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Henry Vaughan as a Nature Poet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In spite of Henry Vaughan's widely recognized significance as an early poet of nature, discussion of his nature poetry has almost always been incidental to a general consideration of the man and his work. The feeling that a more systematic examination of his nature poetry would be of value has prompted the present study.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1927
References
1 The most ambitious treatment is by Anna von der Heide in her Dos Naturgefühl in der Englischen Dichtung im Zeitalter Miltons, 1915, pp. 70-83.
2 Upon the Priory Grove, His Usual Retirement; Olor Iscanus; Ad Fluvium Iscam; The Eagle; Retirement; and perhaps Ad Echum.
3 In Man in Darkness (Martin's ed. of Vaughan's Works, I, 175) Vaughan quotes in Welsh three lines from the so-called Verses of the Months, attributed by the editors of the Myvyrian Archaiology to the seventh-century bard Aneurin. Thomas Stephens, who gives a translation and discussion of the poem, dates it at the beginning of the 14th century (Literature of the Kymry, 1876, pp. 287-93). A letter from Vaughan to Aubrey (op. cit., II, 675) discusses bards ancient and contemporary, but is disappointingly non-committal as regards Vaughan's first-hand knowledge of the works of the great Welsh bards.
4 Works of Matthew Arnold (1903), V, 112,
5 Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson, p. 161.
6 Cf. John Aubrey in a letter to Anthony à Wood (quoted from Tanner MS. 456, f 19, by Grosart, Works of Henry Vaughan, II, xxxix): “I desire your kindnesse . . . . to tell him [Dr. Plott of Magdalen Hall] that I have writt out for him the Natural History of Wiltshire and of Surrey, and a sheet or two of other counties and am now sending to my cosn., Hen. Vaughan (Silurist), in Brecknockshire to send me the natural history of it, as also of other circumjacent counties: no man fitter.”
7 The Morning Watch.
8 In The Mount of Olives: or, Solitary Devotions, Vaughan's one original prose volume, his love of nature appears in brief passages like the following, introduced to illustrate some religious truth: “The singing of birds is naturalis musica mundi, to which all arted strains are but discord and hardness,” or “Thou also seest those various, numberless, and beautiful luminaries of the night to move on in their watches, and some of them to vanish and set, while all the rest do follow after.”
9 To . . . Master T. Lewes opens with a good snow scene, Vaughan's only snow scene by the way, but it is borrowed from Horace, Ad Thaliarcham (Book I, Ode 9); see Chambers' ed., II, 340.
10 In an article soon to appear in Studies in Philology.
11 The Works of Thomas Vaughan, ed. A. E. Waite, 1919, p. 85.
12 Ibid., p. 115.
13 Ibid., p. 116.
14 Ibid., p. 297.
15 “I walk'd the other day, to spend my hour.”
16 In his paraphrase of Psalm 121, Vaughan renders “The Lord which made heaven and earth” by “Him Who fills, Unseen, both heaven and earth.”
17 The Check.
18 The Retreat.
19 Chicago, 1913, pp. 70-71.
20 Cf. The Constellation, Misery, The Men of War, Abel's Blood, Righteousness, Ad Posteros, and Mount of Olives (Martin's ed. Vaughan's Works, I, 167).
21 Vaughan's love of the country doubtless prompted him to make his delightful translation The Praise and Happinesse of the Countrie-Life, London, 1651, from the Spanish of Don Antonio de Guevara, Bishop of Carthagena and Counsellor of Estate to Charles V, Emperor of Germany. Guevara stresses the envy, pride, lust, ambition, and extravagance of the city in contrast to the piety, peace, truth, independence, security, innocence, and happiness of the country, Guevara's treatise may have colored Vaughan's poems on retirement: several of Vaughan's early poems indicate a pronounced liking for London life.
22 Dean Inge considers that Vaughan “gives only a hint of the doctrine which Wordsworth elaborates” (Studies of English Mystics, p. 202). Professor G. M. Harper suggests as a probable source for Wordsworth's ode Coleridge's “Sonnet composed on a journey homeward, the author having received intelligence of the birth of a son, Sept. 20, 1796,” which in turn Coleridge admitted was indebted to Plato's Phœdo. The remaining and more important ideas of the poem Harper believes original with Wordsworth, the nine lines beginning “My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky” being “its germ” (William Wordsworth, II, 126).
23 Grosart in his edition of Vaughan (II, lxviii) speaks of half a dozen of Vaughan's poems “which beyond all question went to ‘feed’ Wordsworth in his most august meditative moods.” Cf. also L. R. Merrill, “Vaughan's Influence upon Wordsworth's Poetry,” Modern Language Notes, xxxvii, 91.
24 In Daphnis and Ad Posteros he alludes to the mountains among which the Usk rises. The adjectives “lofty” and “aerius,” which he applies to them, tell us only that he had a wholesome respect for their height.