling is in the dust, and as for their place here, it lies wast, & is not known: Nettles and Brambles come up in it, and the Ο wie and the Raven dwell in it" (p. 172). "O wretched slaves of Mammon," St. Bernard exclaims of these men, "you cannot glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and at the same time hope in earthly riches; you cannot seek for gold and prove how gracious the Lord is! Very fearful will you find Him one day, the thought of Whom has never been your joy." 67 One thinks, in connection with Abraham's driving away the fowls and these allusions to merchants, of Christ driving the money-changers from the temple: "And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money-changers . . ." (Matt. xxi.12). The soul of man is the temple of God (2 Cor. vi.16), and Meister Eckhart brings us close to the single-mindedness of Vaughan's verses when he interprets that "the merchants are driven from the temple and God is there alone when one has no intention but God. Behold thy temple cleared of merchants. The man who is intent on God alone and on God's glory, verily he is free from any taint of commerce in his deeds, nor is he in any wise self-seeking."68 The pilgrim who desires only God, and with his whole heart, shall find Him in the end, if he "faint not"; 109

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for "he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved" (Matt, xxiv.13). Cast not away therefore your confidence, which hath great recompence of reward. For ye have need of patience, that, after ye have done the will of God, ye might receive the promise. For yet a little while, and he that shall come will come, and will not tarry. (Heb. x.35-37) "Then keep the antient way!" the traveler exclaims with joy: Spit out their phlegm And fill thy brest with home; think on thy dream; A calm, bright day! A Land of flowers and spices! the word given, If these be fair, Ο what is Heavenl We have read of this ancient and narrow way before in Vaughan; to choose it was early his "Resolve": Follow the Cry no more: there is An ancient way All strewed with flowres and happiness And fresh as May; There turn, and turn no more . . .

(p. 434)

This is the way of "Retirement" (p. 462), of retreat, from the world's crass foolishness: 'Tis not th' applause, and feat Of dust, and clay Leads to that way, But from those follies a resolv'd Retreat. T o go steadfastly along this way is to "spit out their phlegm," to void the heart of their noxious influence and, as it were, to breathe pure, wholesome air. Home is heaven, and to fill the breast with home is to breathe in the Spirit of love which, as St. John of the Cross says, is the Holy Spirit: "for the Holy Spirit, Who is love, is also compared to air in the Divine Scripture, since he is the breath of the Father and the Son." ββ no

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So the pilgrim goes on in love and faith, with his vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem shining before him. Yet he knows that what he sees, the glimpse he has been granted of a shady city of palm trees, is only a type and figure of the heaven he shall know when he has passed in death beyond the ultimate veil. "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known" (i Cor. xiii.12). The vision that the pilgrim beholds, of "a calm, bright day, / A Land of flowers and spices," is indeed a fair symbol; but he understands that it does not describe God, Who—as the Pseudo-Areopagite most vigorously taught 70 —transcends all images. "If these be fair, Ο what is Heaven!" And so the final note of the poem is one of great hope and joy. For, having refused the world's proffer and seen the night birds drop behind him, croaking in the darkness they inhabit, the pilgrim walks on in the lovely light of his vision, knowing that his journey's end will lead him into Light and Love transcending all his mortal powers to imagine. The word has been given, and he, having walked after the Spirit and not after the flesh, is a son of God, an heir of the promise, of the Word given, the Word of Life which is spoken in the hard-won quiet of his listening heart. iii The Night

John 2. 3. 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. Most blest believer he! Who in that land of darkness and blinde eyes III

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Thy long expected healing wings could see, When thou didst rise, And what can never more be done, Did at mid-night speak with the Sun! Ο 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. 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 ]ews did sleep. 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. Were all my loud, evil days Calm and unhaunted as is thy dark Tent, Whose peace but by some Angels wing or voice Is seldom rent; Then I in Heaven all the long year Would keep, and never wander here. But living where the Sun Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tyre 112

READINGS Themselves and others, I consent and run To ev'ry myre, And by this worlds ill-guiding light, Erre more then I can do by night. 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; Ο for that night! where I in him Might live invisible and dim. We are accustomed, in reading Henry Vaughan, to respond to the imagery of night and darkness as symbolic of our earthly condition of ignorance and sin here in the dark land of our exile from the House of Light. But the night of the poem before us now 7 1 is different from the carnal darkness of the nox corporis; for this is the night of the spirit, familiar in the writings of the mystics—not, indeed, the "dark night of the soul" but the time of the soul's transcendence of the sensual scene. "This night," writes Walter Hilton, for example, "this night consists in nothing else than a withdrawal of the soul from the things of earth by a great desire and longing to love and see and experience Jesus and spiritual things." 72 It was Vaughan's first admonition in The Mount of Olives that "the night . . . was not therefore made, that either we should sleep it out, or passe it away idly . . ."; but rather, he counsels, "when all the world is asleep, thou shouldst watch, weep and pray and propose unto thyself that Practise of the Psalmist, I am weary of my groaning, every night wash I my bed, and water my Couch with my tears . . ." (p. 143). Nierembergius, in Vaughan's translation, explains why it is that "the night is the working time of Spirits": Paracelsus writes, that the watching of the body is the sleep of the Soul, and that the day was made for Corporeall Actions, but the night is the working-time of Spirits. Contrary natures run contrary courses: »3

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Bodies having no inherent light of their own, make use of this outward light, but Spirits need it not. (p. 305) Therefore, Vaughan charged the spiritual aspirant, "when the night is drawn over thee, and the whole world lies slumbring under it, do not thou sleep it out; for as it is a portion of time much abused by wicked livers, so is it of all others the most powerful to excite thee to devotion . . ." (p. 187). Vaughan took for his text and occasion the very appropriate Biblical account of how the Pharisee Nicodemus visited the Lord one night and heard from Him, in wonder and bewilderment, the fundamental gospel truth—which is the fundamental theme of Vaughan's whole work—that man, even Nicodemus, one of the righteous among the Jews, must be born again of the Spirit before he can see the kingdom of God (John iii.iff). The poet's meditation 73 on this scriptural passage opens with an allusion to the incarnation, progresses through the experience central to Christianity of loving communion with the Lord, and ends upon the wish for his own ultimate union with Him, ecstatically in this life, beatifically in the next. The first section of the poem's tri-partite structure, stanzas one through three, corresponds to the formal meditative act of memory; it composes the scene, the meeting of Nicodemus with Christ, in which resides the question the poem answers: 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. Most blest believer he I Who in that land of darkness and blinde eyes Thy long expected healing wings could see, When thou didst rise, And what can never more be done, Did at mid-night speak with the Sun! 114

READINGS Ο 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. "Pure Virgin-shrine" refers to Christ's body, the "sacred vail" of the flesh (Heb. x.20), through which mankind, or Nicodemus, could behold the Light of the World ("through" is ambiguous: it was "by means of" His incarnation that man could know Him and live, since no man can behold the naked Godhead and live [Ex. xxxiii.20]; and since His body is "pure," perfectly expressive of His Being, man can see "through" it its animating Spirit —it does not foil the Light but is its shrine). Virgin shrine, further, rightly suggests the Virgin Mary, who afforded the Lord His humanity: man can not witness the sun directly, for as the direct light of the sun would quench the glowworm's feeble and inconstant flicker, so would the direct and noonday revelation of Divinity extinguish man's slight and intermittent light; 74 but he may gaze unharmed on the Light reflected, as it were, from the moon—Cynthia, whose ancient place was subsumed in Medieval thought by Mary, the Queen of Heaven, shining within our mortal sphere of mutability. "A great Light," as Francis Bacon says, "drowneth a smaller, that it cannot be seene; As the Sunne that of a Gloworme." 75 In the seventh of Quarles's Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man the basic conception of Vaughan's image is clearly explicated. The engraving depicts a flameless candle standing in the fierce rays of the sun, while an owl—a bird of night, representing the children of darkness—hides in the shadows of a tree stump. The most pertinent of Quarles's expository stanzas are these: Great God, I am thy taper, thou my sun; From thee, the spring of light, my light begun; Yet if thy light but shine, my light is done. . . . " 5

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Thy sunbeams are too strong for my weak eye!

If thou but shine, how nothing, Lord, am I! Ah! who can see thy visage, and not die!

Nicodemus was wise because he went to Christ, but he was "blest" because, living in the fullness of time, he was able to do "what can never more be done"—speak directly with the incarnate Deity. The realization of those hard words "never more" culminates in that poignant sense, found throughout Vaughan's work, of a lost familiarity. How often have we heard his lamentations on the passing of that first white age, when "still Paradise lay / In some green shade, or fountain": Angels lay Leiger here; Each Bush, and Cel, Each Oke, and high-way knew them, Walk but the fields, or sit down at some wel, And he was sure to view them. "Almighty Love!" Vaughan cries, "where art thou now" (p. 440) ? For the Lord Himself, "in those early days," walked in the garden at the cool of the afternoon, and angels sat with Abram by his shady tent (p. 404). But Vaughan felt that there are no more "conferences," that He has withdrawn even from "The Brittish Church" (p. 410), for though the "truce" is not broken, "Religion is a Spring" which, flowing from a pure Source, becomes defiled in its passage through time and the minds and churches of men (pp. 404-405). And so the poet's meditation on the scene of Nicodemus' visit with Christ has led him to the question that is central to all in his work: how in the days of corruption, when "mad man / Sits down, and freezeth on," when God's "Curtains are Close-drawn" and His bow dim in the cloud (p. 440), how can man converse directly with the Lord? How may he enter into that vital and truly spiritual communion with God, wherein alone the Divine Child is conceived in the heart that the new birth He demands might be fulfilled and he thus brought once more', as a child of the light, to Paradise? In what fair field or meadow may his 116

READINGS devoted search discover once again that Lily of the Valley ? T e This overwhelming question toward which the first three stanzas have led us are answered in the three that follow: 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. 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 kindred catch. This second section of the poem is, in the language of meditation, the "analysis," wherein the faculty of understanding searches out the meaning of the initial "composition," or scene. The first of these stanzas provides a negative answer—though the positive is implicit—to the query with which the preceding section closed. The Lord was not to be found in the ark of the old covenant, or in the stone tables of the Law, or in any images and artifacts (Ex. xxv.17). For He lodged only in "his own living works." T o find H i m the seeker needed only to watch and wait in trustfulness, as did even trees and herbs (Rom. viii.19-21), to be still and hear Him with an open and attentive heart; he did not need any ritualistic forms and ceremonies but only a living faith and a real desire. And thus, the implication is, must He still be sought 117

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for in the days of decadence—not simply in forms and images and services, but principally in the "dear night" of the "souls calm retreat" from the world's crass clamour, when in the quiet of a humble longing the heart hears in its "dumb watch" His "still, soft call" and gentle knocking. Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. (Rev. iii.20) In the time of corruption the temple of the scribes and hypocrites, the "worldly sanctuary" (Heb. ix.i), is empty of God's presence. But there was formed with Christ a new covenant and a new temple, not made with hands (Heb. ix.11), a "true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man" (Heb. viii.2). This is the mystical church of Christ, the union of faithful hearts that have, like Nicodemus, seen the Light, that have opened to Him and been converted and, dying to the old man, are reborn in Christ. These have His laws not on stone in an ark secured behind the veil of the inner sanctum, but in their minds and hearts (Heb. viii.io). This is the new and living way to God the Father, the way of the new birth in the Son—or, otherwise expressed, the birth and residence of the Divine Child in the meek and faithful heart. The return in meditation to a scene of a living and personal encounter with the Lord, the stress on "living works," the question how He might be found, and the implications raised by reference to the tabernacle in conjunction with the meditative night, have led us to discover here, beyond the common theme of a simple refutation of the Old Law, the ultimate concomitants of the N e w : a strong emphasis upon renewal of a vital, intimate, and private confrontation of the pious soul with God. We have heard Vaughan speak most clearly on this matter in "Jacobs Pillow, and Pillar" (p. 527) : The first true worship of the worlds great King From private and selected hearts did spring, 118

READINGS But he most willing to save all mankinde, Inlarg'd that light, and to the bad was kinde. Hence Catholick or Universal came A most fair notion, but a very name. For this rich Pearl, like some more common stone, When once made publique, is esteem'd by none. Man slights his Maker, when familiar grown, And sets up laws, to pull his honor down. This God foresaw: And when slain by the crowd (Under that stately and mysterious cloud Which his death scatter'd) he foretold the place, And form to serve him in, should be true grace And the meek heart, not in a Mount, nor at Jerusalem, with blood of beasts, and fat. A heart is that dread place, that awful Cell, That secret Ark, where the milde Dove doth dwell When proud waters rage: when Heathens rule By Gods permission, and man turns a Mule. A s in " T h e Search" (p. 405), the word pronounced is "look within," nosce teipsum, and there find Christ eternally presiding in the inmost sanctuary of the temple of the heart. 77 Thus as the answer forms itself on what "hallow'd solitary ground" may be discovered once again "so rare a flower," w e hear the long-familiar words of Paul, echoed through the centuries by every devout soul that came to experience their meaning: " K n o w ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you" (1 Cor. iii.16) ? " A n d what agreement hath the temple of God with idols" (2 Cor. vi.16) ? In the time of the Old L a w , God was resident in the ark within the tabernacle's inner sanctum, and now H e is resident in the center of the tabernacle of the purified heart that has opened to H i m . This now is the "Virgin-shrine"

that holds H i m ; the regenerate heart is the womb

of His eternal birth. T h e night is the time for this true worship, for then the buzzings of the worldly chorus have subsided, and "the flyes of hell" (p. 487), confounded by the soul's withdrawal from its sensual parts, are blinded in devotion's trusting darkness. T h e soul then 119

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travels, as St. John of the Cross says, "concealed and hidden . . . from the devil, to whom the light of faith is more than darkness." 78 At this time, under such circumstances, the way is open for the intercourse of spirits. With the inconsonant grind of the fleshly mechanism barely audible, the soul can set itself in tune with the heavenly harmony. And the time of spiritual activity is marked not by the world's false hours but by watches, vigils, to which high heaven sounds the chime. W e move on now to the poem's final triad, stanzas comparable to the final division of a meditation—the soul's "colloquy" with God—in which the will, the last of the soul's trinity of faculties, expresses its desire.79 The answer that the second triad has formed to the question arising in the first—that Christ is to be found at the heart's core in the meditative watches of the night—now focuses the soul's desire on the ultimate fulfillment of the search: the ecstatic or beatific union with the Lord, here or hereafter. Were all my loud, evil days Calm and unhaunted as is thy dark Tent, Whose peace but by some Angels wing or voice Is seldom rent; Then I in Heaven all the long year Would keep, and never wander here. But living where the Sun Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tyre Themselves and others, I consent and run To ev'ry myre, And by this worlds ill-guiding light, Erre more than I can do by night. 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; Ο for that night! where I in him Might live invisible and dim. 120

READINGS For the night of meditation passes, the flesh revives, and the world's day returns, awakening its false prophets and enkindling its misleading lights. The feeble spirit finds itself beclouded once again with dust. The world Is full of voices; Man is call'd, and hurl'd By each, he answers all, Knows ev'ry note, and call, Hence, still Fresh dotage tempts, or old usurps his will.

(p. 413)

Therefore his heart turns now to ultimates, to a night that cannot fade or fail: the "deep, but dazling darkness" of the unknown Godhead: "That topmost height of mystic lore," in the words of the "right-ey'd Areopagite," 80 "which exceedeth light and more than exceedeth knowledge, where the simple, absolute, and unchangeable mysteries of heavenly Truth lie hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellect with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories which exceed all beauty I" 8 1 In the words of Tauler: God is a pure Being, a waste of calm seclusion—as Isaiah says, He is a hidden god—He is much nearer than anything is to itself in the depth of the heart, but He is hidden from all our senses. He is far above every outward thing and every thought, and is found only where thou hidest thyself in the secret place of thy heart, in the quiet solitude where no word is spoken, where is neither creature nor image nor fancy. This is the quiet Desert of the Godhead, the Divine Darkness—dark from His own surpassing brightness, as the shining of the sun is darkness to weak eyes, for in the presence of its brightness our eyes are like the eyes of the swallow in the bright sunlight—this Abyss is our salvation! 82 I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God. (T. S. Eliot's East Co\er, III) 121

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Here in this Divine Dark beyond the bourne of simple meditation, in union with his Lord as near perfect as can be in mortal life, Vaughan would abide. This is the wish and longing that concludes "Regeneration" and the vision, eschatologically conceived, which leads the pilgrim of "The Proffer" on. Union with God, here or hereafter, is what animates the languor dominant throughout the Silex Scintillans. Vaughan had known the first night of the soul, the sensual night, "wherein the soul is purged according to sense, which is subdued to the spirit," and he had been granted the consequential periods of grace, of joyous illumination; but he hungered for the experience of the second dark night, the spiritual night which "is the portion of very few," 8 3 in order that he might pass through it into the Perfect Day. "Let us then die," urges the Seraphic Doctor, "let us then die and pass over into darkness . . ." 84 Vaughan longed for this passage into the dazzling darkness, this "death more mystical and high," but unless his early lapse into silence is indicative of a final consummation, he did not, so far as his work reveals, attain to it. "For many are called, but few are chosen" (Matt, xxii.14). Vaughan heard the still, soft voice, the knocking in the night, and he sought to open fully to Him; he had made his hard, nocturnal pilgrimage, but we do not know that he arrived home. For "not all those who walk of set purpose in the way of the spirit are brought by God to contemplation, nor even the half of them—why, He best knows." 85

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AV\ / / Λ V s e e E. L. Marilla, Comprehensive Bibliography of Henry Vaughan (University of Alabama, 1948), for a full listing of early and modern editions. This bibliography, which is annotated, may be referred to for items not mentioned in my survey. See also, E. L. Marilla, "The Significance of Henry Vaughan's Literary Reputation," MLQ, 5:155-162 (1944), for a summary of work done on Vaughan from his own time through the nineteenth century; also Arthur H. Nethercot: ( 1 ) "The Reputation of the 'Metaphysical Poets' during the Seventeenth Century," JEGP, 23:173-198 (1924), in which the author comments (pp. 189-190) that Vaughan was almost unknown to his contemporaries and that he later lapsed into total obscurity; (2) "The Reputation of the "Metaphysical Poets' during the Age of Pope," PQ, 4:161-179 (1925), in which the author notes (p. 177) this era's complete disregard of Vaughan; and (3) "The Reputation of the 'Metaphysical Poets' during the Age of Johnson and the 'Romantic Revival,'" SP, 22:81-132 (1925). For an early view of Vaughan's standing in the period between Dryden and Cowper, see the anonymous notice of an American reprint of the poet in Russell's Magazine, 1:191-192 (1857). 2. Edward Fitzgerald's remark in a letter of 1837 was the first notice of Vaughan's sacred poetry by someone outside the church (see Letters and Literary Remains of Edward Fitzgerald, ed. William Aldis Wright [London and New York, 1902], pp. 48-49). 3. A. B. Grosart, ed., The Wor\s in Verse and Prose Complete of Henry Vaughan, 4 vols. (Lancashire, 1871), I, xx. 4. John Brown, Horae Subsecivae (Edinburgh, 1882), p. 292. 5. Francis Palgrave, Landscape in Poetry (London and New York, 1897), pp. 160-161. 6. W. J. Courthope, A History of English Poetry (London and New r

39

N O T E S ON C H A P T E R I York, 1895-1905), III, 235. For a resume and rather conclusive criticism of the long history of the belief that Vaughan directly influenced Wordsworth's "Ode" and that the romantic possessed a "well-thumbed" copy of the Silex Scintillans, see Helen N. McMaster, "Vaughan and Wordsworth," RES, 11:313-325 (1935). 7. F. E. Hutchinson, The Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. A. W. Ward and R. W. Waller (Cambridge, 1919-1930), VII, 41-42. 8. Lionel Johnson, "Henry Vaughan, Silurist," in Post Liminium, ed. Thomas Whittemore (London, 1911), p. 273. 9. Edward Bliss Reed, English Lyrical Poetry (New Haven and London, 1912), pp. 289, 291. 10. Ernest Rhys, Lyric Poetry (New York, 1913), p. 219. 11. Felix Schelling, The English Lyric (Boston and New York, 1913), p. 98. 12. William Empson, "An Early Romantic," The Cambridge Review, 31:495-496 (1929). 13. George Williamson, The Donne Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1930), pp. 123, 132-133. 14. George Macdonald, England's Antiphon (London, 1868), p. 261. 15. Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1945), p. 146. 16. Courthope, History of English Poetry, III, 233; cf. The Spectator, 59:1246 (1886). 17. Reed, English Lyrical Poetry, p. 289. 18. The Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, ed. Ε. Κ. Chambers, 2 vols. (London, 1896), I, xli. Edward Hutton, ed., The Poems of Henry Vaughan (London, 1904), p. xvii, echoes Reverend Beeching: "But he did owe to Herbert that he was ever a religious poet at all . . ." 19. Elizabeth Holmes, Henry Vaughan and the Hermetic Philosophy (Oxford, 1932), p. 17. 20. Helen C. White, The Metaphysical Poets (New York, 1936), p. 273. 21. Joan Bennett, Four Metaphysical Poets (Cambridge, England, 1934), pp. 75-76. 22. Itrat-Husain, The Mystical Element in the Metaphysical Poets of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1948), p. 205. 23. E. L. Marilla, "The Religious Conversion of Henry Vaughan," RES, 21:15-22 (1945); "Henry Vaughan's Conversion: A Recent View," MLN, 63:394-397 (1948). See William Riley Parker, "Henry Vaughan and His Publishers," Library, 20:401-411 (1900), and H. R. Walley, 'The Strange Case of Olor Iscanus," RES, 18:27-37 (1942). 24. "The Significance of Henry Vaughan's Literary Reputation," MLQ, 5:155-162 (1944); and 'The Secular and Religious Poetry of Henry Vaughan," MLQ, 9:394-411 (1948). 25. For passages quoted in this paragraph, see E. L. Marilla, RES, 21:16, 20, 22 (1945). 140

INTRODUCTION 26. Bush, English Literature, p. 144. 27. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (London, 1949), ch. II; Ε. T. Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion (London, 1901), ch. xxix. Geraldine Emma Hodgson, in 1914, in her chapter on Vaughan in A Study in Illumination (London), took for granted the pertinence of the experiences of Pascal and St. lohn of the Cross. See her English Mystics (London, 1922), in which she maintains that Vaughan was one of the great illuminatives. 28. Heinrich Suso, The Life of the Servant, trans. James M. Clark (London, 1952), p. 20. 29. Works, ed. L. C. Martin, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1914), p. 444. AH quotations are from this edition, and page references will appear in the text henceforward. 30. The part played by Herbert's poetry in Vaughan's conversion has been overemphasized, it seems to me, because while it was doubtless climactic it was almost certainly not fundamental. We know that a long period of dissatisfaction and restlessness, however subliminal, normally precedes the actual moment of awakening. Herbert's poetry was undoubtedly a precipitating influence, releasing an accumulated energy, but it was not a basic cause of Vaughan's regeneration. 31. Suso, Life, p. 16. 32. England's Antiphon, p. 252. See H. C. Beeching's pleasant summary of the early course of the comparison in The Poems of Henry Vaughan, in Chamber ed., p. xxxivf. 33. Edith Sichel, "Henry Vaughan: Silurist," The Monthly Review, 11:112, 113 (April, 1903). Her essay is full of such fine observations as this: 'Thought was with him an emotion and, when it wedded religion, he was at his highest" (p. 117). One thinks of Eliot's famous remark about the Metaphysicals. 34. Sir Herbert Grierson, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1921), p. xivi. 35. Williamson, The Donne Tradition, p. 131. 36. White, The Metaphysical Poets, p. 259. 37. Bennett, Four Metaphysical Poets, p. 85. 38. Ε. I. Watkins, in Poets and Mystics (London, 1953), pp. 281-282, has made a comparison whose point is very like this one of mine; see also the passages in Edward Dowden's early Puritan and Anglican (London, 1900), pp. 120-122, 126. 39. Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (London, 1952), pp. 19-20. 40. Certain modern theologians have turned to the question of the nature and function of symbolism with a vital interest. Thus Paul J. Tillich observes that "the direct object of theology is not God [Who cannot be "the object of conceptual discourse"]; the direct object of theology is His manifestation to us, and the expression of this manifestation is the religious symbol. . . . The object of theology is found in the symbols of reli141

N O T E S ON C H A P T E R I gious experience. . . . In these symbols there is expressed that which is the content of every religion, the basis of every religious experience and the foundation of every theology, the divine-human encounter." Mr. Tillich's conception of the symbol, which is essentially that of Coleridge and Jung, is one I share with him: "Although the word, 'symbol,' does not make this immediately clear, the symbol actually participates in the power of that which it symbolizes. The symbol is not a mere convention as is the sign. It grows organically. The symbol opens up a level of meaning which otherwise is closed. It opens up a stratum of reality, of meaning and being which otherwise we could not reach; and in doing so, it participates in that which it opens. And it does not only open up a stratum of reality, it also opens up the corresponding stratum of the mind." ("Theology and Symbolism," in Religious Symbolism [New York and London, 1955], pp. 108-109. See also F. W. Dillistone, Christianity and Symbolism [Philadelphia, 1955].) In Vaughan's poetry there are many images, like the cock or dew, which by themselves are signs bearing a conventionally defined meaning; but these images transcend their semiotic significance as they function in the context of the total network of interrelations. The cock traditionally may stand for the awakened and conscientious Christian soul, or for the priest, and it does also in Vaughan. But as this bird of light takes its place in Vaughan's landscape in harmony with the turtle-doves and hymning streams and groves, and in contrast with the feral fires and birds of night, all of it animate with a sense of secret Life, then the cock is no longer a sign but has become a symbol, a living pertinence in Vaughan's country of the soul. 41. Edmund Blunden, On the Poems of Henry Vaughan: Characteristics and Imitations (London, 1927). 42. T. S. Eliot, "The Silurist," The Dial, 83:260-261, 263 (1927). 43. J. B. Leishman, The Metaphysical Poets (Oxford, 1934), p. 166; Bennett, Four Metaphysical Poets, p. 289. 44. White, The Metaphysical Poets, p. 289. 45. This statement is especially surprising coming from Miss White who, in her English Devotional Literature: 1600-1640 (Madison, 1931) University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 29, shows herself familiar with some of the greatest mystics as well as with the seventeenthcentury religious temper. 46. Edward Chauncey Baldwin, "Wordsworth and Hermes Trismegistus," PMLA, 33:235-243 (1918). 47. John Smith Harrison, Platonism in English Poetry (New York, 1903)· 48. Percy H. Osmond, The Mystical Poets of the English Church (London and New York, 1919), p. 155. 49. A. C. Judson, SP, 24:592-606 (1927). 50. L. C. Martin, "Henry Vaughan and the Theme of Infancy," in 142

INTRODUCTION Seventeenth Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson (Oxford, 1938). 51. Merritt Hughes, PQ, 20:484-500 (1941). 52. Malcom Ross, Poetry and Dogma (New Brunswick, 1954), p. 95; compare Ε. I. Watkin, Poets and Mystics, pp. 294-295. 53. Macdonald, England's Antiphon, pp. 406-407; quoted by Grosart in Wor\s of Henry Vaughan, II, lxiii-lxiv. 54. For a similar conception, see James Baird's Ishmael (Baltimore, 1956), p. ixf., where he explains his idea of "organic wholes." 55. F. E. Hutchinson, The Cambridge History of English Literature, VII, 41. 56. Robert Sencourt, Outfiying Philosophy (London, c. 1924), pp. 202, 195· 57. Holmes, Henry Vaughan and the Hermetic Philosophy, pp. 9, 18, 35. 58. Among such articles, not previously mentioned, are the following: Helen S. Hughes, "Night in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan," MLN, 28:208211 (1913); G. C. Moore Smith, "The Works of Henry Vaughan," MLR, 11:245-247 (1916); Edward Bensley, "Notes on Henry Vaughan," MLR, 14:103-105 (1919); A. C. Judson, "Cornelius Agrippa and Henry Vaughan," MLN 41:178-181 (1926); Arthur J. M. Smith, "Some Relations between Henry Vaughan and Thomas Vaughan," Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, 18:551-561 (1933); Edouard Roditi, "Henry Vaughan," The Spectator, 149:211 (1932); Wilson O. Clough, "Henry Vaughan and the Hermetic Philosophy," PMLA, 48:1108-1130 (1933); R. M. Wardle, 'Thomas Vaughan's Influence upon the Poetry of Henry Vaughan," PMLA, 51:936-952 (1936); L. C. Martin, "Henry Vaughan and 'Hermes Trismegistus,'" RES, 18:301-307 (1942); D. C. Allen "Henry Vaughan's 'The Ass,'" MLN, 58:612-614 (1942), and "Henry Vaughan's 'Salome on Ice,'" PQ, 23:84-85 (1944); E. L. Marilla, "Henry and Thomas Vaughan," MLR, 39:180-183 (1944); Richard H. Walters, "Henry Vaughan and the Alchemists," RES, 23:107-122 (1947); Μ. M. Mahood, Poetry and Humanism (New Haven, 1950); Bain Tate Stewart, "Hermetic Symbolism in Henry Vaughan's T h e Night,'" PQ, 29:416-422 (1950); E. C. Pettet, "A Simile in Vaughan," TLS, January 27, 1956, p. 53. 59. Leishman, The Metaphysical Poets, pp. 176, 158. 60. White, The Metaphysical Poets, pp. 308-309. 61. Ruth Preston Lehmann, "Henry Vaughan and Welsh Poetry: A Contrast," PQ, 24:333 (1945). 62. Ruth Preston Lehmann, "Characteristic Imagery in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan," unpublished dissertation (University of Wisconsin, 1942). 63. Vaughan's abrupt lapse into silence in the middle of his life calls to my mind the fact that when Thomas Aquinas had been granted mystical knowledge he considered all he had done before as so much straw and stubble, and wrote no more. Recalling the Silurist's supplications for the 143

N O T E S ON C H A P T E R I full vision and union, one wishes that his silence were the consequence of just such an experience, the fulfillment of his desires. 64. Itrat-Husain, The Mystical Element in the Metaphysical Poets, pp. 223-225. 65. Μ. M. Mahood, Poetry and Humanism. (New Haven, 1950), pp. 255, 294. 66. Ibid., pp. 252, 26if. 67. ELH, 21:94-106 (1954). 68. S. L. Bethel, The Cultural Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (London, 1951), pp. 139-140. 69. Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, 1955). 70. Ross Garner, Henry Vaughan: Experience and the Tradition (Chicago, 1959), pp. 20, 162-163. 71. Ibid., pp. 66, 78, 149. 72. Ibid., pp. 72-73. 73. Wor\s, L. C. Martin, ed., p. 538. 74· Garner, pp. 74-75. 75. E. C. Pettet, Of Paradise and Light: A Study of Vaughan's Silex Scintillans (Cambridge, England, i960), pp. 21-22. 76. Ibid., pp. 71, 72-73, 82. 77. Ibid., pp. 86, 87. 78. Ibid., p. 196. 79. Ibid., p. 201. II. T H E

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1. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism (London, 1949), p. 128. 2. The Wor\s, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford, 1914), 2 vols. 3. See Appendix A. 4. In this poem Vaughan refers only to the cock, which is, moreover, a special case, as D. C. Allen has shown ("Vaughan's 'Cock-crowing' and the Tradition," ELH, 21:94-106 [1954]). But we know from the body of his work that Vaughan considered all creatures to be in continuous "commerce" with their Creator, though without the specific conventional meanings attached to the cock; for, as Thomas Vaughan maintains, "Though His full-eyed love shines on nothing but man, yet everything in the world is in some measure directed for his preservation by a spice or touch of the First Intellect." ( T h e Wor\s of Thomas Vaughan, ed. A. E. Waite [London, 1919], p. 81. See Appendix B, "The Book of Creation.") 5. Thomas Vaughan stresses man's inspiration of the Divini Spiritus at his creation: "In Ezekiel the Spirit comes from the four winds and breathes upon the slain, that they might live. Now, this Spirit was the Spirit of Life, the same with that Breath of Life which was breathed into the first 144

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man, and he became a living soul. But without doubt the Breath or Spirit of Life is the Spirit of God" (Worfa, ed. Waite, p. 53). 6. The Homilies of St. John Chrysostom on the Gospel of St. Matthew, xliv.4, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Library (hereafter, Nicene), ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, X, 281. 7. St. Bernard, On the Song of Songs, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. (London, 1952), p. 85. 8. Meister Ec\hart, trans. Raymond Bernard Blakeney (New York, I 9 4 1 ) , p. 121.

9. Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, trans. Dom Gerard Sitwell (London, 1953), p. 222. 10. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, ii.n, ed. Jean-Jacques Denonain (Cambridge, England, 1953), p. h i . 11. What is significant in this connection about Vaughan's motif that "celestial natures still / Aspire for home" is not the question of whether or not he—like Justin Martyr for example—held the doctrine of pre-existence as an article of faith, but the way the idea functions in the poems in depicting the soul's essential nature and hence its proper relation to Life. That is, though the notion of the soul's prior existence is frequently implicit in Vaughan's poetry, we cannot assume that as a good Anglican he believed in it as creed, nor is it necessary that the question be decided. For as we are concerned with his poetry and not primarily with his theology, our interest is in meanings larger than—though often found through —dogma. The images connoting the soul's pre-existence are important not in themselves as doctrine but as they coordinate with the central complexities of Vaughan's meaning, as they fill in our understanding of his vision of the soul of man and the purpose of his life. The effort to fix the orthodoxy of the elements of that vision can only blur our perception and limit its horizons. 12. Compare Jacob Boehme: "Now observe, what I have signified by this Similitude: The Garden of this Tree signifies the World; the Soil or Mould signifies Nature; the Stock of the Tree signifies the Stars; by the Branches are meant the Elements; the Fruit which grows on this Tree signifies Man; the Sap in the Tree resembles the pure Deity. Now Men were made out of Nature, the Stars and Elements, but God the Creator reigneth in all: Even as the Sap does in the whole Tree." 'The Author's Preface" to Aurora, 7, in The Worths of facob Behem, the Teutonic Theosopher, with figures illustrating his principles, left by the Reverend William Law, M. A. (London, 1764-1781), I, 10. This, the so-called "Law edition," in four quarto volumes, is largely a reprinting of the English translations made between 1644 and 1663 by John Sparrow, John Ellistone, and Charles Hotham. It was published after Law's death by his friends, George Ward and Thomas Langcake. All quotations of Boehme's writings, unless otherwise noted, are from this edition. 145

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13. "Anthroposophia Theomagica," in Workj of Thomas Vaughan, ed. A. E. Waite, p. 49. 14. Ibid., p. 10. 15. St. Bernard, On the Song of Songs, pp. 255-256. 16. Ibid., pp. 254-255. Compare Jacob Boehme: Man "lies now shut up after his Fall in a gross, deformed, bestial dead Image . . . he is as the gross Ore in Saturn, wherein the Gold is couched and shut up; his paradisical Image is in him as if it were not. . . . till the Artist who has made him takes him in Hand . . . and a new Man arises in Holiness and Righteousness, which lives before God, [and his divine Image] appeares and puts forth its Lustre as the hidden Gold out of the earthly Property" (1Signatura Rerum, viii.47—48; Wor\s, IV, 58). 17. St. Bernard, On the Song of Songs, p. 254. Dean Inge has found this distinction between imago and similitudo, having a strong Patristic sanction, to be "accepted by all mystical writers." He explains that "though we are made in the image of God, our li\eness to Him only exists potentially. The Divine spark already shines within us, but it has to be searched for in the innermost depths of our personality, and its light diffused over our whole being" (Christian Mysticism [London, 1948], p. 7). 18. As Boehme expresses it: "The written Word is but an instrument whereby the Spirit leadeth us to itself within us" ("Of Regeneration," viii.189, in Wor\s, IV, 68). Basil Willey explains the similar conviction of the Cambridge Platonists that "the gospel is not a body of doctrines, but a saving influx moulding the heart towards the divine likeness and quickening a godlike life within" (The Seventeenth Century Background [New York, 1953], p. 156). 19. The Sophie Hydrolith in The Hermetic Museum (London, 1953), 1,96; see also Vaughan's translation from Nierembergius: "Certaine Divine Raies breake out of the Soul in adversity, like sparks of fire out of the afflicted flint" (p. 249). There is a pertinent quotation in Mario Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (London, 1939), 1,190, from Canto iv of Marino's Adone: Selce ch'auree scintille in seno asconde II lor chiuso splendor mostrar non pote, Se da l'interne sue vene profonde Non le tragga il focil, che la percote. (A flint which conceals golden sparks in its bosom cannot show their hidden splendour until the steel, which smites it, draws them from its deep inner veins.)

This imagery recurs in Vaughan (see pp. 159, 249), and has its Biblical origins in such verses as Ps. cxiv.8; Ezek. xxxvi.26; Jer.xxiii.29. It is also found in Thomas Vaughan (ed. Waite, pp. 32, 113, 302); see also, Quarles, Emblems, 111,8. For translations of the Latin verses accompanying the emblem on the title page of the 1650 ed. of Silex Scintillans see Grosart's 146

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Fuller Worthies ed., I, 327-328, and Edmund Blunden's On the Poems of Henry Vaughan, p. 62. Rosemond Tuve would relate Vaughan's title to the image, found in the Biblia Pauperum and Prudentius (Cathem. v,5ff.), of Christ as the silex; and, though the flint in Vaughan is most immediately man's hard heart, Miss Tuve's suggestion is possible inasmuch as Christ is the Cornerstone and the Rock, and whatever sparks of Divinity man may show are ultimately from Him. ( A Reading of George Herbert [London, 1952], p. 67, n.21.) The possibility of this kind of ambiguity may be seen more clearly perhaps in this quotation from Bernardino De Laredo: What else is meant by the rising of the fire of the sacrifice from the rock save the rising upward of the love which God creates in souls? This love rises up from the corner-stone, Christ Jesus, our most living Flint, Who is never touched by spiritual steel without giving forth fire from Himself. (The Ascent of Mount Sion, trans. E. A. Peers [London, 1952], p. 72 )

The sparks are the soul's love for Christ rising up towards Him, but they are at the same time of Him. Thus, though the specific occurrences of the silex scintillans image in Vaughan do not enforce the conception of Christ as silex, it can be seen that such an extension of meaning is perfectly in accord with Vaughan's thought and orthodoxy. Jung points out that in the blessing of the new fire on the Saturday before Easter "the fire is 'like onto' Christ, an imago Christi. The stone from which the spark is struck is the 'cornerstone'—another imago; and the spark that leaps from the stone is yet again an imago Christi" (Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull [London, 1953], p. 339)· 20. The Inward Journey of Isaac Penington: an abbreviation of Penington's works by Robert J. Leach (Pendle Hill, c. 1943), p. 13, from the second London edition of 1761. 21. John Ellistone, "The Preface to the Reader," in Jacob Boehme's Signatur a Rerum {Works, IV, 4). 22. Private Prayers, Put Forth by Authority during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. The Boo\ of Christian Prayers of 1578, ed. W. K. Clay (Cambridge, 1852), pp. 524-525. 23. "Ex Deo . . . per regenerationem & adoptionem factus Dei filius . . ." Γη the Synopsis Criticorum, ed. Poli Matthaei [Matthew Poole] (London, 1669), on 1 John iii.9. See also Mark x.14-15. The Biblical commentators knew very well what the word "child" signified in the Christian world; on Matt, xviii.3, for example ("Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven"), they write: "Nisi conversi sitis ad Deum ab quae vos aversos tenet ambitione. . . . Nisi animum vestrum superbum in humilem mutavertitis." And Grotius states: "Puero autem similes vult fieri Christus scctatares suos, quod ea aetas longissimi absit ab isto studio, quod ne ad juventam, referri solet." Diodati (Pious and Learned Annotations upon the Holy Bible, trans. Nicholas Fussell, 2nd ed. [London, 1648], p. 26) sums up the '47

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conventional understanding of this verse: "In humility, simplicity, fear, innocency, docility, &c. Mat.n. 25. Ps. 13. 1, 2. nor in ambition of worldly honours, desiring not to excell one another therein." Long before these men wrote, however, one of the greatest of the Fathers, Clement of Alexandria, had explained very clearly to the world in what sense Christians were called children (The Instructor, I, vi, in The Ante-Nicene Library [hereafter, Ante-Nicene], ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, IV, 131. 24. Jacob Boehme, Of Christ's Testaments, i.12, in Works, IV, 167. 25. Thomas Vaughan, Anima Magica Abscondita in Worlds, ed. Waite, p. 81. This conception of the innate drive of the soul back toward its Source derives most influentially from Neoplatonism; thus Enneads, V. v,i2, for example: "All that exists desires and aspires towards the Supreme by a compulsion of nature . . ."; and IV. viii, 4: "The appetite for the divine intellect urges [souls] to return to their source . . ." (trans. Stephen Mackenna [London, 1954], 2nd rev. ed., pp. 360, 412. Pre-eminently through Augustine and the pseudo-Dionysius the idea pervades Christianity. 26. "Therefore on the one hand they call Him the Object of Love and Yearning as being Beautiful and Good, and on the other they call Him Yearning and Love as being a Motive-Power leading all things to Himself . . ." The Divine Names, iv.14, trans. C. E. Rolt (London, 1951), p. 107. 27. It is the frequent lamentation of the mystics that the raptus, so rarely given, is so briefly enjoyed, and the "journey back to habitual self," as Keats knew, so hard to endure. "And sometimes," Augustine tells his Lord, "You admit me to a state of mind that I am not ordinarily in, a kind of delight which could it ever be made permanent in me would be hard to distinguish from the life to come. But by the weight of my imperfections I fall back again, and I am swallowed up by things customary: I am bound, and I weep bitterly, but I am bifterly bound." (Confessions, X, 40, trans. F. J. Sheed [London and New York, 1954], p. 204.) 28. St. Augustine, On the Psalms, lii.8 (Nicene, VIII, 199-200). 29. The Third Epistle, 7; see John Thomson, ed., The Epistles of Jacob Boehme (Glasgow, 1886, reprinted from the 1649 ed.), pp· 2of. and 83. As Christ is the Lily, so are those true believers who emulate Him growing up as lilies, or, put another way, growing the lilies of heavenly virtues in their hearts. (Cf. St. Bernard, On the Song of Songs, p. 218.) One of Christopher Harvey's emblems in Schola Cordis (London, 1647) depicts Christ gathering lilies from the heart which, in the former two emblems, He had tilled and seeded; his text is also Canticles vi.2: "My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies." Edmund Arwaker in the Pia Desideria (III, iii, 2nd ed. [London, 1690], p. 167) describes the love union of Bridegroom and Spouse thus: 148

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In Paradices of delight it feeds, Where whitest Lilies deck th' enamell'd Meads: Among which Emblems of our pure desires, We in chast pleasures quench our nuptial fires.

In Henry Hawkin's The Devout Heart (Rouen, 1634), a translation of F. St. Luzvic's Le Coeur Devot (Douai, 1627), there is a section in which ' T h e Hart consecrated to the love of Jesus is a flourishing garden," wherein the lily figures as "a noble Hierogrifike of a snowy mind, a candid purity, and a cleane hart . . ." (pp. 163-164). Hawkin's Partheneia Sacra or the Mysterious and Delicious Garden of the Sacred Parthenes (Rouen, 1633), as the title indicates also concerns the garden of the soul. See Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books (London, 1948), pp. i77f. John Donne, in one of his sermons, uses the lily to symbolize the condition of transcendent purity of the mystical death: . . . I will finde out another death, mortem raptus, a death of rapture, and of exstasie, that death which S. Paul died more than once, the death which S. Gregory speaks of, Divinia contemflatio quoddam sepulchrum animae, The contemplation of God, and heaven, is a kinde of buriall, and Sepulchre, and rest of the soule; and in this death of rapture, and extasie, in this death of the Contemplation of my interest in my Saviour, I shall finde my self, and all sins enterred, and entombed in his wounds, and like a Lily in Paradise, out of red earth, I shall see my soule rise out of his blade, [blode?] in a candor, and in an innocence, contracted there, acceptable in the sight of his Father. ( L X X X Sermons, 27, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. [Berkeley, 1 9 5 3 ], II, 2 1 0 - 2 1 1 . The image recurs in his poem, "The Litanie," stanza i.)

Thus Vaughan, in the final stanza of "Cock-crowing," though he has not attained the mortem raptus and is not pure, is "no Lilie," begs the Lord to continue His sustaining grace and illumination: "Though with no Lilie, stay with me!" 30. On the Song of Songs, p. 146. Again (p. 219): "So if you, who hear or read these words, would have the Dweller among lilies dwell in you, your character must have the lily's purity and fragrance too." 31. Ibid., pp. 201-202. 32. The Complete Works of Saint Teresa of Jesus, trans, and ed. E. A. Peers (London, 1944), I, 65; see also Isa. lviii.11 33. Joseph Hall, Works, ed. P. Hall, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1837), XI, 68. George Herbert's "The Answer" contains this image of weak exhalations. The Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), p. 169. 34. Confessions, viii.8 (trans. Sheed, p. 136). 35. Works, ed. Hall, V, 203, a sermon (xiv) on Ps. cvii.34: "He turneth a fruitful land into barrenness, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein." 149

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36. The Complete Works, trans. Peers, I, 87. Compare George Herbert's "Affliction ( v ) " : Affliction then is ours; We are the trees, whom shaking fastens more, While blustring windes destroy the wanton bowres, And ruffle all their curious knots and store. (The Works, ed. Hutchinson, p. 97.) 37. Rose and rose-tree in the writings of Heinrich Suso are emblems, as in this poem of Vaughan's, of the beneficent suffering the Lord sends His servants: This holy daughter told him that she had once seen in the spirit a beautiful rose tree well adorned with red roses, and on the rose tree appeared the child Jesus with a chaplet of red roses. Under the rose tree she saw the Servant sitting. The child plucked many roses and then threw them on the Servant, so that he was entirely strewn with red roses. She asked the child what the roses signified, and he said: "The number of the roses is the manifold sufferings that God will send him, which he should accept kindly from God and endure patiently." (The Life of the Servant, xxxiv; trans. James M. Clark [London, 1952], p. 103; cf. xxii, pp. 66-67.) 38. Imitation, xxiii.5. Compare Vaughan: "sanctifie and supple my heart with the dew of thy divine Spirit, refresh it with the streams of thy grace, that I may bring forth fruit in due season, and not cumber the ground, nor be cut off in thy anger" (p. 145). See also, George Herbert's "Grace," in Wor\s, ed. Hutchinson, p. 60. 39. One of the principal Old Testament prefigurations of the Savior's coming to earth was the falling of the manna, or dew, to feed the Israelites in the wilderness, as Christ spiritually "feeds" His members at Holy Communion. "The explanation of one thing is a key to the rest," writes Augustine. "For if the rock is Christ, from its stability, is not the manna Christ, the living bread which came down from heaven, which gives spiritual life to those who truly feed on it?" {Reply to Faustus the Manichaean, xii.29, Nicene, IV, 193). Thus the Biblia Pauperum and Speculum Humanae Scdvationis juxtapose pictures of the scene in Exodus and the Last Supper; see The Boo\ of Common Prayer in the edition of 1863 (London), which reproduces Holbein's plates depicting the conjunction. 40. Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, II, xxiv (trans. Sitwell, p. 203). 41. "Of Regeneration," iv.91, vii.178, in Wor\s, IV, 58, 67. 42. Of the Christian Faith, 1,7 (Nicene, X , 209). 43. The idea of God's fire of love and grace melting man's hard, frozen heart occurs frequently in emblem literature. See, for example, Quarles, Emblems, V.5, and Christopher Harvey, Schola Cordis, Ode 16, "The Softening of the Heart." 150

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44. Religio Medici, i.32 (ed. Denonain, pp. 49-50). 45. Confessions, ii.7 (trans. Sheed, p. 27). 46. Imitation, xiv.2. 47. Thomas Vaughan, Lumen de Lumine (ed. Waite, p. 297). Herbert's "The Flower" is built upon this imagery of reviving vegetation; its first stanza is: How fresh, Ο Lord, how sweet and clean Are thy returns! ev'n as the flower in spring; The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring. Grief melts away Like snow in May, As if there were no such cold thing.

This poem is closer in imagery and fervor to Vaughan's cluster than any other poem in Herbert; but see his "Employment ( 1 ) . " Wor\s, ed. Hutchinson, pp. 165, and 57. 48. Wor\s, ed. Hall, V, 419. 49. Thomas Vaughan declares that fire, "the fourth and last substance, the highest in scala Naturae," is "the mask and screen of the Almighty: wheresoever He is, this train of fire attends Him. . . ." Anthroposofhia Theomagica (ed., Waite, p. 25). Fire was, of course, one of Boehme's primary symbols. 50. Though Vaughan will use water imagery in association with regeneration, he seems at times to connect its function with preparatory cleansing and purgation, reserving fire to signify that fulfilling influx of grace "from above" which alone can make a new man. John baptizes with water, but Christ with the Holy Spirit and fire. In the proem to the 1655 Silex he seems to distinguish the ordinary entrance into the Christian life, to which he exhorts his readers, from the special illumination he has received, in terms of water (tears) and fire: Praise him, who dealt his gifts so free In tears to you, in fire to me.

And in his address ' T o the Reader" of his translation of Nierembergius (p. 216) Vaughan speaks as one who has passed through the fire, as one having authority and not as one of the scribes: "Candidus & medicans Ignis deus est. So sings the Poet, and so must I affirme, who have been tryed by that white and refining fire, with healing under his wings." The distinction is by no means certain or clear, but if it obtains it is such as Joseph Hall draws in this statement: "Shortly, then, if we would be sons and daughters of God . . . we must see, that we be born again: not of water only; so we are all sacramentally regenerated; but of the Holy Ghost" (Wor\s, V, 531). To undergo the baptismal rite as members of a Christian society is one thing, but to have the very breath of the J

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Holy Spirit breathed into the soul is another; the latter is the full realization and consecration of what the former signifies. Thus, Hugh of St. Victor, in discussing "what the difference is between the baptism of lohn and that of Christ," considers that in the first "the sacrament alone was given," whereas in the second "with the sacrament the power of the sacrament also is received." (On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith, II, vi.6, trans. Roy J. Defarrari [Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1951], p. 292.) Thus Diodati on John 1.26 has the Baptist say, in paraphrase, "and upon him depends all the spirituall virtue, whereof I dispense nothing but the outward signe"; and on John i.33, "with the holy Ghost By which baptism receiveth its power to fulfill that which is represented by it" (Pious and Learned Annotations, pp. 81-82). 51. Treatise on Purgatory, i; trans. C. Balfour and H. D. Irvine (London, 1946), p. 17. 52. Walter Hilton, The Scale of Perfection, I, xxxi (trans. Sitwell, p. 43). The scriptural imagery of the refining fire is, as one might expect, frequently adopted by the spiritual alchemists. Thus Catherine of Genoa is writing out of the Biblical tradition: "Look at gold: the more you melt it, the better it becomes . . ."; and she reaches the inevitable conclusion: "Thus the divine fire works in the soul: God holds the soul in the fire until its every imperfection is burnt away and it is brought to perfection, as it were to the purity of twenty-four carats . . ." (The Scale of Perfection, I, x, p. 27). But John Pordage, the spiritual alchemist and leader of the "sect of Behmenists," employs nearly identical imagery: "Accordingly and so that I could arrive at a fundamental and complete cleansing from all tares and earthiness . . . I gave over my will entirely to its [wisdom's] fiery smelting furnace as to a fire of purification, till all my vain and chaff-like desires and the tares of earthly lust had been burnt away as by fire, and all my iron, tin and dross had been entirely melted in this furnace, so that I appeared in spirit as pure gold, and could see a new heaven and a new earth created and formed within me." Quoted by Herbert Silberer, Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism, trans. S. E. Jelliffe (New York, 1917), p. 172. The Jesuit Jeremy Drexelius in his excellent work, The Heliotropium; or, Conformity of the Human Will to the Divine Expounded in Five Boo\s, trans, from the Latin by Rev. R. N. Shutte (London, 1863), has recourse to similar imagery when discussing affliction: "Fire tries gold, and misery tries brave men" (p. 116). He quotes St. Augustine at length to the same effect (p. 238). 53. The Complete Wor\s of St. John of the Cross (trans. Peers, III, 18). 54. On the Song of Songs, p. 183. One is reminded of the famous Memorial of Pascal: "depuis environ dix heures et demie du soir jusques environ minuit et demie, Feu" (quoted in full in Underhill, Mysticism, p. 189).

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55. T . S. Eliot's conclusion to the Four Quartets (alluding to Julian of Norwich). 56. "The Storm" of George Herbert is also purgative: "Poets have wrong'd poore storms: such dayes are best; / They purge the aire without, within the breast." (Wor\s, ed. Hutchinson, p. 132.) 57. The use of the sunflower as the emblem of the soul faithful to God was widespread in Vaughan's day (and reappears in Blake). George Wither's Collection of Emblemes (London, 1635) contains an exposition upon the flower's constancy in turning always to the sun, after which the meaning is drawn in relation to the soul and the Sun of Righteousness (p. 109). The sunflower in Cowley's book of plants says of itself and its Sun: My Orb-like golden Aspect bound with Rays, The very Picture of his Face displays . . . This resemblance quickly becomes, however, the basis for a very unChristian display of pride: Presume not then, ye Earth-born Mushroom brood To call me Brother—I derive my Blood From Phoebus self, which by my Form I prove, And (more than by my Form) my filial Love. I still adore my Sire with prostrate Face, Turn where he turns, and all his motion trace. The Second and Third Parts of Mr. Abraham Cowley (London, 1700), "Of Plants," p. 100. Drexelius makes a more consistently pious use of the image throughout The Heliotropium. 58. Wor\s, ed. Hall, XI, 100. 59. Pia Desideria, III, xii (2nd ed., London, 1690), p. 218. 60. Boehme, Aurora, xxiv.38, in Wor\s, I, 242. 61. This symbolism attained a grand development on the slightest of scriptural bases. The author of The Epistle to the Hebrews transformed the story of the Patriarchs into a metaphor of man as a pilgrim on earth, desiring "a better country, that is, an heavenly" (Heb. xi.13, 16). And Peter exhorted his listeners to righteousness in like terms: "Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul" (1 Pet. i i . n ) . By the time of the Renaissance the interpretation of such a passage was fixed. As the learned Diodari explicates, in his precise way: Pilgrimage vis: In this world, a place of travell for us, and not our owne native countrey: whereby the goods and delights thereof are not our proper goods, and the too much studying and fixing ourselves upon hindereth our endeavour and care which we aught to take in this our voyage to heaven. (Pious and Learned Annotations, p. 414).

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Yet this conception, though pervasive in Christian writing, appears to be rather dispersed as metaphor and terminology than concentrated and worked out as allegory in specific texts. In Plotinus and Augustine, for example, its imagery will be met with very frequently throughout, but not in full development. St. Bernard treats the parable of the Prodigal Son at some length as a pilgrimage (PL, 183:757-761). More famous are the chapters in Walter Hilton's The Scale of Perfection (II, xxif.) where he teaches the way to God "by taking the example of a pilgrim." There are also John Gerson's De Monte Contemplationis and Testamentum Peregrini (Opera Omnia [Antwerp, 1706], III, j6yf; I, I2gf); and the passage paraphrasing Hilton in Fr. Baker's Sancta Sophia, I, i.6. In literature, of course, besides such famous examples as Dante, Chaucer, Piers Plowman, and Bunyan, there are very many works based in whole or in part upon this allegory of the life of man, such as De Guileville's Pelerenage de la Vie Humaine and Nicholas Breton's The Pilgrimage to Paradise. See James B. Wharey, A Study of the Sources of Bunyan's Allegories (Baltimore, 1904), for an extensive listing of such works. 62. On the Psalms, cxiii.i (Nicene, VIII, 596). 63. Ibid., cxxii (p. 593). 64. Imitation, II, i.3. 65. William Cowper, A Most Comfortable and Christian Dialogue, betweene the Lord, and the Soule (London, 1611), p. 70. 66. Wor\s, ed. Hall, XI, 67-68. 67. On the Psalms, lxxvii.4 (Nicene, VIII, 361). 68. Imitation, III, xlviii.i. 69. Ibid., II, xxxiv.3; see also Quarles, Emblems, I, 14. 70. Confessions, I, ν (trans. Sheed, p. 3). 71. St. Bernard, On the Love of God, vii; trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. (New York, 1951), p. 52. Harvey, Schola Cordis, Ode 10, cites Hab. ii.5: "Who enlargeth his desire as hell, and is as death, and cannot be satisfied." His epigram is: The whole round world is not enough to fill The heart's three corners, but it craveth still, Only the Trinity, that made it, can Suffice the vast triangled heart of man.

72. On the Love of God, vii; p. 50. Herbert's ' T h e Pulley" was, of course, Vaughan's closest model. See Traherne's Centuries of Meditations, I, 22-24. 73. Imitation, II, 1.4. 74. On the Gospel of St. John, xli.io; Nicene, IV, 229. 75. Quarles's Emblems are filled with the journey motif. In II, 1 1 , for example, Matt, vn.14 is cited, and the pilgrim contrasts the two ways thus: 'Tis true; my way is hard and strait, And leads me through a thorny gate:

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Whose rankling pricks are sharp and fell; The common way to heav'n's by hell. T i s true; thy path is short and fair, And free from rubs: Ah! fool, beware, The safest road's not always ev'n: The way to hell's a seeming heav'n . . .

Cf. Theologia Germanica, xl: "Christ's soul must needs descend into hell, before it ascended into heaven. So must also the soul of man" (ed. Joseph Berhnhart [London, 1951], p. 1 3 1 ) . 76. Quoted by Underhill, Mysticism, p. 222. 77. The Scale of Perfection, II, xxi (trans. Sitwell, p. 193). 78. Thomas Vaughan quotes Mirandola (No. 8 of the Conclusiones Kabalisticae), in Anthroposophia Theomagica (ed. Waite, p. 46). The Biblical commentators were forthright on the evil significance of night: "The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light" (Rom. xiii.12). Nox here is variously, "tempus Legis Mosaicae, sive ante adventum Christi"; "tempus persecutionis a Judaeis"; "nox hujus seculi, plena tenebris errorum & peccatorum"; "tempus infidelitatis, & ignorationes Dei"; "magna rerum bonarum ignorantia"; "status caecitatis ante conversionem"; see Poole's Synopsis Criticorum on this verse. To Diodati night is, in sum, "the time of this world's lasting, which is but as a darke night in respect of the world to come" (Pious and Learned Annotations, p. 174). 79. On the Psalms, cxix (Nicene, VIII, 569). 80. Quarles is specific about these "spiritual hunters": These purlieu-men are devils; and the hounds (Those quick-nos'd cannibals, that scour the grounds) Temptations; and the game, the fiends pursue, Are humane souls, which still they have in view; Whose fury if they chance to 'scape, by flying, The skilful hunter plants his net, close lying On th' unsuspected earth, baited with treasure, Ambitious honour, and self-wasting pleasure: Where, if the soul but stoop, death stands prepar'd To draw the net, and drown the souls ensnared.

Elsewhere he assures Cupid, who is the villain cupidity, vulgar eros, that he need not go to so much trouble to snare idiot man, who is readier to be caught than he to catch: Husband thy flights: It is but vain to waste Honey on those will be catch'd with gall; Thou canst not, ah I thou canst not bid so fast As men obey: Thou art more slow to call Than he to come . . .

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He cites "S. Bern, in Ser.": "In this world is much treachery, little truth; here all things are traps; here everything is beset with snares; here souls are endangered, bodies are afflicted; here all things are vanity and vexation of spirit." (Emblems, III, 9; II, 3.) 81. The Scale of Perfection, II, xxii (trans. Sitwell, pp. 198-200). See S t Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, iv.i, for a similar description of the reaction of the children of the world to the endeavors of the seekers after God. 82. The Scale of Perfection, p. 198. 83. On the Gospel of St. ]ohn, ii.16 (Nicene, IV, 18). 84. "For the Lord gives light to the blind. Therefore, we, brethren, having the eye salve of faith, are now enlightened. For His spittle did before mingle with the earth, by which the eyes of him who was born blind were anointed. We, too, have been born blind of Adam, and have need of Him to enlighten us. He mixed spittle with clay: T h e Word was made flesh, and dwelt among u s ' " (On the Gospel of St. John, xxiv.g, p. 203). Cf. Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor, I, vi (Ante-Nicene, I, 133). 85. The Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino theorized that if a man were to purify himself, thus becoming "celestial," he could mount to heaven, for he would have become susceptible to the vibrations of the spiritus mundi as transmitted by the stellar rays. And the fact that Pico di Mirandola went to the trouble of attacking the idea that the stars are the agency of God's providence indicates its popularity. See D. C. Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance (Durham, 1941), pp. 10, 28; see pp. 36 (n), 49. 57, 80, 97, and 43, 65, 69, 72. 86. Astrologie Theologised (London, 1649), p. 6; cited by Holmes, p. 32. Stars symbolize the soul in Horapollo's Hieroglyphica (II, 1), which was frequently translated and reprinted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—not to mention the elaborations available in such a commentary as that of Valeriano. See Boas's Introduction to The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo (New York, 1950). 87. The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelsus the Great, trans. A. E. Waite (London, 1894), II, 283. 88. Anthroposophia Theomagica (ed. Waite, p. 41). This "Medial Soul" is that which man shares in common with all of the creation, minerals as well as animals and vegetables; and the "influence" it is under is from God. "In plain terms it is part of the Soul of the World, commonly called the Medial Soul because the influences of the Divine Nature are conveyed through it to the more material parts of the creature . . ." (pp. 40-41). 89. The Threefold Life of Man, vii.73, xi.35, in Wor\s, II, 77, 115. Boehme probably adopted the idea of the "sidereal body" from Paracelsus. 90. Of the Christian Faith, II, ii.24 (Nicene, X, 226). 91. St. Bonaventure advises the soul to imitate the virtues of the saints, who shine like the stars in the firmament (Collationes in Heraemeron, v. 19; Sermones de Tempore, xi). 156

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92. George Herbert addresses "The Starre" as a "bright spark, shot from a brighter place," {Works, ed. Hutchinson, p. 74), and Giles Fletcher considers the stars "so many little sparkles" of the sun, wherein "it is visibly, though absent, presented to us . . ." ( T h e Reward of the Faithful [London, 1623], pp. 307-308). 93. II, ii, pp. 84-85; cf. I, i, pp. 7-9. An image in Vaughan related to this function of the stars as guides to benighted man is that of the "clue" or "love-twist." In the "dead night" when "horrour doth creepe / And move on with the shades," the "stars nod, and sleepe," but yet "through the dark aire spin a fierie thread" (p. 410). In "The Constellation" (p. 469) the stars' "silence, and light, and watchfulness" "wind the Clue." "Sondayes" (p. 447) are "a Clue / That guides through erring hours." And Vaughan sternly questions those who wind their thoughts "into a Clue / To guide out others," while they themselves remain in sin (p. 649). When Vaughan one day had gone astray "unto the very brink," the Lord's "love-twist," His "unseen lin\" held him up (p. 462). The Virgin is called "the true Loves-knot" because through Her "God is made our Allie" (p. 506); see pp. 462.22, 465.29, 466.12, 474.73. These images and the larger group of the star-guides share the common function of revealing a continuing and beneficent relationship, a "commerce," as Vaughan often calls it, between man and his God. The stars and the clues and the threads are all from God and purposed to lead man out of the dark maze of sin and error, while the love-twist, the unseen link, denotes the essential ties and boundless love binding the Creator to His hapless creatures. Nothing could have been more dreadful to Vaughan than the thought that man had forfeited all contact with his God. (See Quarles's emblem IV,2 [of Emblems] of the pilgrim soul guided through the labyrinth by the thread extended to him by Christ in His Tower of Truth.) The idea may be found in Herbert's "The Pearl": Yet through these labyrinths, not my groveling wit, But thy silk twist let down from heav'n to me, Did both conduct and teach me, how by it To climbe to thee.

Also Traherne's: Let it be a Clew, A Gale of Air, A Golden Chain, Arising from Thy Throne, Raising me to Glory.

( " T h e Thanksgivings")

His stanza indicates that the symbolism of the "clew" and "love-twist" is closely related to that of the "golden chain," for which one might refer to Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being and A. K. Coomeraswamy's article on symbolism in the Dictionary of World Literature, ed. Joseph T. Shipley (New York, 1953).

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94. The symbolism of courtship and marriage in the Christian world is too well known and too widely dispersed to require comment It will suffice here simply to take note of some of the more important texts. Theodoret ( P G , 81:62) proclaims that the early Fathers were unanimous in their agreement concerning the mystical nature of the Canticles; he cites Eusebius, Origen, Cyprian, Basil, both Gregorys, Diodorus, and Chrysostom. Of these, perhaps Origen (PG, 13:35-58, 61-198) and Gregory of Nyssa (PG, 44:755-1120) are most famous. Ambrose (PL, 15:1821, 1851), Augustine (PL, 34:372, 925; 41:556), Gregory the Great (PL, 79:267, 471, 905), Bede (PL, 91:1065), Strabo (PL, 1 1 3 : 1 1 2 6 ) , Rupert (PL, 168:837), and Richard of St. Victor (PL, 196:405) all furthered the agreement; and Apponius, Honorius of Auton, and Aquinas wrote on the Canticles in the mystical vein. The long commentary of Bernard gave the tradition an impetus probably greater than any other (PL, 183:779). As one would expect the writings of the mystics abound in the terminology of the Canticles. In Vaughan's time, besides the wealth of critict sacri and glossed Bibles available, there were many exegitic works published, such as William Gouge's An Exposition of the Song of Solomon (London, 1615) and Henry Ainsworth's Annotations upon the Song of Songs (London, 1639). The English emblemists, following their continental sources, seem to have been partial to the Canticles for their texts. Much of the Pia Desideria, Quarles's Emblems, and Harvey's Schola Cordis, for example, expound upon passages from it. Antonius Wiericx in Cor lesu amanti sacrum, in a sequence of eighteen emblems, depicts the purgation, illumination, and union along the via mystica in images and verses similar to the cluster we are rehearsing in Vaughan. Wiericx' plates were later put to use to illustrate various Jesuit books of devotion, such as that of Fathers Etienne Luzvic and Etienne Binet, Le Coeur devot . . . (Douai, 1627), which was translated into English in 1634 as The Devout Heart or Royal Throne of the Pacified Salomon by H. A. [Henry Aston?] but without plates. See Praz, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (London, 1939), I, 139-141. 95. On the Song of Songs, p. 78. 96. "Open yourselves then, for it is written: I f any man opens, I will come in and sup with him.'" Thomas Vaughan uses this text to make a point with which Henry would have concurred: 'This is the inward mystical, not the outward, typical supper; and this is the spiritual baptism with fire, not that elemental one with water" (Magia Adamica, ed. Waite, p. 135). Recall the likely distinction found earlier in Henry Vaughan between the baptism of water and the baptism of fire, which this passage tends to corroborate. 97. Imitation, III, xxiv.2. The imagery of the heart as God's temple occurs in Herbert also; see, for example, ' T h e Church-floore," "Vanitie ( 1 ) , " "Man," "Decay," and "Sion." It does not bear so central an importance in Herbert as in Vaughan, however.

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98. Meister Ec^hart (trans. Blakeney), p. 121. 99. John Donne, LXXX Sermons, 19 (ed. Simpson and Potter, VI, 73). 100. Anima Magica Abscondita, ed. Waite, p. 111. 101. Thomas ä Kempis, Imitation, II, i.1-2. 102. On the Love οf God, p. 26. 103. Confessions, I, ν (trans. Sheed, p. 3). 104. "Kiss" draws for its meaning upon the whole tradition of the symbolism of love and marriage. When the sponsa has progressed so far toward perfection that she is free of all cupiditas she desires only this kiss, which is to say Christ Himself, or the infusion of the Holy Spirit. "So she asks boldly for the Kiss, which is that Spirit in Whom both Son and Father are revealed. In asking for this Kiss, she prays she may be given grace to know the Holy Trinity, to have the threefold knowledge of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, so far as in this mortal flesh it may be had" (St. Bernard, On the Song of Songs, p. 31). St. Bernard's contemporary, William of Saint-Thierry, held a like interpretation. When the perfected soul of man attains to that kiss which is the infusion of the Holy Spirit, then it has restored its lost likeness to God (In Cant. Cant., in PL, 180:506; and Epistola aurea, II, iii.16 in PL, 184:349; cf. Rabanus Maurus, PL, 112:1014). 'This kiss is the union whereof we are speaking, wherein the soul is made equal with God through love," writes St. John of the Cross (trans. Peers, II, 88). And for Donne also the kiss symbolizes a foretaste of beatitude: Love is as strong as death; As in death there is a transmigration of the soule, so in this spirituall love, and this expressing of it, by this kisse [Ps. ii.12: "Kiss the Son, lest he be angry"], there is a transfusion of the soule too . . . as S. Ambrose delivers it, Per osculum adhaeret anima Deo, et transjunditur spiritus osculantis, In this kisse . . . Love is as strong as death; my soule is united to my Saviour, now in my life, as in death, and I am already made one spirit with him: and whatsoever death can doe, this kisse, this union can doe, that is, give me a present, an immediate possession of the kingdome of heaven . . ." (LXXX Sermons, 41, Potter and Simpson, ed., III, 320.)

The "kiss" symbolizes the union of God and man, or, metaphysically, the "love" that unites the spiritual and physical, the infinite and finite. Thus, Thomas Vaughan, in writing about "all the close connections and that mysterious kiss of God and Nature," quite logically refers to "that merciful mystery of the Incarnation, wherein the fulness of the Godhead was incorporated and the Divine Light united to the Matter in a far greater measure than at the first creation"; and he goes on to praise Christianity on this basis as "the only true philosophy and the only true religion" since it alone "both perfectly united God to His creature . . ." (Waite, p. 93). Henry Vaughan expresses as much in defining life—or, better, Life—as "A quickness, which my God hath kist" (p. 538): the perfect union of the finite and infinite in love, agape. r

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105. De Quatuor Gradibus Violentae Charitatis, PL, 196:1216. 106. Blakeney trans., p. 186. 107. Joseph Hall, Wor\s, ed. Hall, V, 531. III.

READINGS

1. Our poem has elicited comment before: Edmund Blunden, On the Poems of Henry Vaughan (London, 1927), pp. 20-21; Itrat-Husain, The Mystical Element in the Metaphysical Poets (London, 1948), p. 214; Wilson Clough, "Henry Vaughan and the Hermetic Philosophy," PMLA, 48:1129 (1933). The present essay is rewritten from my article, "Vaughan's Theme and Its Pattern: 'Regeneration,"' SP, 54:14-28 (1957). Since then, and since my writing this version, two extended readings of the poem have appeared: Ross Garner, Henry Vaughan: Experience and the Tradition (Chicago, 1959), pp. 47-62; E. C. Pettet, Of Paradise and Light: A Study of Vaughan's Silex Scintillans (Cambridge, England, i960), pp. 101-117. 1. That is, with Vaughan, Boehme, and the mystics, the emphasis is not on ritual and dogma. It is on immediate knowing beyond all forms— noesis—which requires an absolute revolution in the deepest seats of consciousness, an absolute conversion, or death and regeneration: "a Christian is a new Creature in the Ground of his Heart" (Jacob Boehme, Mysterium Magnum, lxx.40, in Works, III, 444). 3. Franz Pfeiffer, Meister Ec\hart, trans. C. de Β. Evans (London, 1956), I, 80; "Sermon xxix." 4. The Complete Wor\s of Saint John of the Cross, trans, and ed. E. A. Peers (London, 1953), I, 62. 5. The Complete Works, trans. Peers, I, 39. Thus Crashaw says of this world: His superficiall Beames sun-burn't our skin; But left within The night & winter still of death & sin. ("In the Glorious Epiphanie of our Lord God")

6. Benjamin Minor, lxxvii (PL, 196:54). 7. Smoke designates anything void of value and substance, worldly vanities. Quarles (Emblems, II, 4) cites Hosea xiii.3: 'They shall be as the chaff that is driven with the whirlwind out of the floor, and as the smoke out of the chimney." He expounds thus: What's sweet-lipt honour's blast, but smoke? What't treasure, But very smoke? And what more smoke than pleasure? Alas! they're all but shadows, fumes and blasts; That vanishes, this fades, and other wastes.

160

READINGS Vaughan calls the "lazie breath" of a half-hearted prayer "the smoke, and Exhalations of the brest" (p. 412). Nierembergius, in Vaughan's translation, says of temporal possessions that "they creep from us like a mist or smo\e . . ." All worldly things, even while they grow, decay, As smoke doth, by ascending, wast away.

(p-273)

8. The weighing of God's goodness against Vaughan's sins is the controlling metaphor of "Repentance" (pp. 448-450), and in that poem too the sins outweigh all God's "fair, and various store"; only the Son's sacrifice can "outvie" his "score." 9. The Confessions, XIII, 9, trans. F. J. Sheed (London and New York, 1954), p. 264. 10. Christopher Harvey, Schola Cordis (London, 1647), Emblem 20. 1 1 . Vaughan might not have had any specific being in mind, or, more likely, he did not judge it consonant with the visionary, or dream-like, quality of the poem to incorporate explicitly a figure from Christian iconography. But his readers probably associated the voice, or voices, that cried Away with the archangel Michael, or "Michael and his angels" (Rev. xii.7). Michael was "especially the protector of high places" (Francis Bond, Dedications & Patron Saints of English Churches [London, 1914], p. 37) and was frequently represented with a pair of scales, in which he weighed souls. The weighing of souls was a very popular theme in ecclesiastical architecture, and Michael was probably the most popular of the angels; but sometimes it was not Michael but the hand of God that held the scales. See Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (London, 1952), p. 165, for an account of the similar theme of "the Cross as a balance, the scales of God's judgement." 12. Thomas Vaughan interprets the scene symbolically: "Now to return to Jacob, it is written of him that he was asleep, but this is a mystical speech, for it signifies death—namely, that death which the Kabalist calls Mors Osculi or the Death of the Kiss . . ." Magia Adamica, in The Worths, ed. A. E. Waite (London, 1919), p. 170. The scene at Bethel and the symbolism of "Jacob's ladder," as one might expect, appear frequently in the writings of the mystics; for in their doctrine the heart is "God's house," and their "scale of perfection," their "ascent" to God, has a natural representation in a ladder—especially since Christ is Jacob's ladder. 13. Thomas Vaughan says of Jacob's ladder: "This answers to God the Son, for it is that which mediates between extremes, and makes inferiors and superiors communicate." Anthroposophia Theomagica, ed. Waite, p. 28. 14. Matt, xxi.42; Acts i v . n ; Eph. ii.20-22; 1 Pet. ii.1-9. 15. Reply to Faustus the Manichaean, XII, 26 (Nicene IV, 192). The alchemical mystics accepted the tradition. Joachim Frizius (who is probably 161

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Robert Fludd) tells us that Jacob's stone, Aben, "that spirit-filled stone, was Christ . . . [Then] seek the cornerstone, which is the means of all change and transformation, in yourself." Summum Bonum, quod est verum Magiae, Cabdae, Alchymiae verae Subjectum Fratrum Roseae Cruets verorum (Frankfort, 1629), pp. \ηί., 34f.; quoted by Silberer, pp. 177-180. 16. Confessions, XIII, 9 . 1 have used the translation of Edward B. Pusey here as better suited to my purpose (New York, 1952), p. 273. 17. Compare St. Augustine, Confessions, II, 3 (trans. Sheed, p. 22): "O God, who are the one true and good Lord of Your field, my heart" 18. Pfeiffer, Meister Ec\hart (trans. Evans), I, 221. 19. It is interesting to note that among the Assyrians the grove emblem of Ashtoroth represented the delta, or female "door," of life. In the Middle Ages, Mary subsumed the role of Ashtoroth and was frequently pictured within a grove-like aureole, as in the woodcut tide to the Psalter of the Blessed Virgin (Czenna, 1492). See Thomas Inman, Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism (New York, 1875), pp. 129-132. Again, the Virgin is Christ's bower, as in St. Godric's "Hymn to the Virgin" ("Sainte Marie, Cristes bur"). Thus, "Virgin-soile" and the symbol of the grove in "Regeneration" coordinate to substantiate the poem's theme, announced in its title, of the birth of Christ in the regenerate heart. In 'The Night" (p. 522) the heart becomes such another "Virgin-shrine" for the Lord as Mary's womb had been. 20. Pfeiffer, Meister Ec\hart (trans. Evans), I, 38. 21. Ibid., I, 35. 22. Ibid., I, 34. 23. Mathew Poole, Synopsis Criticorum (London, 1669). 24. Thus St. Bernard: "But when winter passed, and the dry land appeared and flowers bloomed upon it, showing that pruning time had come at last, when do you think that was? When indeed could it be, save when the Flesh of Christ blossomed anew in the Resurrection?" On the Song of Songs, XXVI, 2, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. (London, 1952), p. 187. Compare On the Love of God, trans. A Religious of C.S.M.V. (New York, 1951): " 'For lo, the winter is past,' says the Bride, 'the rain is over and gone, the flowers have appeared in our land.' By these words she would have us understand, summer has come with Him Who, loosed from out death's winter into the springtime of the risen life, declares, 'Behold, I make all things new.' For, sown in death, His body has in His resurrection flowered anew; to greet its budding fragrance our life's parched plain grows green, the glaciers melt, the dead return to life" (p. 27). 25. See Joseph Hall, An Open and plaine Paraphrase Upon the Song of Songs (London, 1609), p. 2 1 ; George Gyflord, Fifteene Sermons, upon the Song of Salomon (London, 1598), p. 80. 26. A Journal of the Life of Fox, ed. John N. Nickalls (Cambridge, England, 1952), p. 27.

162

READINGS 27. A thousand is the greatest number. John of the Cross, for example, in explicating his verse, "Scattering a thousand graces, He passed through these groves in haste," makes this equation (trans. Peers, II, 47-49). Before leaving this stanza, we should also notice that the frost of the first stanza, which was developed in the snow of the second, is here met with again in a transformed state as "snowie fleeces": now the snow does not connote the harshness of winter dying but rather the purity of whiteness. The clouds being described as fleeces is—like the incense, gold, and fountain—another sign of the presence of the Lamb of God; or, looked at another way, it suggests that the Good Shepherd's lost sheep has come back to the fold. 28. Gold was a favorite symbol of faith triumphant (see Job xxiii.io, 1 Pet. 1.7). Christ, Heavenly Wisdom, is Spiritual Gold. Thus Herbert calls Mary "the holy mine, whence came the gold" ("To all Angels and Saints"); and Bernardino De Laredo says that gold "signifies the strength which God infuses in souls that love Him, and which is one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit." The Ascent of Mount Sion, trans, and ed. E. A. Peers (London, 1952), p. 163. See John Donne, "Resurrection, imperfect," John Donne: The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1952), p. 28: Hee was all gold when he lay downe, but rose All tincture, and doth not alone dispose Leaden and iron wills to good, but is Of power to make even sinfull flesh like his.

29. Basilius Valentinus, Chymische Schriften (Hamburg, 1700), p. 364. Valentinus is a pseudonymous writer whose works began to appear in 1602, an early reference to them occurring in Michael Maier's Symbola aureae mensae (1617). See C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London, 1953), pp. 406-407, and ch. 5, "The Lapis-Christus Parallel," passim. 30. Clavis philosophiae et dcymiae Fluddanae (Frankfort, 1633 ); quoted by Herbert Silberer, Problems of Mysticism and its Symbolism, trans. S. E. JellLffe (New York, 1917), pp. 295-296. Compare die Sophie Hydrolith: "Thus . . . I have briefly and simply set forth to you the perfect analogy which exists between our earthly and chemical, and the true and heavenly Stone, Jesus Christ"; in The Hermetic Museum (London, 1953), I, 114. 31. On the Song of Songs, p. 58. 32. The Complete Wor\s of Saint Teresa of Jesus, trans, and ed. E. A. Peers (London and New York, 1944), II, 238. 33. Ibid., II, 113. The reference to "dumbe shades" in the next stanza does not qualify the grove's sensibility to His presence. The vegetation has its "language" of praise, as witness the garlands of transcendent beauty they wear, but it is inarticulate. The point is that man, made in His image, is most eminendy suited to receive His gifts and render back the praise 163

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that makes the heavens glad. In Vaughan, as in Herbert, man is—or ought to be—nature's high priest. 34. In "Jesus weeping" (p. 502) the Lord preaches His word to the "stiff-necked Jew/' in vain: in Vaughan's imagery, He pours His tears, "soul-quickening rain, this living water / On their dead hearts" to no avail. They do not heed and turn; they are unregenerate. In the second poem of the same title (p. 503) Christ's tears are "healing," the "dew of the dead! which makes dust move / And spring . . ." The tears of "Regeneration's" fountain have the same renewing effect upon hearts that truly will it. 35. Cf. St. John of the Cross, who writes that "when it is said that God communicates by the ear, that expression describes a very sublime and certain fact. . . . For even as faith, as Saint Paul says, comes by bodily hearing, even so that which faith teaches us, which is the substance of understanding, comes by spiritual hearing. . . . Wherefore this hearing of the soul is seeing with the understanding." The Complete Wor\s, trans. Peers, II, 80. 36. English Lyrics of the XHIth Century, ed. Carleton Brown (Oxford, !953). P· 32· 37. Pfeiffer, Meister Ec\hart (trans. Evans), I, 336. 38. Quoted by F. W. Dillistone, Christianity and Symbolism (Philadelphia, 1955), p. 186. The conception of the font as "mother" and womb is probably sufficient to account for Vaughan's use of the feminine pronoun for it. We are regenerated in Christ. It would be to complicate the poem unnecessarily to consider the symbolism of the Virgin as the fountain from whence issued the living waters, Christ, or as the East which gave birth to the Sun of Righteousness. Many of the symbols of the Son were employed as well for His Mother. Baptism, spiritual regeneration, is of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, not of Mary. She is relevant to our poem, as we have seen, insofar as the birth of the Divine Child in man's soul was likened to the birth that Mary knew. 39. Quoted by E. O. James, Christian Myth and Ritual (London, 1938), p. 116. Compare Rupertus, PL, 167:1648; Rabanus Maurus, PL, 112:1071. 40. Quoted by Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Remarks upon Alchemy and Alchemists (Boston, 1857), p. 87. Compare the Ars chemica: "Et locus generationis, licet si artificialis, tarnen imitatur naturalem, quia est concavus conclusus." Quoted by C. G. Jung in The Practice of Psychotherapy, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York, 1954), p. 203. 41. Waite, ed., p. 100. The saying is met with frequendy among the alchemists and Rosicrusians; thus Gerhard Dorn, for example, in Theatrum Chemicum praecipuos selectorum auctorum tractatus . . . continens (Ursel, 1602), I, 2: 'Transmutemini de lapidibus mortuis in vivos lapides philosophicos" (p. 267). 42. In "Ascension-Hymn" (p. 482) Vaughan echoes the phrase, "quick as light," in a context that explains its import here. He is exclaiming how 164

READINGS Christ's blood alone has the power to wash away the stains of man's sins and renew his original brightness, and "make clay ascend more quick then light." 43. Vaughan often uses "center" in this negative sense, as in "Corruption" (p. 440): Sin triumphs still, and man is sunk below The Center, and his shrowd; All's in deep sleep, and night . . .

He would have learned in translating Boethius that "things of weight hast to the Center." The second meaning of center given in the NED is (a) "the centre of the earth"; (b) "the earth itself, as the supposed centre of the universe." Vaughan, I think, is using the word in this sense and with the kind of associations Wyclif assumes in this extract given in the NED: "As the sentre is lowest of alle thinges." Cf. p. 429, "Sure, there's a tye of Bodyes!" 44. As St. John of the Cross says: "The flower which belongs to good works and virtues is the grace and virtue which they derive from the love of God, without which not only would they not be flowering but they would all be dry and worthless before God, even though humanly they were perfect" (trans. Peers, II, 1 1 4 ) . Cf. the Biblical commentators' interpretation of Canticles ii.12, "The flowers appear on the earth . . .": "Flores . . . Ita . . . quae naturaliter arida est & maledicta, Gen. 3. 17. sed benedictione Dei ferax reddita. Id quod accommodatur naturae nostrae sterili & corruptae, per Evangelium fertili factae, Heb. 6. 7, 8, 9." Poole's Synopsis Criticorum. 45. See St. Bernard, On the Song of Songs, p. 95; Bonaventura, Itinerarium Mentis ad Deum, i. 2-3. 46. The Complete Wor\s, trans. Peers, II, 32-33. 47. The Spiritual Espousals, trans. Eric Colledge (London, 1952), p. 96. 48. The Instructor, Il.ix (Ante-Nicene, IV, 241). 49. On the Psalms, xlix (Nicene, VIII, 175). 50. From the Primer of 1559, in Private Prayers Put Forth by Authority During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. William Keatinge Clay (Cambridge, England, 1 8 5 1 ) , p. 89. 51. Pfeiffer, Meister Eckart (trans. Evans), I, 23. 52. The Complete Wor\s, trans. Peers, II, 128. Diodati, in his customarily precise way, sums it up: "Au>a\e That is to say, Ο holy Spirit do thou animate and vivifie in me the gifts and virtues which I have received from my Bridegroom, that they may not remain idle, and buried in me, but be stirred up, to beare fruits pleasing to God, until they come to full ripenesse, and perfection . . ." (John Diodati, Pious and Learned Annotations upon the Holy Bible . . . , trans. Nicholas Fussell, 2nd ed. [London, 1648], p. 443)· Vaughan might also have had in mind the alchemical use of the sapientia

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austri—"regina Austri, quae ab Oriente dicitur venisse, ut aurora consurgens," as the Aurora consurgens (c. 1300) puts it (See Vulgate, Matt. xii.42, Luke xi.31). See lung, Psychology and Alchemy, p. 363. In the Wisdom of Solomon Sapientia is personified as a woman and described as "the breath of the power of God" (vii.25), who "maketh all things new" (27). The alchemists identified the personified Sapientia of Wisdom with the Queen of the South, and to the Church Fathers the south wind is a symbol of the Holy Spirit (Eucherius, PL, 50:739; Rabanus Maurus, PL, 112:869). The state of the hidden child of the second birth is in Sapientia Dei, the South Wind, the Holy Ghost, which Vaughan prays will infuse itself into him. We might notice here that the last stanza, in which the plea for perfection is expressed, is the tenth, and this might be because in symbolic thought "numerous perfectus est denarius," the number of divinity. Johann Daniel Mylius, Philosophia reformata, p. 134; quoted by C. G. Jung in The Practice of Psychotherapy (London, 1954), p. 304. As Gerhard Dorn explains, "When the number four and the number three ascend to the number ten, they return to the One." Theatrum Chemicum, IV, 622; see Jung, Practice, pp. 304-306. 53. St. John of the Cross, The Complete Wor\s, trans. Peers, II, 37. 54. Nevertheless, it has received no notice from scholars and critics and is seldom anthologized. My reading, in slightly different form, has been published in MLQ, 21:45-58 (i960). 55. The Complete Works, trans. Peers, II, 141-142. St. Francis de Sales warned his Philothea about these subtle fowls: "Let them cry out like owls trying to disturb the birds of day as much as they like while we go serenely on our way, unwavering in our resolves . . ." Introduction to the Devout Life, IV, 1 ; trans. Michael Day (London, 1956), pp. 204-205. St. Ignatius of Loyola, in his "Rules for the Discernment of Spirits," emphasizes the subdety of the evil angels' attempts to disquiet the soul "in order to stop its progress," tempting it "under the appearance of good." The Spiritual Exercises, trans. W. H . Longridge (London, 1955), p. 1 8 5 t 56. The motif of the heart's melting under the rays of Divine love, pervasive in Vaughan, is found frequently among the emblemists. Christopher Harvey, for example, cites Job xxiii.16: "God maketh my heart soft," and expounds: Mine heart is like a marble ice, Both cold and hard: but thou canst in a trice Melt it like wax, great God, if from above Thou kindle in it once thy fire of love. (Schola Cordis, Emblem 16) Cf. Herbert's "Grace": Sinne is still hammering my heart Unto a hardnesse, void of love:

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READINGS Let suppling grace, to Crosse his art, Drop from above.

(The Worlds, ed. Hutchinson, p. 60)

57. Bees recur here and there in Vaughan's work bearing various meanings but all of good, of pious, import. They are an example for man of the creatures' steadfastness (p. 477) or of humble virtue in contrast to the hawk's pursuit of glory (p. 5 1 1 ) ; "Son-dayes" are hives of rest for the pious spirit (p. 447), and the Bible is a hive of beamy, living lights for him (p. 529); Vaughan finds a hive of peace and joy in meditation of his Savior's death (p. 537), and spirits after their own death hive in heaven (p. 534); ungrateful man, on the other hand, is a "thankless hive" devouring the bees and honey of His providential gifts to him. "Busie, but sacred thoughts" are likened to bees within the heart striving "unto that Hill," Where redeem'd Spirits evermore alive After their Work is done, ascend and Hive.

(p. 6 1 0 )

The wise and industrious are also likened to bees (pp. 640, 654), as are the virtues of a pure conscience (p. 257). A Latin bestiary of the twelfth century expounds at length upon diese virtues, maintaining that "although bees may be weak in physical strength, they are strong in the vigour of wisdom and the love of virtue." Trans. Τ. H. White, The Boo% of Beasts (New York, 1954), p. 158. Herbert uses the symbolism of bee and hive in very much the same way as Vaughan; see "The H. Scriptures (I)," "Praise (I)," "The Starre," and "Home." The bee has been extolled among the Greek and Latin authors for its industry, excellent government, and beneficent products, but more to the point is that, as early as Clement of Alexandria, Christ was likened to honey ( T h e Instructor, I, vi; Ante-Nicene, IV, 147), and that St. Bernard compares Him to the bee itself (In Cant. Cant., viii.6, PL, 183:813). St. Teresa uses the bee as an emblem of Christian humility ("Humility must always be doing its work like a bee making honey in the hive . . .") and as a right example for the soul (Complete Wor\s, trans. Peers, II, 208, III, 42, I, 91). St. John of the Cross (Complete Works, trans. Peers, II, 323) and Bernardino De Laredo ( T h e Ascent, trans. Peers, p. H I ) employ it for this latter purpose. Compare Thomas Vaughan (ed. Waite, p. 3 ) ; Crashaw, "To the Name Above Every Name," lines 151-158; St. Francis de Sales, Introduction, 1.3, 4; iv.2, 6; Day, pp. 12, 14, 206, 233. 58. The fifth sense of the word "fly" given in The Oxford English Dictionary fits Vaughan's symbol: "A familiar demon (from the notion that devils were accustomed to assume the form of flies) . . . and with the allusion to the insect's finding its way into the most private places . . . a parasite, flatterer." Valeriano relates these meanings properly to Beelzebub, the god of flies, and develops the idea relevantly, citing Eucherius, whom Vaughan knew well. See Joannis Pierii Valeriani, Hieroglyphica, seu 167

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De sacris AEgyptiorum diarumque gentium Uteris commentarii (London, 1602), p. 269. St. Francis de Sales uses flies to symbolize sins (Introduction to the Devout Life, i.23, trans. Day, p. 44) and temptations: "Treat such small temptations like flies and gnats which flutter about us and sometimes settle on the face; as we cannot be entirely rid of them our best defence is to remain undisturbed; they can annoy us but never harm us so long as we are firmly resolved to serve God" (Introduction, iv.9, trans. Day, p. 216). Alciati has an emblem whose scene and mode of exposition are very close to Vaughan's opening stanzas. Under the headings, "Hositlitas" and "In detractores," he depicts an old man on the road surrounded by flies, with the verses: Audent flagriferi matulae, stupidique magistri Bilem in me impuri pectoris euomere: Quid faciamP reddamne vices? sed nonne cicadam Ala una obstreperam corripuisse ferar? Quid prodest muscas operosis pellere flabris? Negligere est satius, perdere quod nequeas. (From Andreae Alciati Emblematum Flumen Abundans, a photo-lithographed facsimile of the Lyons edition, by Bonhomme, 1 5 5 1 ; ed. Henry Green [London, 1 8 7 1 ] , p. 1 7 7 ) .

59. The Scale of Perfection, II, xxvi; trans. Dom Gerard Sitwell (London, 1953). P· 2 1 1 . 60. Ibid., II, xxiii, xxii (trans. Sitwell), pp. 201, 199. Vaughan, who would be God's obedient ass, makes answer elsewhere than in "The Proffer" to the world's offer: If the world offers to me ought, That by thy book must not be sought, Or though it should be lawful, may Prove not expedient for thy way; T o shun that peril, let thy grace Prevail with me to shun the place. Let me be wise to please thee still, And let men call me what they will.

(p. 5 1 9 )

61. Diodati, interpreting the descent of the fowls in this scene from Genesis, writes, "It was an evident signe of the disturbances which evil spirits do offer to the elects acts of piety by wandering thoughts, or otherwise." Pious and Learned Annotations, pp. 12-13. The eighteenth-century editors of Poole's Synopsis Criticorum summarize his commentator's primary interpretation in a similar manner. The fowls represent "the disturbance and distraction which good men are exposed to in the service of God from evil spirits and men." One recalls the legend about St. Benedict which relates how one day as he was praying in the desert the devil came to him in the shape of a blackbird and sought to distract him from his 168

READINGS devotions. S t John of the Cross uses this symbolism of birds in his Spiritual Canticle, where he calls the digressions of the imagination "birds of swift wing, since they are light and subtle in their flight first in one direction and then in another. When the will, in quietness, is enjoying the delectable communication of the Beloved, they are apt to cause it displeasure, and, by their subtle flights, to quench its joy" ( T h e Complete Worlds, trans. Peers, II, 139). The fusion in the poem of fly and fowl is perfectly comprehensible in the light of this symbolism, since the fly, like such fowls as the blackbird and night-raven, represents specifically the carnal distractions sent by the devil in an effort to divide the will and unsettle the heart. "Musca est inquietudo cordis," Rabanus Maurus declares (Allegoriae in Sacram Scriptorum, PL, 112:1003). Walter Hilton says that "no fly dares to rest on the edge of a pot that is boiling on the fire. So no sensual pleasure touches a pure soul which is embraced and warmed with the fire of love . . ." (The Scale of Perfection, II, xlii, trans. Sitwell, p. 289). 62. The commentators interpreted "the wicked ones" as "the devils who are afraid of the power of the word digested" and who "(like the fowls of the air,) by suggesting other thoughts, or by presenting other objects to men, catch away the word that was sown in their hearts." Poole, Annotations (1762). The raven was given the surname spermologos because of its habit of devouring the newly sown seed. 63. In a Latin bestiary it is said, "God poured out his grace and disposition on Turtur, and gave her this virtue of continence. He also is able to lay down what all should follow. The flower of youth does not burn up the turtle-dove, nor is she allured by the temptations of occasion" (trans. Τ . H . White, The Book, of Beasts, p. 146). Closer to the point is the significatio offered for the natura turturis in the early English translation of Theobaldus: vre fowle atte kirke dure ches hire crist to meche, he is ure soule spuse, luue we him with migte, and wende we neure fro him-ward be dai ne be nigtej thog he be fro ure sigte faren, be we him alle trewe, non other louerd ne leue we ne non luue newe . . . (An Old English Miscellany, ed. Richard Morris, E.E.T.S., o.s., 49 [London, 1872], p. 23) Vaughan is consistent in his use of this symbol; see pp. 513, 524, 535, 643, 156, 166. 64. On the Gospel of St. John, vi.i.32 (Nicene, VII, 39). 169

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65. The raven, for example, has frequently been assigned a sinister nature ever since he failed to return to the ark, choosing instead to feed upon the corpses floating about, for which action, Rabanus Maurus tells us, he was thrown out of the church and damned (Allegoriae, in PL, 112:902). Clement of Alexandria makes him an emblem of greed (The Miscellanies, V, viii, in Ante-Nicene, XII, 252). In Isa. x x x i v . n f . the raven and screech-owl are linked with the images of destruction visited by God upon the enemies of the church. In alchemy, also, the raven—and sometimes the crow or vulture—represents man's lower nature, which must be killed in the Stage of Putrefaction. The owl had as bad a reputation, and was used to symbolize the Jews, as in Le Bestiare Divin by Guillaume, Clerc De Normandie (ed. Reinsch, Leipzig, 1890), in the bestiary of Philippe de Thaun, in Wright, Popular Treatises, p. 123, and in White, The Boo\ of Beasts, pp. 133-134. Quarles writes of "owl-ey'd lust . . . / Whose eyes and actions hate the day" (Emblems, II, 9) and, like Bishop Hall, condemns all night birds generally: Let those have night, that love to have a nap, And loll in ignorance's lap; Let those, whose eyes, like owls, abhor the light, Let those have night, that love the night . . .

(Emblems, I, 14)

These birds had, of course, a long history, both in folk lore and in literature, as omens of death and disaster; for examples from Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, and Drayton, see Thomas P. Harrison, They Tell of Birds (Austin, Texas, 1956). 66. Works, ed. Hall, XI, 164. 67. On the Love of God, p. 34. 68. Pfeiffer (trans. Evans), I, 29. 69. Peers, II, 70. 70. "For even as things which are intellectually discerned cannot be comprehended or perceived by means of those things which belong to the senses, nor simple and imageless things by means of types and images, nor the formless and intangible essence of unembodied things by means of those which have bodily form, by the same law of truth the boundless Super-Essence surpasses Essences, the Super-Intellectual Unity surpasses Intelligences, the One which is beyond thought surpasses the apprehension of thought, and the Good which is beyond utterance surpasses the reach of words." On the Divine Names, trans. C. E. Rolt (New York, 1 9 5 1 ) , pp. 52-53; cf. 57-58. With this last stanza of ' T h e Proffer" compare the last stanza of Herbert's "The Glance": I£ thy first glance so powerfull be, A mirth but open'd and seal'd up again; What wonders shall we feel, when we shall see Thy full-ey'd love! 170

READINGS In his "The Size" there occurs the phrase, "Call to minde thy dream." The Works, ed. Hutchinson, pp. 1 7 1 , 137. C£. Drummond of Hawthornden: As doth the pilgrim therefore, whom the night By darkness would imprison on his way, Think on thy home, my soul . . . ("No Trust in Time," The Poems of William Drummond of Hawthornden, ed. William C. Ward [London, n.d.], Muses Library, II, 4). 71. "The Night" has been read as a kind of Cabalistic cryptogram completely outside the Christian orientation by Bain Tate Stewart, "Hermetic Symbolism in Henry Vaughan's T h e N i g h t , ' " PQ, 29:416-422 (1950). He traces the image of Christ's dewy hair, for example, not to the Canticles (v.2) but to the Cabala (pp. 420-421). In another place he makes the incredible statement that "three symbols in particular—veil, darkness, dew— in the sense in which they are used in T h e Night' are primarily Cabalistic in origin" (p. 417). Earlier, however, Helen S. Hughes, "Night in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan," MLN, 28:208-211 ( 1 9 1 3 ) , had considered examples of Vaughan's imagery of night and darkness in the context of the Biblical symbolism. But she did not distinguish between the night and darkness of our poem and the night of ignorance and sin of the secular land of darkness usual elsewhere in Vaughan's poetry. See Ross Garner's discussion of ' T h e Night," Henry Vaughan, pp. 135-144, and E. C. Pettet's interpretation, Of Paradise and Light, pp. 138-154. My own reading was published in JEGP, 59:34-40 (i960). 72. The Scale of Perfection, II, xxiv (trans. Sitwell), p. 205. 73. I am indebted for my understanding of the meditative structure to Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven, 1954). 74. Reference to The Oxford English Dictionary makes it clear that the image was frequently employed to make contemptuous reference to mere human or earthly power or grandeur. Thus William Drummond in " A Pastorall Elegie on the Death of S. Α. Α.": "Earths glow-worme Greatness"; Quarles, Emblems, V. 6: "The proudest flames that earth can kindle be / But nightly glow-worms, if compared to thee" [God]; Jeremy Taylor asserts how it is "childish in us for the glittering of the small gloworms and charcoal of worldly possessions to swallow the flames of hell . . ." ( X X V I I I Sermons [London, 1651], p. 249); and Shakespeare, Pericles, II.iii.43: "Now his son's like a glow-worm in the night. The which hath fire in darkness, none in light . . ." Since "the light of reason" is man's distinguishing power and glory, it is possible that Vaughan had it in mind when comparing the righteous Pharisee with Christ Thus Timme, The Silver Watch Bell (10th ed., 1628), ix.7: "Reason (which the Fathers call Noctilucam cerebri, the brains Gloworme)." 75. Sylva Sylvarum, 224.

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76. The query is couched concerning where Nicodemus found Him, but we have seen what the night signifies—the working time of spirits wherein we "find," commune with, the Lord—and we have read the rest of the poem: we know that as in an earlier "roving Extasie" the search (p. 405) is a present endeavor and the country of its exploration all within. 77. This is not to imply that Vaughan was secretly a Seeker, or had Anabaptist or Ranter sympathies. So far as we know, he was a solid, church-going Anglican. But such an emphasis as we find in his writings upon a living, experiential faith was pervasive in his day of unparalleled religious ferment and fervor, and it is, of course, a fundamental trait of the contemplative. Vaughan undoubtedly lived his profoundly religious life wholly within the Church. It was his purpose, however, since his conversion and consequent conviction that most of the Christians he knew were so in name only—"titular Christians," as Boehme would say—to help lead these blind souls into some perception of that Life and Light which had dawned within himself—just as earlier the poetry of George Herbert had helped him. For other statements of Vaughan's conviction of religious decadence in his day, especially as compared with the primitive Christian times, see The Mount of Olives, pp. 166-167, 181; in the poems, pp. 404, 408, 410, 440, 485-486, 509-510, 527-528, 530-531, 652-655 (where he echoes Herbert's thought that religion stands tip-toe in England, ready to pass over to America). Cf. Herbert's "Whitsunday" and "Decay." 78. The Complete Workj (trans. Peers, I, 64). 79. Louis Martz (The Poetry of Meditation, p. 36) writes: "Now, with this trinity of powers integrated through meditation, the climax, the aim and end, of the whole exercise is achieved when the soul thus reformed is lifted up to speak with God in colloquy and to hear God speak to man in turn." In Vaughan's poem God does not reply, but there was room within the scope of the "colloquy" for the nature of "The Night's" last stanzas. Thus Luis de la Puente says, "albeit praier is properly a speche, and colloquy with our Lord," it is permissible to "speake therin to our selves, and have conference with our owne soule. Sometimes our selves (as S. Paul saieth) exhorting our selves, and reviving our selves in the affections, and petitions rehearsed" (Martz, p. 37). 80. Crashaw's hymn, "In the Glorious Epiphanie of our Lord God," line 192. This entire section of the Catholic poet's poem is relevant to Vaughan's. 81. The Mystical Theology, i (Rolt, p. 191). Thomas Vaughan appears to identify the Divine Dark with the Cabalistic ein soph and the alchemical prima materia (Waite, p. 214). 82. Rufus Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion (London, 1909), p. 278. 83. The distinctions between the nights of the soul are, of course, from S t John of the Cross (The Complete Wor\s, trans. Peers, I, 349). ItratHusain, The Mystical Element in the Metaphysical Poets (London, 1948), p. 231, also makes this distinction in connection with "The Night."

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READINGS 84. St. Bonaventura^ Itineranum Mentis ad Deum, vii.6; trans. George Boas, The Mind's Road to God (New York, 1953), p. 45. See also Meister Eckhart, who regarded the Pseudo-Areopagite very highly: "The light which God is shines in darkness. God is the true light: to see it one has to be blind and strip God naked of things" (Pfeiffer, trans. Evans, I, 62). 85. St. John of the Cross, The Complete Works (trans. Peers), I, 356.

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INDEX

Agrippa, Cornelius, 8, 15, 21 Allen, Don Cameron, 21-22 Animia Magia Abscondita. See Vaughan, Thomas Anthroposophie^ Theomagica. See Vaughan, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas, 125, 143 Areopagite, Dionysius, The, 89 Ascent of Mount Sion, The. See Bernardino De Laredo Baldwin, Edward Chauncey, 15, 16 Baxter, Richard, 132-133 Beeching, H. C., 4 Bellarmine, Robert, 132 Bennett, Joan, 4, 10, 14 Bernardino De Laredo, 125-126, 147, 163 Bethel, S. L., 22 Bible, the influence of, 4, 21, 26, 146, 150; childhood motif, 15, 17, 147148; seed motif, 36, 42-43; fire motif, 53; pilgrimage, 65, 66, 72; "Regeneration," 82, 86-87; "The Proffer," 105, 109—no; "The Night," 1 1 4 - 1 1 5 , 118-119 "Bird, The," 105-106 Blunden, Edmund, 13 Boas, George, 132 Boehme, Jacob, 40, 42, 50, 65, 72, 82, 135, 145, 146, 172; his conversion, 6; his relevance to Vaughan, 16; and the Divine Spark, 127; and fire symbol, 151 Boethius, 41, 165

Brown, John, 1 Browne, Sir Thomas, 36, 52, 129, 133 Bush, Douglas, 3, 6 Childhood motif, 2, 8, 9, 1 3 - 1 7 , 20, 40, 147-148 Clement of Alexandria, 96, 167 "Cock-crowing," 21, 32-33, 36, 63, 149 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 27, 142 Confessions, The. See St. Augustine Conversion, Vaughan's, 3-9, 18, 141 "Corruption," 37, 96, 165 Courtship and marriage metaphor, 30, 31. 74-78 Cowley, Abraham, 153 Cowper, William, 61-62 Crashaw, Richard, 10, 11, 160; "Hymn of Saint Thomas," 92; "In the Glorious Epiphanie of our Lord God," 172 Creation, The Book of the, 1 3 1 - 1 3 3 Critics, Vaughan's, 1-3, 4-6, 8, 9-10, 12, 13-28 Cyril of Jerusalem, 93 Dante, 35, 43. 94 Davies, Sir John, 128 de la Puente, Luis, 172 De Laredo, Bernardino. See Bernardino De Laredo Dew and shower motif, 48-51 di Mirandola, Pico. See Pico di Mirandola Diodati, John, 153, 165, 168 "Disorder and frailty," 7, 31, 35, 104

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INDEX Donne, John, ίο, 87, 92, 149, 159, 163 Dowden, Edward, 9 Drexelius, Jeremy, 152, 153 Drummond, William, 1 7 1

I," 167; "Man," 158; "The Pearl," 157; "Praise I," 167; "The Pulley," 154; "Sion," 158; "The Size," 1 7 1 ; "The Starre," 157, 167; "The Storm," 153; "To all Angels and Saints," 163; "Vanitie (I)," 158; "Whitsunday," 172 Herbert of Cherbury, 127 Herman of Fritsler, 127 Hermes Trismegistus, 8, 15, 24 Hermetic Museum, The, 15 Hermeticism, 4, 8, 15, 18, 72, 129; Garner on, 23-26; Pettet on, 27 Hilton, Walter, 102, 134; on pilgrimage, 66, 67-68, 86, 154; on night, 1 1 3 ; on flies, 169 Hodgson, Geraldine Emma, 141 Holmes, Elizabeth, 4, 15, 18 Horapollo, Hieroglyphica, 156 Hotham, Charles, 127 Hugh of St. Victor, 152 Hughes, Helen S., 171 Hughes, Merritt, 16

Eckhart, Meister, 35, 109, 134, 173; and courtship and marriage, 75, 77; on Jesus Christ, 82, 88, 89-90, 93, 98; and Divine Spark, 126-127 Eliot, T. S., 1 3 - 1 4 , 16, 121 Ellistone, John, 39 Empson, William, 3 Eucherius, 92, 167 Feltham, Owen, 129 Ficino, Marsilio, 156 Fire imagery, 53-55 Fitzgerald, Edward, 139 Fletcher, Giles, 157 Flower and fruit imagery, 42-44 Fludd, Robert, 91, 162 Fox, George, 6, 7, 90 Frizius, Joachim. See Fludd, Robert Frost imagery, 51-53

Imitation of Christ, The. See Thomas h Kempis Immanence, 23, 24 Inge, Dean William Ralph, 125, 126, 146 In Noctem Corporis, 66-71 Itrat-Husain, 4-5, 20, 21, 172 "I walkt the other day (to spend my hour)," 31

Garner, Ross, 22-26 Grierson, Sir H. J. C., 10 Grosart, A. B., 1, 9 Guiding stars metaphor, 71-74 Hall, Bishop Joseph, 44, 47, 53; and heliotrope imagery, 58; and pilgrimage, 62; and courtship and marriage, 77; on birds, 106-107, 170; and Divine Spark, 128; and water imagery, 151 Harrison, John Smith, 15, 16 Harvey, Christopher, 85, 148, 166 Hawkins, Henry, 73-74, 149 Heliotrope, imagery of the, 57-58 Herbert, George: compared to Vaughan, 2, 4, 14, 22, 34, 50, 164; his influence on Vaughan, 8, 9 - 1 3 , 26, 1 4 1 ; "Affliction," 150; "The Church-floore," 158; "Decay," 158, 172; "The Flower," 50, 1 5 1 ; "The Glance," 170; "Grace," 166-167; "Home," 167; "The H. Scriptures

"Jacobs Pillow, and Pillar," 1 1 8 - 1 1 9 "Jesus weeping," 51, 164 Johnson, Lionel, 2 Judson, A. C., 16, 19 Jung, C. G., 129, 142 Justin Martyr, 145 Kempis, Thomas ä. See Thomas ä Kempis Kermode, Frank, 26 Langer, Susanne, 135 Languor Animi, 60-63 I

INDEX Lehmann, Ruth Preston, 19-20 Leishman, J. B., 14, 19 Life of the Servant, The. See Suso, Heinrich "Love, and Discipline," 31 Lull, Ramön, 132 Macdonald, George, 3, 9, 17 Mahood, Μ. M., 21, 129 Marilla, E. L., 5-6, 8 Martin, L. C., 16 Martz, Louis, 22, 172 "Match, The," 34-35 Meister Eckhart. See Eckhart, Meister More, Henry, 128 "Morning-watch, The," 49 "Mount of Olives," 3 1 , 91 Mount of Olives, The, 34, 103, 1 1 3 Narrow Way, The, 64-66 Nature, Vaughan as a poet of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 17-20, 23, 27 Neoplatonism, 148 Nierembergius, 43, 1 1 3 , 146, 1 5 1 , 161 "Night, The," 1 1 1 - 1 2 2 , 162 Olor Iscanus, 5 On the Psalms. See St. Augustine On the Song of Songs. See St. Bernard Origen, 158 Osmond, Percy H., 15 Osuna, Francisco de, 126 Palgrave, Francis, 1 Paracelsus, 21, 72, 1 1 3 , 127 Parthenia Sacra, 73 Pascal, Blaise, 1 4 1 , 152 Pettet, E. C., 26-28 Pia Desideria, 73 Pico di Mirandola, 67, 155, 156 Pilgrimage motif, 29-30, 3 1 , 60-74, 101 Plant symbolism. See Seed symbolism Platonism, 15, 16, 127-128 Plotinus, 89, 125, 134, 154 Pordage, John, 152 Pre-existence, 16, 36, 128, 145

"Proffer, The," 68, 9 9 - m , 122, 170 Pruning motif, 47-48 Quarles, Francis, 21, 85, 146, 154, 155156, 160, 171 Reed, Edward Bliss, 2 "Regeneration," 3 1 , 52, 79-99, 1 0 1 , 122; storm symbolism in, 55-56; flower symbolism in, 58, 59 Regio Dissimilitudinis, 63-64 Religio Medici. See Browne, Sir Thomas "Resolve," n o "Retirement," n o Retreat motif, 40-42 "Retreate, The," 16 "Revival, The," 3 1 , 97 Rhys, Ernest, 2 Richard of St. Victor, 77, 84 Road of Trials, 66 Ross, Malcolm, 16 "Rules and Lessons," 47 Ruysbroeck, 96, 126-127 St. Ambrose, 51, 72 St. Augustine, 42, 52, 85, 87, 89, 96, 106, 150, 154; conversion of, 6; and pilgrimage motif, 60, 62, 63, 67; and courtship and marriage motif, 76; and fire motif, 152 St. Bernard, 34, 37, 42, 43, 55, 91, 109, 134, 162; and pilgrimage motif, 64, 154; and courtship and marriage motif, 74, 76, 158; and bee metaphor, 167 St. Bonaventura, 125, 156 St. Catherine of Genoa, 54, 152 St. Francis de Sales, 166, 168 St. Francis of Assisi, 6 St. Jerome, 125 St. John of the Cross, 43, 95, 101, 119, 1 4 1 , 159, 163, 164, 165, 169 St. Paul, 6, 96, 1 1 9 St. Teresa of Jesus, 43, 48, 67, 91, 135, 167 "Sap, The," 36-37, 49, 50 Scale of Perfection, The. See Hilton, Walter Schelling, Felix, 2

177

INDEX Schola Cordts. See Harvey, Christopher "Search, The," 22, 119, 126 Secular verse, Vaughan's, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 20, 22 "Seed growing secretly, The," 3 1 , 41 Seed symbolism, 29, 31-60, 83, 1 2 5 130 Sencourt, Robert, 18 Seneca, 129 Severinus, 41 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1 "Showre, The," 45 Sichel, Edith, 9-10 Silex Sctntillans, 5, 7, 20, 22, 26, 27, 28, 30, 122, 1 5 1 Starbuck, Ε. Τ., 6 Stars and Star-Flowers imagery, 5860 Stewart, Bain Tate, 171 "Storm, The," 56 Storm imagery, 55-57, 83 Suso, Heinrich, 6, 7

pilgrimage motif, 61, 62, 64; and courtship and marriage motif, 75 Tillich, Paul J., 1 4 1 - 1 4 2 Traherne, Thomas, 16, 129, 134; "Fullnesse," 126; "Thanksgivings, The," 157 Transcendence, 23, 24 Tuve, Rosemond, 12, 147 Underhill, Evelyn, 6, 30 "Unprofitablenes," 3 1 Valeriani, Joannis Pierii, 167 "Vanity of Spirit," 36 Vaughan, Thomas, 8, 15, 16, 19, 37, 72, 94-95, 146, 148, 158; Garner on, 25-26; Pettet on, 27; and courtship and marriage motif, 75; and Divine Spark symbolism, 129, 144-145; and fire symbolism, 1 5 1 ; and night symbolism, 155; and kiss symbolism, 159, 161 Waite, A. E., 129 Walters, R. H., 19 Weigel, Valentine, 72, 127 White, Helen, 4, 10, 14-15, 19 "White Sunday," 55 Willey, Sir Basil, 127, 146 Williamson, George, 3, 10 Wither, George, 153 Wordsworth, William: compared to Vaughan, 1 , 2, 3, 14, 15, 140 "World, The," 30, 108

Tarnished-gold image, 37-39 Tatian, 125 Tauler, John, 65-66, 89, 1 2 1 , 127 Taylor, Thomas, 132 Tears motif, 51 Temple, The, 4, 1 1 Tertullian, 125 "Teutonic Theosopher," 39 Theodoret, 158 Thomas ϊ Kempis, 49, 52, 132; and

178