Henry Vaughan [antikvár]

Introduction The language of Henry Vaughan's poetry derives much of its power from two sources that reverberate throughout his poems: the Bible and the poetry of George Herbert. Indeed Vaughan treats Herbert's poetry as virtually a continuation of sacred scripture, and he echoes Herbert's words almost as much as he echoes the Bible. Vaughan is following here the common Renaissance practice of creative imitation, usually displayed, as with Ben Jonson, in the imitation of classical authors: Martial, Juvenal, Horace. But for Vaughan, Herbert is the prime Christian classic, a 'true saint and a seer', a writer of 'incomparable prophetic poems', and 'the first that with any effectual success attempted a diversion of this foul and overflowing stream' of secular poetry in England.1 Consequently, the first edition of Sílex Scintillans (1650) seems designed, even in its physical form and size, as a companion to Herbert's Temple— but a companion with its own individual integrity. These echoes of Herbert and the Bible provide the instruments through which Vaughan can explore and express his own genius: his individual apprehension of the divine presence in external nature and in the self. The older critics who associated Vaughan with Wordsworth were not far wrong, for Vaughan stands almost alone among poets of his era in his appreciation of the vitality of the Creation—an appreciation shared by Milton in the seventh book of Paradise Lost. Vaughan's advice in Rules and Lessons is enough to distinguish him at once from Herbert, even as he follows here the stanza-form and epigrammatic manner of Herbert's Church-porch: Walk with thy fellow-creatures: note the hush And whispers amongst them. There's not a spring, Or leaf but hath his morning-hymn; Each hush And oak doth know I AM; canst thou not sing? . . . To heighten thy devotions, and keep low All mutinous thoughts, what business e'er thou hast Observe God in his works; here fountains flow, Birds sing, beasts feed, fish leap, and th' Earth stands fast; 1 Mount of Olives, Vaughan's Works, ed. L. C. Martin (2nd edn., Oxford, 1957), 186; and the 1655 Preface, below, p. 100.