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  #1  
Unread 03-23-2012, 05:17 PM
Christopher ONeill Christopher ONeill is offline
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Default Henry Vaughan: The Call

I mentioned on AE Stalling's thread that one of the things I find most interesting about Henry Vaughan is the way he avoids saying certain things in his poetry.

This isn't quite one of those poems, but it does something similar - which is just as interesting.


The Call

Come my heart! come my head
In sighes and teares!
'Tis now, since you have laine thus dead
Some twenty years;
Awake, awake,
Some pitty take
Upon yourselves -
Who never wake to grone, nor weepe,
Shall be sentenc'd for their sleepe.

2

Doe but see your sad estate,
How many sands
Have left us, while we careless sate
With folded hands;
What stock of nights,
Of dayes and yeares
In silent flights
Stole by our eares,
How ill have we our selves bestow'd
Whose suns are all set in a Cloud?

3

Yet, come, and let's peruse them all;
And as we passe
What sins on every minute fall
Score on the glasse;
Then weigh, and rate
Their heavy State
Untill
The glasse with tears you fille;
That done, we shalbe safe, and good,
Those beasts were cleane, that chew'd the Cud.



What I love especially in this poem is the way that Vaughan exploits the ambiguities of his terms. Donne (who in most respects is better) usually writes poems where words stand for symbols so clearly defined that one could draw a picture map of most of his poems. Vaughan often (and particularly here) exploits the way that words are naturally ambiguous, words slip when you try to attach them to things. It's something bad writers do all the time;- but Vaughan probably isn't a bad writer. It is also something you don't expect from a Metaphysical, but Vaughan is definitely a Metaphysical.

.......

Come my heart! come my head
In sighes and teares!


At first sight an off-the peg Metaphysical invocation. The heart is Vaughan's feelings, the head is his intellect. Vaughan doesn't worry about making two entities out of his one self, even two entities vaguely inimical to each other. Herbert split himself up into many more than two factions in poems like The Pulley. The sighs we suppose are aspirations towards holiness, the tears regret for past failings. So far, so good.

The sighes belong to the heart, and the teares to the head, presumably. Tears certainly belong to the head anatomically, and sighs are usually considered more emotional than rational.

But anatomically, to be strict, sighs also belong to the head (an ENT function). And couldn't the tears come from a heart? Traditional depictions of the Sacred Heart regularly show drops of blood around a thorn-crowned heart looking remarkably like tears. So perhaps the head is also sighing, the heart also crying.

Vaughan has smeared the distinction between aspiration (sighs) and regret (tears) in a way which is hard for visual representations, and not useful in sermons - but is actually quite easy in a poem. So easy that bad writers get these directionless referents going all the time. Only Vaughan seems to know what he is doing.


......

Tis now, since you have laine thus dead
Some twenty years;
Awake, awake,
Some pitty take
Upon yourselves -


The poem first appears in Silex Scintillans (1650), when Vaughan is only around thirty. Presumably the 'twenty years' that intellect and feeling have 'laine dead' supposes that Vaughan should have been old enough to begin praising shortly after the age of ten. This seems optimistic, but not excessive, for so devout a period in English history.

What is more suprising is that the revived intellect and ethical sense are not called to worship The Lord, or God, or any Third Party (I think Crashaw would have done it that way). They are told to sort themselves out: (Some pitty take / Upon yourselves). At this point there is something very Protestant about the way Vaughan is arguing. Grace - or at least the gift of grace - doesn't seem uppermost in the poem's thinking here; salvation seems almost a self-help business. It is going too far to sniff Pelagianism here, but Vaughan is a long way from the mainstream Anglican teaching of salvation through intervention of Divine Grace, and getting close to the more independent muscular Christianities of early Puritanism.

......

Who never wake to grone, nor weepe,
Shall be sentenc'd for their sleepe.


If I were a seventeenth century Anglican, I would start worrying at this point. vaughan seems to suggest that avoiding taking your punishment like a man, is itself a punishable sense. Suggesting sinners can be sentenc'd for their sleepe puts the onus of salvation very much on the individual soul (and to that extent takes it away from the ordained church). This is the private salvation of the Puritans, not the public salvation through ritual of the Anglican church. The implication that one has some sort of holy duty to suffer takes it even fairly deep into Puritan thinking.

......

2

Doe but see your sad estate,
How many sands
Have left us, while we careless sate
With folded hands;


Vaughan has made his basic doctrinal position clear - salvation is through a glad acceptance of suffering. Now we get a strophe of exempla. The general theme is time wasted.

Only I'm not sure what the precise image is here. Someone sits with folded hands, certainly: so there is a sin of omission.

But I'm challenged by the 'many sands' which have in some way been lost.

Since the theme is 'lost time', the sands may be the sands in an hourglass - a common image in all Metaphysical poetry.

But since we are given only 'sand' I can't help also recalling the foolish builder of Matthew 7:24; who built his house on sand.

This second resonance doesn't help. It isn't clear that missing the opportunity to build on sand would be a bad thing. But you have to entertain this image that doesn't work before you realise that it doesn't work (or at least, I do).

Again, Vaughan is smearing what could easily have been expressed clearly. The poem is making you consider ideas that finally don't work. The poem is confusing you, taunting you that you haven't understood this stuff as much as you thought you did.

......

What stock of nights,
Of dayes and yeares
In silent flights
Stole by our eares,


This I find singularly powerful. One normally thinks of the past in images, things you once saw that are not there anymore. But the passage of time is just as inaudible. I find myself wondering what sort of a noise a day might make as it stole by. It is easy to think of seeing time pass: the sun rising, a lake icing over. But I strain to conceive how I could hear time pass (clock ticks and metronomes are noisy, but not sequential). Again the poem is telling me to do something when I just don't know how. Again the poem is not offering a neat, bounded, argument - just entanglement and confusion.

......


How ill have we our selves bestow'd
Whose suns are all set in a Cloud?


Not darkness - which would be easy to decode as an image of the loss of God - but fog. With the sun set in a cloud one can have quite a lot of illumination; but it wouldn't be useful. In heavy fog, one can see perfectly well - only one can't see anything. I think Vaughan has found an inescapable image of a clarity which isn't a clarity about anything, and understanding which has nothing to understand - very much what this poem has been doing from the very beginning.

......

3

Yet, come, and let's peruse them all;


I find 'peruse' here almost painful. Metaphysical poetry is often rebarbative on the surface, but once you find a thread into it - it begins to make sense. You can unpick Donne or Carew or Davenant, you can solve them.

This is a poem you can't decipher. The machinery of the conceits seems to get less clear as you try to disassemble it. The poem makes less sense than it seems to; we can peruse it, but we can't read it.

The poem is like a Chinese Box that actually doesn't open. The slats slide back and forth - seemingly with a sense of purpose - but in fact you are getting no nearer to reaching the contents. You are just moving around purposefully on the outside of the poem.

The poem reminds me of a lot of Dylan Thomas, some John Ashbery, and even some Tristan Tzara. It also reminds me faintly of some medieval Welsh poetry where often commonplace objects are described in such meticulous and unlikely detail that it is often difficult to know what the poet is talking about. I don't see much Welsh influence in Vaughan, but his ability to describe things in a way which makes them more unclear than ever does have some similarities with earlier Welsh poetry.

And as we passe
What sins on every minute fall
Score on the glasse;


Again, I think we have an image here of writing on glass with a diamond (a commonplace conceit for the fragility of human promises), but I am not at all sure where it is going.

I suppose there must be many sins. So the glass must get very scratched, and perhaps lose its transparency. Why are we 'scoring' the sins on the glass? Is this the glass of the hourglass we (perhaps) met earlier? If so, won't scoring sins on the glass prevent us from being able to see the passage of the sands? Are we scoring the glass because sinning makes us lose track of time?

It is an alluring idea. But I think I have strayed too far from what the words actually give me. My problem is, I don't know where else I can go with these words.

Then weigh, and rate
Their heavy State
Untill
The glasse with tears you fille;


By this point I have an hourglass, which is also a windowglass in some way (which is being scratched on by a diamond point); but it seems that the hourglass is also a lachrymatory in some way (since we are filling this glass with tears).

I can certainly understand the idea of suffering being a measure of time (Swinburne has something similar in his 'Time with a gift of tears'). Does that mean I can see a lachrymatory being used as an hourglass? Can I then see the lachrymatory hourglass being made useless by being scratched all over with diamond inscriptions?

Does the poem offer me any real alternative?

......


That done, we shalbe safe, and good,

And suddenly, the 7th Cavalry arrives! Vaughan has led us into the most slewed-up, confused, cut to pieces, wayzgoose of a muddled nest of metaphors we've seen since the last time we read a poem from Silex Scintillans.

Now he promises he is going to lead us out of the marsh, all in one go.

come on, Henry, show us.

.......

Those beasts were cleane, that chew'd the Cud.

Well, the clue was there in line 8 of the first strophe. We have suffered, we have struggled, we have vexed ourselves with trying to peer through this impossibly opaque poem.

And that is the point. There is nothing to see as such, it was the struggle to see that the poem was about. It was the effort that was the meaning, it was the fever that purified.

......

I don't know many other poets that work this way, and in English hardly any before the twentieth century.

Perhaps someone has an easier, more natural, clearer, reading of the poem than I have managed here.

An easier path through the maze would make this a very different poem, though not necessarily a better one.

Last edited by Christopher ONeill; 03-23-2012 at 05:21 PM. Reason: Adding formatting
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  #2  
Unread 03-26-2012, 05:02 AM
Ann Drysdale's Avatar
Ann Drysdale Ann Drysdale is offline
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Christopher - are you aware of the Usk Valley Vaughan Association? Their publication, Scintilla, is on hiatus due to a funding crisis, but there is hope of resurrection. The annual colloquium is at the end of April and you'd be welcome.

Of course, if you are already a member please forgive my interference, otherwise drop me a private message and I'll give you contact details of the organisers.
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Unread 03-26-2012, 08:17 AM
Tim Murphy Tim Murphy is offline
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Thank you Chris. I think every poet dreams of so close a reading centuries after his death.
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Unread 03-26-2012, 08:12 PM
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Gail White Gail White is offline
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I appreciated this very much as well. I've sometimes felt that I was the last poet standing who appreciated Henry Vaughan.

My sou, there is a country
Far beyond the starts
Where stands a winged sentry
All skillful in the wars...

If thou canst get but thither,
There grows the flower of peace,
The rose that cannot wither,
Thy fortress, and thine ease.
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