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Henry Vaughan: The Man Within

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Louis L. Martz
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Extract

The earlier poets in the English meditative tradition, Southwell, Alabaster, Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw, were all poets of Catholic or Anglo-Catholic tendency, where the Continental art of meditation found a fertile ground in which to develop an English counterpart. It is significant that all five of these earlier poets became priests: Southwell, bred and executed as a Catholic; Alabaster, shifting from Anglican to Catholic to Anglican; Donne, born and bred a Catholic, but turning finally to the English Church; Crashaw, born and bred a Protestant, but turning finally to the Roman Church; and Herbert, happy all his life within the English communion. They had their doctrinal differences, and I do not wish to minimize those differences; but they had something more in common: a devotion to the central mysteries of the Passion, a devotion to the symbols and a liturgy that served to celebrate those mysteries. All would have agreed with George Herbert's vision of “The Agonie”: Who knows not Love, let him assay And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike Did set again abroach; then let him say If ever he did taste the like. Love is that liquour sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 78 , Issue 1 , March 1963 , pp. 40 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1963

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References

Note 1 in page 40 The present essay represents essentially the first chapter of a forthcoming book, The Paradise Within, to be published by Yale University Press.

Note 2 in page 41 I am indebted to the Rev. Marcus Haworth for suggesting some of the phrases in this translation.

Note 3 in page 41 In 1655 this 14-line poem becomes the first part of a poem in 46 lines, with the elaborate dedicatory heading: “To my most merciful, my most loving, and dearly loved Redeemer, the ever blessed, the onely Holy and Just One, Jesus Christ, The Son of the living God, And the sacred Virgin Mary.”

Note 4 in page 41 Many of these echoes have been listed in the notes to Vaughan's Works, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd edn., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957; and the echoes have been perceptively discussed by E. C. Pettet, Of Paradise and Light: A Study of Vaughan's Silex Scintillans (Cambridge University Press, 1960), Chap. iii. See also the recent helpful article by Mary Ellen Rickey, “Vaughan, The Temple, and Poetic Form,” SP, Lix (1962), 162–170.

Note 5 in page 42 This brief account of “Regeneration” deals only with those aspects important to the present study; for detailed interpretations, differing in some respects from my own, see the illuminating studies of this poem by R. A. Durr, SP, Liv (1957), 14–28; by Ross Garner, Henry Vaughan: Experience and the Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1959), 47–62; and by Pettet, op. cit., pp. 104–117.

Note 6 in page 43 For the trees of stanza 2, see I Kings xix.4-8 (Elijah under the juniper tree); Zechariah i.8-11 (“the men that stood among the myrtle trees”); Judges vi.ll (“And there came an angel of the Lord, and sat under an oak which was in Ophrah”).

Note 7 in page 44 See Herbert, “The H. Communion,” two poems under one title; the first deals with the action of “grace against all sins”; the second celebrates the “ease” with which the soul now communicates with heaven: “Thou hast restor'd us to this ease / By this thy heav'nly bloud.” See also “The Invitation,” esp. st. 4, dealing with “joy”; and “The Banquet,” celebrating the “sweet and sacred cheer” of the Communion, and its power of raising the soul to “the skie.”

Note 8 in page 45 See G. H. Tavard, Transiency and Permanence: The Nature of Theology According to St. Bonaventure (Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure, ?. Y., 1954), chaps, ii-iv.

Note 9 in page 45 See Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, trans. L. ?. M. Lynch (New York: Random House, 1960), pp. 210–224.

Note 10 in page 45 Confessions, Book x, Chap. vi. All subsequent references are to Book x. Quotations in English are taken from Saint Auguslines Confessions translated, by William Watts, London, 1631. This version, with some corrections, is included in the Loeb Library edition of the Confessions, which I have used for the Latin quotations.

Note 11 in page 46 See Bede Frost, The Art of Mental Prayer (London: S.P.C.K., 1940), p. 69.

Note 12 in page 47 Memory, Understanding, and Will are not discussed as “faculties” in the Confessions, although something close to this triad is implied in one chapter of the final book (xiii.ll), where Augustine discusses the triad : esse, nosse, mile. The full development of Augustine's exploration of the interior trinity of powers, the Image of the Trinity in man, is found in his treatise, the De Trinilate, completed about twenty years after the Confessions. See esp. Book X of the De Trinitate, and the excellent Introduction to this treatise by John Burnaby, prefaced to his translation of selected books: Augustine: Later Works, Library of Christian Classics, Vol. vni, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1955.

Note 13 in page 47 Pensées, ed. Brunschvicg, no. 283.

Note 14 in page 49 The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (3rd edn., 5 vols., Oxford University Press, 1892), ii, 222.