Of Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton in Honor of Alan Rudrum

Of Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton in Honor of Alan Rudrum

Donald R. Dickson Holly Faith Nelson Editors

University of Delaware Press

Of Paradise and Light

Frontispiece, Alan Rudrum. Ron Long, Simon Fraser University photographer

Of Paradise and Light Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton in Honor of Alan Rudrum

Edited by

Donald R. Dickson and Holly Faith Nelson

Newark: University of Delaware Press

 2004 by Rosemont Publishing & Printing Corp. All rights reserved. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use, or the internal or personal use of specific clients, is granted by the copyright owner, provided that a base fee of $10.00, plus eight cents per page, per copy is paid directly to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, Massachusetts 01923. [0-87413-876-0/04 $10.00 + 8¢ pp, pc.] Other than as indicated in the foregoing, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (except as permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law), and except for brief quotes appearing in reviews in the public press.

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The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1984. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Of paradise and light : essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton in honor of Alan Rudrum / edited by Donald R. Dickson and Holly Faith Nelson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87413-876-0 (alk. paper) 1. Vaughan, Henry, 1621–1695—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Milton, John, 1608–1674—Criticism and interpretation. 3. English poetry—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 4. Christian poetry, English— History and criticism. 5. Vaughan, Henry, 1621–1695—Religion. 6. Milton, John, 1608–1674—Religion. 7. Rudrum, Alan. I. Dickson, Donald R. II. Nelson, Holly Faith, 1966– PR3744.O38 2004 821′.409—dc22 2004002536

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Contents List of Illustrations Introduction DONALD R. DICKSON AND HOLLY FAITH NELSON Civil War Cleavage: More Force than Fashion in Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans JONATHAN F. S. POST The “true, practic piety” of “holy writing”: Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Christoper Harvey and The Temple ROBERT WILCHER Milton’s Jarring Allusions JOHN LEONARD Milton and the Index NIGEL SMITH Raphael, Diodati KAREN L. EDWARDS Wilderness Exercises: Adversity, Temptation, and Trial in Paradise Regained N. H. KEEBLE Biblical Structures in Silex Scintillans: The Poetics and Politics of Intertextuality HOLLY FAITH NELSON Boethius and Henry Vaughan: The Consolatio Translations of Olor Iscanus JONATHAN NAUMAN The Mount of Olives: Vaughan’s Book of Private Prayer DONALD R. DICKSON 5

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50 71 101 123

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Henry Vaughan, Orpheus, and The Empowerment of Poetry PETER THOMAS “Winged and free”: Henry Vaughan’s Birds GLYN PURSGLOVE Water, Wood, and Stone: The Living Earth in Poems of Vaughan and Milton DIANE KELSEY MCCOLLEY Time and the Word: A Reading of Henry Vaughan’s “The Search” MATTHIAS BAUER Henry Vaughan’s Poems of Mourning ALAN RUDRUM Lark, Wild Thyme, Crowing Cock, and Waterfall: The Natural, the Moral, and the Political in Blake’s Milton and Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans JUNE STURROCK Principal Publications of Alan Rudrum Consolidated Bibliography Contributors Index

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329 351 357 377 381

Illustrations Frontispiece Alan Rudrum, Ron Long, Simon Fraser University Photographer Titian, Salome (ca. 1512–15) Galleria Doria, Rome Reni, Salome with the Head of the Baptist (1639) Galleria Nazionale, Rome Title page of Henry Vaughan’s Olor Iscanus (1651) Celtic Warrior from John Speed’s History of Great Britain (1611) Title page of Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans (1650) Tombstone in Llansantffraed Churchyard

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Of Paradise and Light

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Introduction Donald R. Dickson and Holly Faith Nelson

I

THIS VOLUME IS DEDICATED TO ALAN RUDRUM ON THE OCCASION of his seventieth birthday by his friends and colleagues. His two principal interests, in the work of John Milton and Henry Vaughan, are reflected in the essays collected here. Alan Rudrum is widely recognized as the preeminent Vaughan scholar of his time, for his many critical contributions, and as the first person to have undertaken critical editions of both the Vaughan twins, the poet Henry and the occultist philosopher Thomas. As Stevie Davies put it, all students of the Vaughans are heavily indebted to Alan Rudrum’s “formidable textual and interpretive work” in those editions.1 No scholar in the twentieth century has done more to make accessible the works of the Vaughans and to uncover the beauty and cultural significance of their writings. Alan Rudrum’s earliest book publications grew out of his teaching. His colleague in the University of Adelaide, Peter Dixon, remarked on the need for a selection of Goldsmith’s poems for classroom use, and he replied that there was a similar need in the case of Johnson. That was the genesis of The Poems of Johnson and Goldsmith (1965). His early work on Milton, though the product of original research, was also written for students rather than for professional scholars. Early in his first sabbatical he wrote to Macmillan, stating his interests and asking if they had any project to which he might contribute. They commissioned a short book on Paradise Lost for students preparing for university entrance examinations. Liking what they received, Macmillan commissioned two further volumes on Milton in the Critical Commentary series and a collection of essays with an introductory essay on the history of Milton criticism. The fruits of that first sabbatical were the critical commentaries on Paradise Lost (1966), Comus & Shorter Poems (1967), Samson Agonistes (1969), and Milton: Modern Judgments (1968). At that time 11

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Rudrum was reading Ernst Gombrich, and in the critical commentaries on Milton his aim was to emulate Gombrich’s clarity of exposition while doing justice to the complexity of his subjects. During his second spell of research work in England, in the early 1970s, Rudrum had the satisfaction of seeing an entire shelf in Blackwells given over to his work on Milton, and of meeting several Oxford undergraduates who told him that they had read his work in reading for their scholarships. By that time he had been commissioned by the Oxford University Press to undertake a critical edition of the Works of Thomas Vaughan and by Penguin to edit the Complete Poems of Henry Vaughan. There had been very little scholarly work on Thomas Vaughan, and Rudrum’s edition, the fruit of some fifteen years of intermittent labor, is both pioneering and close to definitive. Its commentary, more than 150 pages of closely printed notes, traces the vast majority of Vaughan’s allusions to their sources and provides an unprecedented account of the reading of an early modern occultist. The edition of Henry Vaughan’s Complete Poems not only supplemented the textual work of L. C. Martin and French Fogle but offered the most comprehensively annotated edition to that date and was hailed as an important landmark for specialists. Work on the editions represents the second phase of Rudrum’s interest in the Vaughans. In the first phase, represented by his dissertation and early articles flowing from it, he was concerned to understand their thought and its philosophical antecedents, rather than with the religio-political context in which they wrote. A number of these essays are now considered to be classic studies, notably the 1961 article on Henry Vaughan’s “The Book,” the 1969 article on Henry Vaughan’s “The Night,” the 1977 essay on Thomas Vaughan’s Lumen de Lumine, and, stemming from his reading in Milton, the 1970 essay on “Polygamy in Paradise Lost.” His aim, in undertaking the wide reading in secondary sources and the close reading of primary texts in preparing the editions, was to lay the foundations for a more comprehensive approach to Henry Vaughan’s work. The third phase of his work was foreshadowed in the 1981 book, commissioned by the University of Wales Press. In working on that book Rudrum became interested in the question of what relevance hermetic ideas, so important to both the Vaughan brothers, might have had for them in the distressing times through which they lived. Consideration of Henry Vaughan as a political poet did not mean a clean break with previous work. For example, the hermetic ideas in

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Vaughan’s poem “The Book,” subject of the 1961 article, were examined afresh in relation to the poet’s anti-Calvinism in the 1989 article “Henry Vaughan, the Liberation of the Creatures, and Seventeenth Century English Calvinism.” Similarly the ideas brought to light in the 1963 article “Henry Vaughan and the Theme of Transfiguration” were later shown to be significant to the Vaughans’ political position. In this third phase Rudrum considered Vaughan and Milton together in the 2000 article “For then the Earth shall be all Paradise: Milton, Vaughan and the neo-Calvinists on the Ecology of the Hereafter.” In this he demonstrated that in spite of being on opposite sides of the political divide, both poets might be considered as forerunners of today’s “deep ecologists.” Both, in opposition to contemporary Calvinist views, understood God as valuing the nonhuman creation, not merely for its utility to human beings, but in its own right. In 1994 an invitation to a seminar on Samson Agonistes at Duquesne University provided the stimulus for his “Discerning the Spirit in Samson Agonistes: The Dalila Episode,” which was a highly controversial conference paper in 1995 before its publication as a book chapter in 1999. The renewed interest in Milton that stemmed from attendance at the 1994 seminar was reflected in Rudrum’s teaching and in a great many contributions to the electronic discussion group, Milton-L. A 1996 conference paper “Samson Agonistes as Battle-Ground: Historical Probability as It Relates to Meaning and Significance,” was an account and appraisal of the continuation on Milton-L of the discussion provoked by his 1995 conference paper. Samson Agonistes has been much discussed in recent years, and Alan Rudrum continues to play a significant role in that discussion, as in the 2002 article on “the agon over Samson Agonistes.” However, his predominant aim has been to combat the commonly held view that ecological concern, or concern for the nonhuman creation, is a purely postDarwinian phenomenon. To this end he has studied the conflict in the early modern period between those who thought of the nonhuman creation in anthropocentric, indeed purely utilitarian terms; and those who believed that God also values the nonhuman world of animals and plants. He has examined this conflict in the work of Vaughan and Milton as it relates to the resurrection of all creatures; and in the writings of others who practiced ethical vegetarianism on the grounds that, in the absence of real need, we ought not to treat other sentient creatures as mere means to our ends.

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In summary, we might refer to Alan Rudrum’s own statement in Contemporary Authors: “Looking back at my work to date after twenty-five years as a university teacher, I see a threefold pattern: I have tried, as in my work on Henry and Thomas Vaughan, to do the kind of fundamental scholarly and critical work that can be said to advance knowledge; I have tried, as in my small books on Milton, to write sound and intelligent criticism aimed at people who are not, or not yet, professional scholars, and to convey my own pleasure as a reader; and I have tried to confront the difficulties of the academic profession in our time, as in my report to Kent State University, commissioned by the American Association of University Professors and published in 1969, and my report “Unemployment and Under-Employment of Qualified University Teachers of English in Canada,” published by the Association of Canadian University Teachers of English, 1979. Alan Rudrum has throughout his career been willing to set aside his own work in situations of urgency. If his report to the A.A.U.P. on Kent State University had been heeded, the tragic events of 1970 might have been averted. His report to A.C.U.T.E. had some positive consequences in the amelioration of the working conditions of sessional lecturers in some Canadian universities. Finally, while it is his scholarship that this volume celebrates (and its ongoing nature acknowledged in his own contribution to it, as startling as his early essay on “Polygamy in Paradise Lost”), his friends will also remember him as a chess player, marathon runner, and all-weather motorcyclist; and for his work on behalf of animal welfare and the mentally ill.

II This collection centers on a concern with textual relations in the works of Henry Vaughan and John Milton. The publications of Alan Rudrum over the past forty years have revealed a fascination with interconnectedness between and within texts. He has deciphered in the writings of Henry Vaughan an uncanny awareness of resemblance and sympathy between all things, an awareness that helps others locate the poet within a coherent landscape despite the fragmentation and dislocation of civil war. Rudrum has shown that in the case of Henry Vaughan and his twin Thomas this landscape is grounded on a fusion of biblical and hermetic texts. Similarly Rudrum has uncovered for stu-

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dents of Milton the conceptual and textual foundations upon which many of Milton’s works are based. The works of Henry Vaughan and John Milton have long been considered rich in antecedent texts or “pre-texts.” Neither Vaughan nor Milton attempt to hide the origins of their works. Their literary productions are not “original” in the modern sense but are a space upon which past voices are revealed and revised. To read a work by Vaughan or Milton is to be thrust repeatedly into other textual worlds. Their work demands the most active of readers, for we are both invited and compelled to establish the meaning that lies between the texts. It was Frank Kermode who first declared Vaughan a “bookish poet” and his works a product of bibliogenesis.2 While Kermode accused Vaughan of the “shabbiness of plagiarism,” others have celebrated the freedom of Vaughan’s mosaic synthesis. For Thomas Calhoun, Vaughan’s “unusual reliance on prior texts” was a creative act worthy of a great poet: “Old voices echo in Vaughan’s poetic rooms. Their language has been disjoined from prior contexts, rendered in new combinations, assimilated, and perhaps hidden, yet their lines are discoverable and other voices inevitably will be listened to as parts of Vaughan’s.”3 Jonathan Post conceives of Vaughan’s intertextual compositional habit as an “extended conversation with his ‘dear friend’ George Herbert,”4 while Stevie Davies views it in psychoanalytic terms, as evidence of Vaughan’s need “to twin another identity in order to be himself.”5 Regardless of authorial motivation, the writings of Henry Vaughan reflect a textual epistemology, a belief that truth can be learned through books and his reliance on prior texts supports this philosophical leaning. As Calhoun notes, for Vaughan “the inner man, that living spirit, is a synthesis of near and remote books–those places where the spirit is communicated.”6 Vaughan frequently engages in direct quotation, italicizing words and phrases not his own to ensure that the reader does not confuse his poetic voice and that of his sources. He exposes the crevices between texts to signal the authority of his predecessors and to root his poetic identity and political allegiance in an established biblical, poetic, and philosophic tradition. He exalts the past through duplication, thereby rejecting the “innovation” of his political enemies. Milton has a more complicated relationship with antecedent texts than does Vaughan. Vaughan experiences little anxiety

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speaking through the “other.” His willingness to foreground old voices in his work suggests that he does not strive to surpass those whom he imitates, but views imitation as a collaborative enterprise. To be second or secondary is insignificant to Vaughan, for he desires to be a disciple. We are far more inclined to think of Milton as an innovator, as one who perceived himself a singular and solitary figure and described himself as the “sole advocate of a discount’nanc’t truth.”7 Milton’s education at St. Paul’s first taught him to fashion himself and his works by absorbing and re-producing antecedent texts. His early poetry reveals the influence of at least thirteen poets, though Ovid was his chief influence. So too does his Commonplace Book attest to his absorption of a wide and varied collection of books.8 Yet even at a young age, Milton was not merely content to reproduce texts and models. Though he embraced imitation as an aesthetic principle, he insisted on transformative imitation, as Barbara Lewalski reminds us: “Rather than imitating specific poems, Milton absorbs, plays with, and freely transforms Ovid and the others, turning them to his own purposes.”9 Unlike Vaughan, Milton prefers to allude rather than to quote, highlighting textual transformation and giving priority to his own words. He seems, as Lewalski claims, to “set himself in competition with the great classical and vernacular epic poets of the past—Homer, Virgil, Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, DuBartas, Spenser.”10 Milton often desires his reader to interrogate authority as embodied by the pre-text; intertextuality, therefore, is less an aesthetic device than a political tool. While the Royalist Henry Vaughan quotes to maintain some measure of cultural continuity in radically discontinuous times and to celebrate duplication over innovation, the Puritan Milton challenges the “authority of the texts from which he takes his allusions” and establishes “the power of the individual reader over the authorship of the text, even his own.”11 Thus for Vaughan and Milton iteration, duplication and renovation of pre-texts is integral to their aesthetic activities. Neither author writes without recourse to earlier authors, literary models or individual pre-texts. Both authors conceive of the self, society, and the sacred through antecedent texts, though the extent to which they rewrite or remodel these texts in artistic production varies. Both Milton and Vaughan embrace the “postmodern” notion of the iterability of language—its endless repeat-

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ability—and use this very principle as the basis for an intertextual poetics.

III The essays in this volume examine intertextual intersections in the works of Henry Vaughan and John Milton and consider their aesthetic, philosophical, or political implications. We hope that their theoretical pluralism will reveal the variety and complexity of textual relations in the works of these early modern authors. Some of the essays focus on the author’s conscious creation of intertext, others explore the reader’s negotiation of books within books, while still others examine the linguistic effect of textual intersections. The essays not only consider material borrowing, but also explore the absorption of concepts or formal structures from antecedent texts. Jonathan Post’s opening essay raises the question of anxiety of influence in the works of Henry Vaughan, a question made acute because of the dark political circumstances at mid century and centering on Vaughan’s immanent sense of difference from Herbert and from Herbert’s other followers with regard to the relative value assigned to fashion and force in poetry. In the preface to the second edition of Silex Scintillans, Vaughan had stated his preference for a poetry of “force” over “fashion.” The one he associated with spiritual striving and conversion, the other with the material and inauthentic in art as well as life. Post then traces out the poetic consequences of this politically responsive aesthetic in Vaughan’s religious verse as a whole and offers, in particular, new readings of both canonical poems and lesser known lyrics. Robert Wilcher also argues that Vaughan is engaged in a battle to establish himself as the legitimate heir of George Herbert and Silex Scintillans as the singular offspring of The Temple. Wilcher proposes that the unnamed followers of Herbert criticized by Vaughan for having “more of fashion, than force” are, or include, Richard Crashaw and Christopher Harvey, and he disproves the claim that Vaughan had Francis Quarles in mind. Wilcher establishes the validity of this hypothesis by examining the publication history of The Temple and by considering allusions in Silex Scintillans to the Steps to the Temple and The Synagogue. Wilcher explains that rather than embracing his “fellow

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labourers in the vineyard of sacred verse,” Vaughan readily dismisses them. The relationship of Silex Scintillans and The Temple is, therefore, complex because The Synagogue and The Steps to the Temple mediate this relationship and because the intertextual dialogue that emerges is not only aesthetic in nature, but also highly political. John Leonard’s essay takes us from the broader question of influence to more specific questions of intertextuality as do the other essays in the second section. Leonard enters the recent debate over the frequency and character of allusions in Milton’s poetry. Some scholars believe that the number of Milton’s allusions have been overestimated, while others insist that critics have admitted too few. Still others point to the bias in bringing to light certain allusions, thereby “exercising a kind of unconscious censorship.” Leonard has a particular interest in those unsafe or jarring allusions frequently ignored by critics because they “jar with and against their contexts.” At times, Milton’s allusions go so far as to pull his text in opposite directions and Leonard claims that, in some cases, such jarring allusions are deliberate, and concludes that “Milton’s poetry draws much of its power from allusions that are unsafe.” Nigel Smith’s essay is also concerned with the way in which Milton receives and revises texts, though its focus is Milton’s reception of the writings of Paolo Sarpi. A staunch defender of an independent Venetian Republic, Sarpi presented a harsh critique of papal power and ecclesiastical abuses in Istoria del Concilio Tridentino. Though Milton’s interest in Sarpi has been documented, many of his allusions to Sarpi’s works have been glossed over. Smith analyzes Milton’s reading of, and response to, Sarpi’s account of various “Romish” institutions and practices, finding that the most significant influence on Milton’s works is that part of the Istoria that deals with the Index of Prohibited Books. Sarpi’s relation of the history of book censorship influences the development of Milton’s imagery, particularly in Areopagitica. Sarpi’s condemnation of censorship as a “form of cultural sterilization” resonates with Milton, who envisions, with Sarpi, the suppression and expurgation of texts as a kind of mass martyrdom. Sarpi’s text gives Milton the language to express his resentment at the emasculation and malformation of texts through censorship. Yet Milton is not content to accept Sarpi as he is; he wrenches and revises the pre-text to invest it with new meanings, “replenishing Sarpi with Protestant vigor.” Similarly, Karen L. Edwards’s essay addresses the way that

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Milton absorbs and transforms texts, though in this case the text is the phoenix image from his own earlier poem Epitaphium Damonis, which he evokes in Paradise Lost (5.271–72). In the seventeenth century, to compare Raphael to a phoenix, even in an epic, risked sounding old-fashioned. Edwards suggests that in the epic Milton revitalizes the ancient legend in line with new “scientific” thinking. He thus makes the phoenix available for figuring the resurrection of a friendship interrupted by death, the poet’s friendship with Charles Diodati. The long conversations between Adam and Raphael not only display all the qualities that characterize the correspondence between Milton and Diodati: wit, gentle humor, seriousness about the creatures and the Creator of the natural world. They bring the topics of conversation up-to-date. In the conversation between man and angel, Edwards shows, Paradise Lost renders the friendship between Milton and Diodati not as it was, but as it might have become. N. H. Keeble also explores Milton’s revision of a single passage from an antecedent text. His essay examines the amplification in Paradise Regained of the biblical account of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness and demonstrates the significance of Milton’s transformation of the wilderness from “a circumstantial detail” in the pre-text “to a resonantly significant part of the poem’s design.” Milton locates Jesus’ wilderness experience within a long biblical tradition of “wilderness habitation,” presenting it as the anti-type of the desert journeys of Old Testament patriarchs and prophets. Keeble claims, however, that Milton is not only concerned with the typological significance of the wilderness in Scripture, but is also intent on invoking the political wilderness of early modern England. Keeble reveals that Royalists and Puritans alike depicted their spiritual experience as a pilgrimage through the “uncultivated waste land” of England. The biblical figure of the wilderness became a site of contest, and Paradise Regained sought to intervene in this contestation to discredit “the Royalists’ appropriation of the wilderness topos.” Milton associates “the unresistable might of Weaknesse” embodied by the Son in the wilderness with his own quietist and pacifist Christian stance after 1660. In Milton’s account, Jesus’ heroic sufferance in the wilderness serves as a model for, and offers consolation to, those exiled by the restored Stuart regime. Like Keeble, Holly Faith Nelson addresses the politics of biblical allusion, though her interest lies in structural allusion in the poetry of Henry Vaughan. Scholars have debated for some time

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the structural unity of Silex Scintillans. While many find in this poetic collection an overall scheme, others find little or no consistent movement or development. Those who find a linear structure in Silex Scintillans often suggest that it is embedded in two external biblical structures: the macro-archetypal structure from creation to apocalypse and the micro-Pauline structure from election to salvation. Though Nelson agrees that a biblical narrative unifies some lyrics and lyric clusters in Silex Scintillans, she finds that Vaughan often subverts such a narrative for political purposes. Silex Scintillans is less a unified and autonomous unit, she claims, than an exploration of identity or subjectivity. If Vaughan relies on any biblical structure, it is that of the Psalms, an anatomy of the human soul, a compendium of diverse voices. Silex Scintillans, like the Psalms, relies on varietas as a structural principal, which undermines the sense of continuity, sequence, and progression associated with narrative, biblical or otherwise. She concludes that we must avoid a totalizing interpretive strategy since the disunity of the Silex Scintillans is both politically and aesthetically meaningful. Jonathan Nauman’s essay continues to explore the politics of intertextuality in Vaughan’s works, though he directs his attention to Vaughan’s translations of Boethius. According to Thomas Greene, translation is a fairly conservative form of imitation, as the author is disinclined to alter the enshrined text. However, Nauman proposes that Vaughan’s translations from the Consolatio are not an act of banal duplication but a politically and poetically meaningful development. Vaughan’s decision to translate Boethius’s philosophical work reveals a desire to locate his own voice within the “context of established literary authority,” thereby challenging “Puritan and sectarian claims to inspired innovation.” With the Civil War in view, Vaughan defensively slants his translation toward exposure of parliamentary atrocities; and the “topical innuendoes and taunts” suggest that the translator has failed to accept Lady Philosophy’s claim that evil accomplishments should be viewed as misfortunes for the evildoer. Donald Dickson, like Nelson and Nauman, finds political resistance in Vaughan’s intertextual efforts. Dickson turns to Vaughan’s prose piece The Mount of Olives to decipher its relationship with the proscribed Book of Common Prayer. Vaughan, like Jeremy Taylor, would have viewed the Prayer Book as the “ligament” of ecclesiastical society. Changes to public worship, including the removal of the Prayer Book, denied “the traditional locus of the holy” to Royalists and the unholy occupation of Wales

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by itinerant ministers violated and desecrated Vaughan’s sacred space. The Mount of Olives is a textual response to these cultural events, and Dickson explores the ways in which it offers consolation and practical assistance to disenfranchised Royalists during the Interregnum. He does not view this prose work as a simple replacement for the Book of Common Prayer, but rather sees it as a private book of prayers with a distinctly public purpose: “to bolster the British church in a hostile and unfamiliar world that is without its traditional supports.” Like Dickson, Peter Thomas places Vaughan’s writings within the political context of Civil War Britain, though he narrows his focus to Vaughan’s reception and transformation of a single mythological figure. When Vaughan’s youthful expectations of literary fame and fortune are dashed and increasingly beset by Civil War defeat, bereavement, and dislocation, Thomas sees Vaughan’s turn to the Orpheus myth (scientific as well as literary) as a key element in this process of transformation as he works to reconstruct a viable poetic identity. With traditional patterns of patronage in disarray, Vaughan seeks his own source of poetic empowerment. His “exile” in Breconshire and the forced return to his Celtic roots are turned to positive advantage. Thomas sketches ways in which Vaughan identifies (sometimes seemingly tongue-in-cheek, sometimes with intense seriousness, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly in recurrent figurations, and pervasively in his poetry’s mind-set) with the figure of Orpheus, the great founding bard and hermetic magus. Glyn Pursglove, like Thomas, narrows his focus to address Vaughan’s treatment of a single metaphor: the soul as winged creature. Pursglove examines avian imagery in Silex Scintillans and Thalia Rediviva in light of the long tradition of representing the soul as a bird. For Vaughan, birds are “messengers of the spirit, words in a divine vocabulary, and means to a poetic understanding of the self.” Pursglove brings to bear upon Vaughan’s poems the meaning(s) accumulated by this metaphor in ancient Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, and Celtic pretexts. Vaughan’s treatment of the metaphor is also located within a Renaissance context when Pursglove discusses avian symbolism in Dante’s Paradiso, Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle” and Hamlet, and Marvell’s “The Garden.” Pursglove argues that this symbolic inheritance must be grasped if we are to understand the complexity of Vaughan’s references to birds, and by extension the complexity of Vaughan’s self-fashioning (he views himself as a swan), his poetics (he fashions his poetry an eagle), and his theology.

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The last few essays address conceptual intertextuality in the works of Vaughan and Milton. Diane McColley traces the Christian vitalist tradition in the poems of Milton and Vaughan, believing that both wish to restore the connection between spirit and matter. Renaissance allegory, theological instrumentalism, and natural philosophy explained the world in polar terms: God and nature; king and body politic; man and woman; body and soul. Vitalists attempted to unite these dualities. McColley adduces works by contemporary authors, including Thomas Vaughan, Henry Oldenburgh, Margaret Cavendish, Pierre Gassendi, and Anne Finch, to identify texts sympathetic to vitalism. She sees Vaughan and Milton not only as Christian vitalists but also as proto-ecologists who view human beings as part of nature rather than outside or above nature and believe that “life is a property traceable to matter itself.”12 This vitalistic vision permitted Milton and Vaughan to give voice in their poems to the “ecological self ” set forth in hermetic, hylozoic, and monist materialist thought. Matthias Bauer looks at theological contexts through an examination of the grammatical structures of “The Search”—in particular, at the relation of tenses that enacts the aporia of the search undertaken by Vaughan’s speaker. In this context he addresses the characteristically circular structure of the poem. Realizing, by means of paradoxical temporal structures, that the ending of the search is only another beginning, becomes a form of imitating the Word as it is found in Vaughan’s motto taken from Acts 17. The speaker’s mystical experience at the moment of sunrise, the memory of a night spent in quest of the Savior, and biblical time itself all become subservient to the insight (of Acts 17) that temporal life takes place “in” the Lord. His examination of the relationship of eternity and time in this poem points to a central mystery or paradox of faith in Silex Scintillans. While McColley and Bauer are concerned with the textual transmission of philosophical and theological vocabulary and thought, Alan Rudrum is intent on exploring the transmission of literary tradition in the poetry of Henry Vaughan. Considering Vaughan’s elegiac poems “in light of the conventions of funeral practices, mourning and the poetics of elegy,” Rudrum locates them within medieval and early modern literary and cultural traditions. In some elegies Vaughan reflects the shift in attitude towards death in the early modern period, with its concern for the uniqueness and particularity of the deceased. In others he reverts to earlier attitudes, focusing on the commonality of death.

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In the earlier elegies Vaughan praises the deceased, making lament and consolation secondary. Frequently in the later elegies Vaughan leaves the identity of his subjects indeterminate and provides no catalog of particular virtues. The range of treatment suggests Vaughan’s familiarity with a number of elegiac traditions. Rudrum suggests the complexity of Vaughan’s engagement with the elegiac mode and in conclusion suggests an entirely new, and surprising, reading of “Fair and young light” as a penitential lament for Vaughan’s first wife, Catherine Vaughan. This collection concludes with an essay that takes us into the linguistic and social environment of the late eighteenth century. June Sturrock compares the natural visions of Vaughan and William Blake by reading two texts side-by-side—Silex Scintillans and Milton. Both Vaughan and Blake, Sturrock claims, recognize in the natural world aspects of human culture and the divine. She argues that, in this, both men rely on a textual tradition that envisions the natural as visionary and transformative. The experiences of Vaughan and Blake are also mediated by past writers—Herbert and Milton, among others; their poetic worlds, therefore, are “part of the long process of human imaginative history.” Their engagement with pretexts and the natural world is not an acultural exercise, for both men seek to improve the “life of the nation.” Though she does not suggest that Blake’s vision is directly indebted to Vaughan, Sturrock believes given similarity of substance and textual borrowing that each of the two poetic works can be fruitfully reinterpreted in light of each other.

NOTES 1. Stevie Davies, Henry Vaughan (Mid Glamorgan, Wales: Seren, 1995), 7– 8. 2. Frank Kermode, “The Private Imagery of Henry Vaughan,” Review of English Studies 1 (1950): 208. 3. Thomas Calhoun, Henry Vaughan: The Achievement of Silex Scintillans (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1981), 2. 4. Jonathan Post, Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), xxi. 5. Davies, Henry Vaughan, 64 –65. Davies bases this reading on the fact that Henry Vaughan had a twin brother, the hermeticist Thomas Vaughan. 6. Calhoun, Henry Vaughan, 73. 7. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 2:224. 8. In her recent biography of Milton, Barbara K. Lewalski notes that at St. Paul’s Milton “would have been assigned selections from Sallust, Virgil’s

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Eclogues, Georgics, and Aeneid, Cicero’s Epistles and Offices, Horace, Martial, Persius, and Juvenal.” He would also be expected to read the Greek New Testament and poetry “from Hesiod, Pindar, Theocritus, Homer, and Euripides, Isocrates or Democritus for oratory, Plutarch’s Moral Essays, and perhaps Dionysius for history.” The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 10. 9. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton, 17. 10. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton, 445. 11. Julia M. Walker, “The Poetics of Antitext and the Politics of Milton’s Allusions,” Studies in English Literature 37 (1997): 170. 12. Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 111.

Civil War Cleavage: More Force than Fashion in Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans Jonathan F. S. Post All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. —Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace Who will ascend, must be undressed. —Henry Vaughan, “Ascension-Hymn”

I HAVE LONG BEEN A DEVOTEE OF THE DARK AND “DUSKY” Vaughan, and as my continued pursuit of this subject here is liable to err in the direction of the tenebrous, let me be up front at the outset and note that the title of this essay is borrowed, with a turn, from Vaughan’s embattled but fascinating preface to the completed Silex Scintillans (1655). The author is speaking of Herbert’s exemplary role as “the first” to have had “any effectual success” at diverting what Vaughan calls “this foul and overflowing stream” of “idle” verse toward “pious themes and contemplations.” And having identified Herbert, Vaughan goes on to say: “After him followed diverse, —Sed non passibus aequis; they had more of fashion, than force.”1 In Vaughan’s diverse “they,” scholars have sometimes seen veiled references to Francis Quarles and Christopher Harvey. From 1640 on, Harvey’s Synagogue, or, The Shadow of the Temple, was often bound with successive editions of Herbert’s poems. During the years of Vaughan’s greatest productivity, it would have been, therefore, a constant, if not entirely welcome, companion. Besides offering a convenient lesson illustrating the pitfalls attending imitation, its presence would also have verified the old saw about two being company but three making a crowd. (And we know how Vaughan felt about crowds.) As for Quarles, E. K. 25

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Chambers found in Vaughan’s derisive comment about “frequent impressions, and numerous pages” a possible reference to the now-little-read-Quarles’s immense popularity in the 1630s and 1640s.2 By the same token, the indefatigable Wither might have been in Vaughan’s thoughts—and just possibly, too, though for different reasons, Richard Crashaw, whose high-church Steps to the Temple was initially published in 1646, the year in which Vaughan published his first thin collection of verse, Poems, with the Tenth Satyre of Juvenal Englished. What interests me, however, is not so much the genealogy of putative Herbertians here as the juxtaposition, given alliterative heightening, between “fashion” and “force” and the Latin tag accompanying the distinction—Sed non passibus aequis—for the light it initially sheds on the valued terms. These might appear, at a glance, to be solely aesthetic distinctions, with “force” gesturing toward the rhetorical concept of enargeia, or vividness,3 and fashion being associated with the habit of writing much but perfecting little : “they aimed more at verse, than perfection; as may be easily gathered by their frequent impressions, and numerous pages.” But it becomes quickly clear that Vaughan is talking about “perfection” as a moral category, as a feature of “true holiness,” as he goes on to indicate, and that a poetry of force, as opposed to a poetry of fashion, is the reward of authentic spiritual striving—the emphatically multipurpose verb is Vaughan’s. (“He that desires to excel in this kind of hagiography, or holy writing, must strive (by all means) for perfection.”) It is the result not so much of effortful revision of a Jonsonian kind, for instance, as inspired revelation, anchored in what Vaughan calls “a true, practic piety,” and its goal is to turn many to rightousness: “for they that turn many to righteousness, shall shine like the stars for ever and ever.” The luminous phrase is quoted verbatim from the Book of Daniel, where the apocalyptic reference to a final deliverance from tribulation is the prophet’s immediate subject—and Vaughan’s too, if, as he says quoting another prophet, this time from Revelation, “a door may be opened to him in heaven.” In this deeply circumstanced preface written from Newton by Usk, near Sketh-rock, 30 September 1654, Vaughan can sound more like Milton than Herbert as he debates in public issues of purity and censorship, and, indeed, one has only to return to the opening of Herbert’s “The Church-porch,” in light of Vaughan’s comments, to glimpse the sea change he thought was now required of devotional poetry. Herbert’s invitation to the “sweet

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youth” belongs not just to an earlier moment in history but to a different epoch altogether: “Hearken unto a verser, who may chance / Ryme thee to good.”4 Here is a reader or listener (“Hearken”) with time on his hands—a bit like the “idle” Vaughan of Poems 1646—and a poet or “Verser” willing to gamble with rhyme to see what good might come of it. The wordplay surrounding “chance” (as in perchance the poet will “Ryme thee to good” with “chance / Ryme”) nicely captures what we might call the art of calculated surprise Herbert practices on his reader, especially in the lyrics from “The Church,” with its unprecedented mix of verse patterns, rhyme schemes, and devotional topics. That critics rightfully remind us of the etymological link between “verse” and “turn” (from the Latin versus, for “turning of the plow”) should not prevent us from dwelling for a moment on the important difference here between rhyming a reader to good as against turning many to righteousness. In the first case, the emphasis is on the poet’s art and the individual reader. In the second, the focus is on the act of converting, of turning large numbers to “righteousness,” a term that carries with it both the Hebrew sense of deliverance from oppression and the Pauline emphasis on salvation through faith in Jesus. As a protestant, Herbert, of course, made the subject of personal salvation into a recurrent and moving theme in his poetry, just as Vaughan made rhyme a distinctive feature of his religious verse.5 But what had been a fine balancing act in Herbert between fashion and force (“his measure was eminent,” Vaughan tells us in the preface), between the art of rhyming and the act of persuading, became, in Vaughan, tilted in the direction of force—of highlighting the act of “turning” and not just one reader at a time, but many at once.6 As “conversion” or “regeneration” is his personal theme, so Vaughan came to see “turning” others as the urgent subject of his age, a subject made urgent, in fact, by the evidence of destruction everywhere around him. “Sed non passibus aequis.” As Alan Rudrum reminds us, the phrase comes from The Aeneid (2: 724).7 The immediate reference is to Aeneas’s son, Ascanius, who is said to walk with steps that matched not his father’s (as Herbert’s followers match not Herbert’s); and the wider historical context being narrated by Aeneas at this moment involves nothing less cataclysmic than the collapse of the Trojan civilization, with Anchises, Aeneas’s father, being urged to carry their country’s sacred household gods into exile.

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FASHION

AND

FORCE

IN

SILEX SCINTILLANS

In a poetry that ineluctably pits spiritual striving against political strife—references to blood are a recurrent obsession in Silex8 —fashion can have little place. Or to be more exact, fashion has a place, but one that Vaughan regarded sometimes with calculated indifference because unnourishing (“wide . . . weak . . . and lean”), or with simple disdain because transient (“The Ornament”), but more often, and interestingly, with moral outrage because threatening: a version of Satanic temptation, like the seductive Salome in “The Daughter of Herodias,” and in need of reviling at first breath: Vain, sinful art! who first did fit Thy lewd loathed motions unto sounds, And made grave music like wild wit Err in loose airs beyond her bounds?

The contrast with Titian’s suave, sentimental depiction of Salome quietly cradling John’s head couldn’t be more to the point.9 Vaughan’s snaky sorceress, generated from his reading of Matthew 14:6, dances errantly and dangerously in “loose airs” in front of her pleased uncle on his birthday and skews the “grave music” of this state occasion. As we know, Salome gets her horrendous wish to have John the Baptist’s head on a platter, shockingly presented to the viewer in Guido Reni’s contemporary version,10 and as if in response to the intrusive violence, Vaughan’s concluding stanza recoils with a two-handed indictment of both mother and daughter: Skilful enchantress and true bred! Who out of evil can bring forth good? Thy mother’s nets in thee were spread, She tempts to incest, thou to blood.

This is not a poem Vaughan scholars have happily taken under wing. It smacks more of the Senecan Kyd (or Anthony Hopkins playing the role of Titus Andronicus) than a disciple of Herbert, especially in its weirdly annotated violence, as Vaughan performs an extra bit of poetic justice by adding in the margin some grisly information about Salome not in the Bible but gleaned from the Byzantine chronicler, Nikephoros Kallistos: “in passing over a frozen river, the ice broke under her, and chopt off her head.”11 The erudition grounds the moral in the historical. In the

Figure 1. Titian, Salome (ca. 1512–15), Galleria Doria, Rome Photo Credit: Alinari / Art Resource, New York

Figure 2. Reni, Salome with the Head of the Baptist (1639), Galleria Nazionale, Rome

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double decapitation, the political analogues (and revenge motif ) are hard to miss and surely explain the decision to include this outlandish topic in a volume subtitled “Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations.” (The long-standing figural association connecting John and Jesus now inferentially incorporates Charles.) But in writing this poem, Vaughan must also have been stirred by the prophet’s fate, glossed by the Geneva Bible, as “an example of an invincible courage, which all ministers of God’s word ought to follow,” as well as by the idea of generational sinning. Bad seeds, too, grow secretly in Silex, and require rooting out by this Scripturally “Revved” up Juvenalian satirist. In any event, or better yet, in the last event, Vaughan’s loathing excoriation of “lust” here forms part of an alliteratively connected, unholy alliance with “lewdness” and the “latter” days (see Mark 13: 2; Thessalonians 2) that runs through the poetry, especially in part 2, where it is Vaughan’s mission to expose the decorative and artful for harboring the dangerous and demonic. In “The Constellation,” Antichrist emerges in the new order of zealous puritans, whom Vaughan accuses of hypocritically casting “blood, and tears upon thy book [Scripture] / Where they for fashion look” (my italics). And in “The Proffer” (should we hear “the prophet”?),12 Vaughan brings together the lewd and the hypocritical in exposing the Salome-like “sorcery / And smooth seducements” of the Commonwealth—its “fine tinsel, and false hair”: “But when thy Master comes,” says this voice crying in the wilderness, “they’ll find and see / There’s a reward for them and thee.” On the basis of his anti-Puritan zeal—the paradox is inescapable—Vaughan is sometimes perceptively paired with the antiprecisianist Herrick as fellow Anglican apologists, but it is hard to think, on the basis of their verse, that they could have belonged to the same church.13 And, of course, in an important sense they did not, since the ceremonial church Herrick images in Hesperides and Noble Numbers in 1648 is barely on Vaughan’s screen in 1650 (see “The British Church”). And it is almost altogether lost from sight in 1655. When Vaughan says in the preface that he is dedicating his “poor talent to the Church,” he quickly adds the important qualifier, “under the protection and conduct of her glorious Head,” meaning Jesus. This “church” is both everywhere and nowhere. It has no institutional place on earth, which does not mean it is without significance for Vaughan, only that the difference between the visible church and the faithful believers in Jesus is ceasing to matter to the poet.

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Hence the characteristically forceful leap or “turn” in his poetry from nostalgia to apocalypse, leaving little or no middle way for fashion or play. “I know the wayes of Pleasure, the sweet strains, / The lullings and the relishes of it,” a phrase from Herbert’s “The Pearl,” is not one Vaughan could have written (even in his courtly moments). In their sensuous immediacy, the lines stay too long on the tongue; they ask too much idle identification from the reader. Pleasurable imaginings, when they happen in Vaughan, belong to other people or orders of being, like the wellbehaved “winged guests” in “Religion,” who “Eat, drink, discourse, sit down, and rest.” And, as in this instance, they are set, with both apostrophe and exclamation mark, in the distant past: “O how familiar then was heaven!” Spiritually adrift, sometimes mistaken in the direction of his devotion (as in “The Search”), Vaughan’s present-tense persona frequently wanders about the landscape, but the sounds of whistling silk, heard by Herbert in “The Quip,” for instance, are altogether missing from his verse. Solomon “was never dressed so fine” as “flowers without clothes,” he says in his un-Herbert version of “Man,” momentarily exploiting the contrast between sumptuous clothing and naked natural beauty as part of his larger argument about man’s rootlessness, a theme emphasized in the double usage of “shuttle” and “loom” as twin images associated with the machinery of fabric making: Man is the shuttle, to whose winding quest And passage through these looms God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.

Vaughan’s plural use of “looms” looms large with gloom. The conjunction reminds us, if only for a moment, of the deterministic associations of cloth with clothos, of fabric with fate, and of the poet’s resonant wish throughout Silex to be unbound, to escape from “captivity,” in all that word comes to signify in a volume where it performs literally as the poet’s last word in “L’Envoy.” Nor did Vaughan share Herrick’s delight in disorder. There is nothing remotely “fine” about experiencing “distraction” in Vaughan’s wrenching poem of that title: “O knit me, that am crumbled dust! the heap / Is all dispersed, and cheap.” Veils are to be pierced in “Resurrection and Immortality,” seen through in “The Night,” or taken off in “Cock-Crowing”; they are not celebrated for being sweetly enticing to the eye. In the poem “Midnight,” stars send “Quick vibrations,” not Julia in her glittering

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garments. Indeed, clothing in Vaughan is explicitly associated with human mortality (“I walked the other day”), rather than with beautiful fabric, and as such, it serves as a symbol for bodily corruption suffered by mankind after the fall. “I’ll disapparel,” writes Vaughan at the end of “Vanity of Spirit” and earns a place in the OED for his singular use of the intransitive verb. And when he cannot simply shuck off his garments because the stain of sin is too deep, he imagines the bold, spectacular act of laundering in “Ascension-Hymn”: Then comes he! Whose mighty light Made his clothes be Like Heaven, all bright; The Fuller, whose pure blood did flow To make stained man more white than snow. He alone And none else can Bring bone to bone And rebuild man, And by his all subduing might Make clay ascend more quick than light.

I doubt anyone will miss the alliterative bounce in the last stanza or the victory ring of the final “might / light” rhyme. Both effects underscore the joyous singularity of a Jesus able to rebuild man from the bottom up. But to appreciate the full meaning of bodily change here, as Rudrum suggests, we also need to catch Vaughan’s allusion to Malachi 3:2, “for he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fullers’ soap” (a fuller is one who works with cloth),14 and the related urgency in Malachi’s warning of the approaching day of judgment: “And I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, and against the adulterers, and against false swearers, and against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow, and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger from his right, and fear not me, saith the Lord of hosts” (3:5). I think it is also just possible that in the subliminal scriptural echoes connecting the fullness of time and Christ as “The Fuller” we see an instance of what Geoffrey Hill calls Vaughan’s “Metaphysical phonetics”:15 those puns in Vaughan that, under the pressure of eschatological time, acquire a peculiar force. If one “disappears” in the present by “disapparelling,” then one becomes cleansed

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(and newly clothed) in the fullness of time by “The Fuller” himself. It seems only right, therefore, that the last poem in Silex represents the day of judgment as one final laundering. Through the agency of Jesus, “the new world’s new, quickening Sun,” “the seers . . . shall all be dressed in shining white,” and “these skies” shall be folded up “like old clothes” (“L’Envoy”). Given his antimaterialist sentiments—the only robes he celebrates belong to Jesus, the rending of which he repeatedly laments as a metonym for the destruction of the visible church— Vaughan’s response to beauty, in contrast to Herrick’s (or even Marvell’s), is not what we would call “aesthetic” in the usual sense. The poet who writes in “Affliction,” “Beauty consists in colours; and that’s best / Which is not fixed, but flies and flows,” is making a moral argument about reconciling himself to the spiritual and emotional vicissitudes of living in a universe in which he is pointedly not at home. He is not reporting his response to actual colors in front of him. As we learn from “Mount of Olives (II)”—one of two variations on Herbert’s two “Jordan” poems— Vaughan associates painting with lying (“The world did only paint and lie”), just as he views paint as a sign of the spotted soul in “St Mary Magdalen” (“He is still leprous, that still paints”). “Beautie and beauteous words should go together,” writes Herbert in “The Forerunners,” making a claim for both materialist and Platonic versions of truth. But in Vaughan beauty is a matter of spiritual value only: the word appears most often in conjunction with the religious experience that left its deepest imprint on him—religious conversion or spiritual regeneration: the “turned” life. The subject of so many richly decorated Renaissance paintings, the converted Mary Magdalene, for example, is described luminously but simply by Vaughan at the outset as “Dear, beauteous Saint! more white than day”; and through her penitential tears other ladies learn “the faithful cure . . . [that] makes beauty lasting, fresh and pure.” Likewise, “a beauteous paisage” in “Mount of Olives (II)” is pretty precisely because, in its sudden flowering, it can reflect an image of the regenerated soul and therefore “in the depth and dead of winter bring / To my cold thoughts a lively sense of spring.” It is when Vaughan is being least worldly, in fact, that his appreciation of beauty is keenest, his eye most alert: “I saw Eternity the other night / Like a great Ring of pure and endless light” (“The World”). “The beauteous files” commanded by “one born in a manger” are glimpsed in “a country / Far beyond the stars” (“Peace”). Uplifted by thinking about Christ’s ascension, that

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event celebrating Christ’s immateriality, Vaughan is suddenly free to appreciate Mary Magdalene’s sensuousness: “I smell her spices, and her ointment yields, /As rich a scent as the now primrosed fields.” Think of “They are all gone into the world of light,” and what comes to mind? Dear, beauteous death! the jewel of the just, Shining nowhere, but in the dark; What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust; Could man outlook that mark!

Vaughan is a great visionary poet at times not because he claimed to be inspired—Wither did, too—but because the desire to be out of body and time charged his metaphor-making capabilities. In a phrase like “jewel of the just” or “I see them walking in an air of glory,” beauty and beauteous words do go together; and in their luminous deployment, we glimpse those moments in Vaughan when aesthetic appreciation and spiritual truth converge in the figure of the righteous dead: those Pauline jewels justified by their faith in Jesus, Vaughan’s “one pearl,” as Jesus is called in “Silence, and stealth of days.” Indeed, when it came to writing a poem on a rainbow (as we might have begun to suspect), there is nothing especially painterly in Vaughan’s treatment of this theme. Although the imagined scene has “color” (but nothing quite as visually suggestive as Milton’s “Bow / Conspicuous with three listed colors gay”), what catches Vaughan’s eye is the rainbow’s “burnished, flaming Arch,” which he reads progressively as an unmistakable sign of God’s anger over past and present acts of infidelity, faithlessness, and murder. In stark contrast to the preceding poem on “St Mary Magdalene,” “The Rain-bow” (like “Abel’s Blood”) is a study in red, not white, although one would not gather as much from the brief commentary the poem has received. Following M. M. Mahood’s early lead of comparing Vaughan to Samuel Palmer, the British Romantic landscape painter, E. C. Pettet quotes the beginning of “The Rain-bow” as “a singularly, beautiful example” of Vaughan’s habit of merging “the Breconshire landscape” with “haunting views of Eden” and the pastoral life associated with early biblical times.16 And so the first thirteen lines appear. Vaughan deliberately identifies the poem’s youthful perspective on the world with that of Noah’s eldest son, Shem: Still young and fine! But what is still in view We slight as old and soiled, though fresh and new.

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How bright wert thou, when Shem’s admiring eye Thy burnished, flaming Arch did first descry! When Terah, Nahor, Haran, Abram, Lot, The youthful world’s grey fathers in one knot, Did with intentive looks watch every hour For thy new light, and trembled at each shower! When thou dost shine darkness looks white and fair, Storms turn to music, clouds to smiles and air: Rain gently spends his honey-drops, and pours Balm on the cleft earth, milk on grass and flowers. Bright pledge of peace and sun-shine!

I think it significant that Pettet stops quoting at this point, not, however, because the poem loses its way as Vaughan’s poems sometimes do, but because the landscape itself changes abruptly and Vaughan’s real theme emerges, indicated by his asterisk in the next line to Genesis 9:16, with its reference to the “bow” as a symbol of “the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.” “The Rain-bow,” we discover, is not about the picturesque or the iridescent. Its subject is “the sure tie / Of thy Lord’s hand, the object of his eye,” and the origins of God’s (and the poet’s) ire, when the “tie” or covenant is seen to be broken by man: When I behold thee, though my light be dim, Distant and low, I can in thine see him, Who looks upon thee from his glorious throne And minds the Covenant ’twixt All and One. O foul, deceitful men! my God doth keep His promise still, but we break ours and sleep.

In this carefully modulated prophetic moment, the Breconshire landscape—if that is what is being imaged here—begins to resemble the last books of Paradise Lost. The scene is not very pretty, and it is not the Vaughan readers like to remember; but it is the poet whose view of the world has been deeply (and appropriately) colored by the violence associated with kingdomdividing “covenants”: the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant between Parliament and Scotland; the covenant broken between ruler and people on 30 January 1649 (the word now being controverted publically by the likes of both Milton and Hobbes);17 and the more recent incursion of the Scottish “covenanting” army in 1651, in nearby Worcester, to help put down the Royalist attempt to restore the young Prince Charles to power.

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After the Fall, the first sin was in blood, And drunkenness quickly did succeed the flood; But since Christ died, (as if we did devise To lose him too, as well as Paradise,) These two grand sins we join and act together, Though blood & drunkeness make but foul, foul weather. Water (though both Heaven’s windows and the deep, Full forty days o’er the drowned world did weep,) Could not reform us, and blood (in despite) Yea God’s own blood we tread upon and slight. So those bad daughters, which God saved from fire, While Sodom yet did smoke, lay with their sire.

Accompanying this shift in vision here is a shift in idiom, as if an earnest but wearied Vaughan were now giving a folksy, inclusive, moral weather report: bloody again with more than a chance of incest. The overlay of the biblical past onto the present acquires a grim predictability without issuing into a specific political allegory. It seems enough for Vaughan to lament the now destroyed “Covenant ’twixt All and One,” a lament that begins laconically enough and, in the final paragraph, rises to a luxuriously bookish point in the rare usage of the Latinate “luctual” for mourning (cited by the OED). But Vaughan also takes care, at the end, to situate this vision of sin in the immediate, deeply prescient, apocalyptically ripe, present moment: Then peaceful, signal bow, but in a cloud Still lodged, where all thy unseen arrows shroud, I will on thee, as on a comet look, A comet, the sad world’s ill-boding book; Thy light as luctual and stained with woes I’ll judge, where penal flames sit mixed and close. For though some think, thou shin’st but to restrain Bold storms, and simply dost attend on rain, Yet I know well, and so our sins require, Thou dost but court cold rain, till rain turns fire.

This is a poem, one feels, just waiting to deliver its final unvarnished line. “The settled red is dull,” Vaughan writes in “Affliction.” “The Rain-bow” burns with a “burnished,” penitential fury, indeed, even inviting us to dismiss all notions of the courtly as so much temporary “cold rain.” Herbert could think of pleasing his God by writing “fine and witty,” but not Vaughan. He looks to the clouds hoping to find arrows hidden in a “shroud”—his use of the

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intransitive here reminding us of the word’s different associations with clothing, hiding places, and death, and of a poet restlessly waiting on the future day of reckoning. “Who will ascend, must be undressed.” The emphatic symmetry of that line also points perfectly to Vaughan’s desire for spiritual purity, for a devotional life so focused on an unmediated vision of religious truth, so driven by the quest for spiritual authenticity and authority, that the specter of anything worldly, false, or fashionable required forceful rejection: “The world did only paint and lie.” “Can these new lights be like to those, / These lights of serpents like the Dove?” The answer to the question prompted in “White Sunday” by the arrival of Sectarian enthusiasm in the early 1650s is a nervously vehement “no,” as Vaughan claims from Matthew 7:15 a prophet’s right to “discern wolves from the sheep.” But by the end of the poem he also ultimately admits to a world well beyond earthly repair, and pleads for an apocalyptic refinement, in which the faithful will be transmuted into stars: O come! refine us with thy fire! Refine us! we are at a loss. Let not thy stars for Balaam’s hire Dissolve into the common dross!

Three exclamation marks in nine words are a lot even for Vaughan. So, too, overloading the close with the forceful allusion to “Balaam’s hire” invites some unpacking, and not just from passages provided by the “Old” Testament but from those in the “New” as well. For in the Gospels, Balaam’s status as a prophet changes radically. From God’s erring but still loyal prophet in Numbers 22, he is forcefully reinterpreted, first by Peter, as an example of the false teacher who “loved the wages of unrighteousness” (2 Peter 2:15), then as an apostate by Jude, “Woe unto them! for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of Balaam for reward” (verse 11), and finally by John in Revelation, as a purveyor of false doctrine, as someone “who taught Balac to cast a stumbling block before the children of Israel, to eat things sacrificed unto idols, and to commit fornication” (2:14). Balaam’s fortune goes from bad to worse. As the Gospels proceed and as biblical perceptions of the end of time become increasingly imminent, the pressure seemingly produces a mini-parable, as it were, of the life corrupted by material gains, by the lure of fashion—and of one of God’s holy men, no less. On this fiery-tongued feast day, banned by Parliament in 1645,18 but

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otherwise given to celebrating the apostolic origins of Christianity, Vaughan’s pointed allusion here to “Balaam’s hire” serves as one last scripturally weighted pitch—an urgent “engine against the Almighty”, as Herbert says in “Prayer” (I)—for God to distinguish (and protect) the true from the false. Otherwise, “we are at a loss”—the downward arc of that line not relieved, or turned, by the poem’s closing rhyme on “dross.”

CLEAVAGE Vaughan’s much celebrated fascination with the creatures ought to be seen as the flip side of his worry over the fashionable, the mobile poseurs, the inauthentic, the “new lights,” “the black parasites,” the Balaams, Salomes, false covenanters, the new forcers of conscience, whether in Brecon or abroad:19 “What needs a conscience calm and bright / Within itself an outward test?” (“The Seed Growing Secretly”). The creatures, by contrast, are guileless. They arrest Vaughan’s attention not for reasons of descriptive appeal or natural behavior, as if they possessed a life or agency of their own (in the almost entirely, self-animating manner, say, of the creation as described by Milton in book 7 of Paradise Lost). What draws Vaughan to them (and them to Vaughan, so magnetic seems the connection) is their fixity, their undistracted, single-minded sense of belonging, the weightiness, in this passage from “Man,” that accompanies their waiting: Weighing the steadfastness and state Of some mean things which here below reside, Where birds like watchful clocks the noiseless date And intercourse of times divide, Where bees at night get home and hive, and flowers Early, as well as late, Rise with the sun, and set in the same bowers; I would (said I) my God would give The staidness of these things to man! for these To his divine appointments ever cleave, And no new business breaks their peace.

If Vaughan is sometimes mistaken for a midcentury Baconian, the error is attributable in part to the intense, personal speculation that frequently issues from his lyric musings. “Weighing” their habits here drives home the recognition that, “to his divine

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appointment,” they “ever cleave.” It is the only time in Silex that Vaughan uses this word (“cleave”) that also harbors its opposite meaning, so distinct and valued is this attribute of adhering, so near, in fact, is it to its dangerous opposite, meaning to separate or to sever.20 (A picture of a meat cleaver accompanies the definition in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.) I suspect that Vaughan was led to use “cleave” because of Paul’s remark in Romans 12:9: “Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good.” (Two verses further, Paul also speaks of being “not slothful in business.”) And small though it is, moreover, the addition of the adjective “ever” in Vaughan’s poem underscores both the sharp contrast in behavior separating man from the creatures and the note of nascent apocalypticism included in the idea of being permanently a part of God’s order. And in the same chapter from Romans, Paul expounds: “For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: so we, being man, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another” (4 –5). This lost sense of human corporate belonging is exactly what is weighed and lamented by Vaughan in “Man.” The creatures “Rise with the sun,” are part of Christ’s body (by virtue of the pun), “and set in the same bower.” But not man: “He hath no root,” an image of restlessness that receives visionary amplification in the elegy that follows beginning “I walked the other day.” This notion of the creatures “ever cleaving” to God runs through much of the verse and finds supreme expression, again through Paul, in the poem “And do they so?” Bearing the bookishly informative subtitle, “Romans viii 19,” with an epigraph taken from Theodore Beza’s Latin rendering of these lines, Etenim res creatae exerto capite observantes expectant revelationem Filiorum Dei (for the creatures, watching with lifted head, wait for the revelation of the sons of God), this often anthologized poem has been the subject of much careful theological scrutiny, especially its opening stanza, in which Vaughan counters orthodox Calvinist belief with his own view that the creatures are not “Wholly inanimate”:21 And do they so? have they a sense Of ought but influence? Can they their heads lift, and expect, And groan too? why the elect Can do no more: my volumes said They were all dull, and dead,

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They judged them senseless, and their state Wholly inanimate. Go, go; Seal up thy looks, And burn thy books.

But bookish to a fault, we learn, as Vaughan emphatically consigns his reading material to the fire. As this gesture forcefully suggests, in the face of greater worries, one should not follow the fashion and exaggerate the place of doctrinal particulars. Indeed, one purpose of the opening stanza is to prepare the way for the elemental distinction differentiating the speaker’s devotional attitudes from those of the elements themselves. Vaughan’s profound wish to be spiritually grounded, to “be tied to one sure state,” even materializes in the addition of “a stone” to the catalog of creatures otherwise borrowed largely from Herbert’s “Affliction I” (ll. 55–60): I would I were a stone, or tree, Or flower by pedigree, Or some poor high-way herb, or spring To flow, or bird to sing! Then should I (tied to one sure state,) All day expect my date; But I am sadly loose, and stray A giddy blast each way; O let me not thus range! Thou canst not change.

In “And do they so?” in fact, doctrinal differences among scriptural interpreters are symptomatic of the gulf that divides the creatures from the speaker. They wait in “earnest expectation” (Paul’s words), while, spiritually speaking, Vaughan cannot sit still for more than an hour, constantly distracted as he is by “fancies, friends, or news”: Sometimes I sit with thee, and tarry An hour, or so, then vary. Thy other creatures in this scene Thee only aim, and mean; Some rise to seek thee, and with heads Erect peep from their beds; Others, whose birth is in the tomb, And cannot quit the womb, Sigh there, and groan for thee, Their liberty.

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O let not me do less! shall they Watch, while I sleep, or play? Shall I thy mercies still abuse With fancies, friends, or news? O brook it not! thy blood is mine, And my soul should be thine; O brook it not! why wilt thou stop After whole showers one drop? Sure, thou wilt joy to see Thy sheep with thee.

“Thee only aim, and mean” is the devotional ideal identified and represented by Vaughan’s personified creatures, an ideal of concentrated “groaning” replicated in the conspicuous apostrophes that mark the shift to direct address in the final stanza. But the wit of “Thy sheep” in the last line is still a little disconcerting. So focused is Vaughan on the matter of his own election that his metaphorical use of sheep here has the effect of displacing the creatures from our thoughts—of reminding us perhaps of their place as “figures” in a meditative poem rather than the wholly animate things remembered by Vaughan when he turns to Jesus. Whether the creatures are actually restored at the end of time seems ultimately less important to Vaughan than his own salvation. In the scriptural lines immediately preceding those chosen for the poem’s epigraph, Paul had written: “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). In as much as the hope of “ever cleaving” to the divine can erase the unworthy thoughts of present suffering, Paul’s remark must surely have been taken to heart by those no longer tied to the political state. But the problem of keeping one’s thoughts permanently aimed heavenward, so acutely registered in “And do they so?” also means that Paul’s comparison remains always in play, even when “present suffering” is not the explicit subject here or elsewhere. As a word “cleave” may make only a single appearance in Vaughan, but the idea runs throughout the poetry. What Roland Barthes labeled an “enantioseme”—a self-opposing verbal sign22 —cuts, I believe, to the heart of Silex Scintillans: the emphasis everywhere on separation, on the force of severing and suffering, yielding, in turn, the desire to ever cleave and cling. The ultimate tension between these two responses in Vaughan produces not so much a poetry of “either/or”—to adopt Belinda Humfrey’s recent phrasing23 —as a poetics of doubling (a head

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for a head, as it were) in which one form of cleaving shadows or “spells” the other. A subtle instance might be simply how Vaughan’s image of the rainbow as a “burnished, flaming Arch” calls to mind “the flaming sword” used to drive mankind from Eden. This kind of “doubling,” in turn, perhaps recollects the rootless, wandering persona of “I walked the other day,” who stumbles upon and clings to the prophetic doctrine that strangely “springs / from a poor root.” And the great invocation at the end of that poem anticipates the quotation from Jude at the end of the last poem in Silex 1650, “Begging,” in which a prayer for comfort—“let no night put out this Sun”—seemingly concludes the first volume on a note of quietude, until one recalls the surrounding scriptural context with its extended diatribe against apostate teachers: “Woe unto them!” And as with the end of Silex, so with Silex 1655: Vaughan’s prayer in “L’Envoy” to be “Fixed by thy spirit to a state / For evermore immaculate” splits apart into the plea, “Only, let not our haters brag, / Thy seamless coat is grown a rag.” Indeed, at the center of Vaughan’s most deeply spiritual (and successful) poem, we have the moment of desired communion: Dear night! this world’s defeat; The stop to busy fools; care’s check and curb; The day of Spirits; my soul’s calm retreat Which none disturb! Christ’s progress, and his prayer time; The hours to which high Heaven doth chime. God’s silent, searching flight: When my Lord’s head is filled with dew, and all His locks are wet with the clear drops of night; His still, soft call; His knocking time; the soul’s dumb watch, When Spirits their fair kindred catch.

And then the subsequent dispersal of this vision of intimate incorporation, when clinging gives way to rending, Were all my loud, evil days Calm and unhaunted as is thy dark Tent, Whose peace but by some Angel’s wing or voice Is seldom rent; Then I in Heaven all the long year Would keep, and never wander here.

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But living where the sun Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tire Themselves and others, I consent and run To every mire, And by this world’s ill-guiding light, Err more than I can do by night.

The great power (and beauty) of “The Night” arises not just from how it sharply reverses the usual moral connotations of light and darkness, a reversal no doubt made imaginatively available to Vaughan because of the drastic reversal in political fortunes. It arises, as well, from Vaughan’s decision to explore these opposing registers of thought from the Nicodemean perspective of the longing outsider, whose intimate exclamations differ qualitatively from the experience of wonder attributed to the creatures: “Where trees and herbs did watch and peep / And wonder, while the Jews did sleep.” Theirs is the wonder associated with complete silence. (“Peep” is Vaughan’s variant on “to peer” or “to see.”) Vaughan’s is the wonder of someone who, caught up in the mix of things, desires complete silence if he is to hear “His knocking time,” a desire made acute, however, because he lives in a world where all things “mix and tire”: where “the “sun” does not always mean “the son,” where “Tent” rhymes with “rent” (from “rend”), and, as with Milton, “wonder” shifts almost seamlessly into “wander.” These are not quite Barthes’s “enantiosemes”; they do not carry their self-opposing signs with them. But the pressure of the political moment makes it difficult to cling long to the solitary flower of the single Word.

“IN

THIS

BITTERNESS, DELIGHT”

Earned wonder, we might say on this occasion, for it is also the land where poetry lives, not of force only but of fashion too; and from the tension they generate. By way of closing, I want to speculate more broadly on the uncertain relationship between these two terms in Vaughan in the context of some remarks made by another poet, whose own career, amid sectarian violence, has made him acutely conscious of the issues at stake here. As it turns out, he, too, enlisted the example of George Herbert for what he happily called Herbert’s “daylight sanity and vigour.” I am speaking of Seamus Heaney in “The Redress of Poetry,”24 with “redress” serving as a second bridge to Vaughan, as I hope to suggest.

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For the cosmopolitan Heaney, “redress” includes notions of “dress,” craft, or fashion as well as of “force,” their achieved combination constituting what he calls “a satisfactory comeback by the mind to the facts of the matter. As long as the coordinates of the imagined thing correspond to those of the world that we live in and endure, poetry is fulfilling its counterweighting function.” And so Herbert must have seemed to Vaughan as well: both a “seer” and a poet, the ideal counterweight to the distractions, now given great “force” of expression in the younger man’s verse. We hear the “comeback” in Silex at once. A ward, and still in bonds, one day I stole abroad, It was high-spring, and all the way Primrosed, and hung with shade; Yet, was it frost within, And surly winds Blasted my infant buds, and sin Like clouds eclipsed my mind.

Vaughan’s word for this experience was “Regeneration” (not “redress,” a term he used in the more narrowly corrective sense);25 and like Marvell’s Horatian ode, the “comeback” here involves blasting through clouds and eclipses to announce the emergence of a new “man,” perhaps even a new era, although decidedly different from the one Marvell was beginning to espouse in the same year that “Regeneration” first appeared in print as his inaugural devotional poem.26 A few years later, when Vaughan must have been about all of thirty, he wrote “The Night,” the energies tempered, the vision more embracing, intimate, and inclusive, but regenerative to the core: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3). The poem is a “comeback” in more than one sense. As surely as Marvell set out to assess the sudden shift in power at midcentury, Vaughan strove to redress, at a private level, the personal life (and lives) he regarded as lost, and the reparation is nowhere more evident than in the joyous surprise of language, the evident wholesale striving to refashion an earlier “literary” self into a real life and, in the process, to make Herbert both anew and his own. When Vaughan writes in “Regeneration” of how “The unthrift Sun shot vital gold,” the surfeit of images dazzles; the underlying military metaphor, on this occasion, is all but obliterated, left behind, as it should be in a poem so dedicated to living. Although Paul might proclaim that “the inward man is renewed day by day” (2 Cor. 4:

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16), the same law of renewal does not automatically apply to writing poetry. But Vaughan seemed to think so, and during a few years of remarkable productivity, writing misfires along side of direct hits, he made the experience of regeneration his subject— the source of his force—right down to insisting in the preface that perfection of the life and the work were one and the same. They are not always, of course, and Vaughan’s criticism of Herbert’s other followers for their wide, weak, and lean conceptions in a preface to a second installment (a sequel, in effect, to a sequel) might easily be read as a flicker of self-doubt about his own verse: the lingering aftereffects of proposing, in the first place, a division between fashion and force when it comes to matters of poetry that was, no doubt, a legacy of doubling as Herbert. In any event, the embattled emphasis on spiritual authenticity and authority, especially in Silex 1655,27 reminds us that Vaughan was a Civil War poet in a more narrowly sectarian sense than Heaney, who, at the time of writing “The Redress of Poetry” was the author of eight books of poems and, as a poet, at home both in Belfast and abroad. There’s none of Heaney’s worldliness in Vaughan. He was recruited for a cause, which got the better of him, but in which sense only the poems will say. Never comfortable with notions of fashion, Vaughan had little of Wallace Stevens’s supreme patience with the material world and the mind engaged in the prospect of endlessly imagining it. Vaughan’s poems were of another climate—end-driven to the hilt. But a part of him would have understood Stevens’s “The Poems of Our Climate,” with its vision of a “vital I” made “fresh in a world of white.” And though Vaughan would certainly have resisted Stevens’s seductive urging in the direction of the incomplete that “one would want more, one would need more / More than a world of white and snowy scents,” the best part of him, I like to think, the poet who kept reimagining the devotional life in all its heated imperfection, its bitter delight, in Silex Scintillans, might have sensed a distant kin in this latter-day “secular” Herbert, as Helen Vendler called Stevens on one occasion.28 For even after glimpsing “the world of white and snowy scents,” the azure of heaven “Chequered with snowy fleeces,” as Vaughan says in “Regeneration,” both knew that There would still remain the never-resting mind, So that one would want to escape, come back To what had been so long composed. The imperfect is our paradise.

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Note that, in this bitterness, delight, Since the imperfect is so hot in us, Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Just maybe the paradox of “ever cleaving” in Silex is another term for Stevens’s imperfect paradise. Some years later, we know, Vaughan would look back and write: And wit, as well as piety Doth thrive best in adversity; For since the thunder left our air Their laurels look not half so fair.29

NOTES I wish to thank “The UCLA Friends of English” for generously assuming permission expenses related to the artwork in this essay. 1. References to Vaughan’s writings are taken from Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1976). See pp. 141– 42 for Vaughan’s prefatory remarks quoted in this essay. 2. Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, ed. E. K. Chambers (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., n.d.), 2 vols., 1: 297. 3. See James Biester, Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 50–51. 4. References to Herbert’s poetry are taken from The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson, 2nd. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945). 5. See Glyn Pursglove, “Henry Vaughan and the Energies of Rhyme,” Scintilla 1 (1997): 143–57. 6. One of the few apparently to hear Vaughan’s call was Nathaniel Wanley, now receiving valuable attention from Philip West. 7. Rudrum, Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, 528. 8. Chris Fitter underscores Vaughan’s “perpetual obsession with ‘blood’ ” (p. 134) in “Henry Vaughan’s Landscapes of Military Occupation,” Essays in Criticism 4 (1992): 123– 47. 9. Panofsky’s assumption that Salome is the subject of this painting has been recently questioned by Paul Joannides, “Titian’s Judith and its Context: The Iconography of Decapitation,” Apollo, n.s., 135 (March 1992): 163–70. 10. The question of whether this painting is fully an autograph or a “studio” work is raised by Richard E. Spear, The “Divine” Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 244 and note 83. 11. D. C. Allen, “Henry Vaughan’s ‘Salome on Ice,’ ” Philological Quarterly 23 (1944): 84 –85. See also Francoise Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987) and her comment that “What is intriguing about Salome, among other things, are the periods during which she becomes an object of interest” (p. 15). Meltzer’s historical focus is not the Renaissance, however, but the late nineteenth century.

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12. For prophetic elements in this poem and elsewhere in Silex Scintillans, see Esther Gilman Richey, The Politics of Revelation in the English Renaissance (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 219–29. 13. See Claude J. Summers, “Herrick, Vaughan, and the Poetry of Anglican Survivalism” in New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century English Religious Lyric, ed. John R. Roberts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 46– 74. Summers is alert to the poetic differences between Vaughan and Herrick, although he does not choose to develop them in this essay. 14. Rudrum, Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, 590. For a further valuable discussion of “Ascension-Hymn” and Malachi, to which I am indebted, see Philip West, Henry Vaughan’s “Silex Scintillans”: Scripture Uses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 203–05. 15. Hill, “A Pharisee to Pharisees: Reflections on Vaughan’s ‘The Night,’ ” English 38 (1989): 108. 16. Pettet, Of Paradise and Light: A Study of Vaughan’s “Silex Scintillans” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 32–33. Somewhat inexplicably, Fitter fails to mention “The Rainbow” in “Henry Vaughan’s Landscapes of Military Occupation,” cited above. In a letter to me dated 16 November 2002, Jonathan Nauman makes the following interesting point: “Pettet’s truncating of ‘The Rain-bow’ followed in the steps of R. C. Trench, an Anglican Archbishop of Dublin whose Household Book of English Poetry (1870) trimmed the poem to thirteen lines without even bothering to alert readers of the abridging. Trench was also the main propagator of the rumor that Wordsworth possessed a copy of Silex.” 17. See Victoria Kahn, “The metaphorical contract in Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 82–105. 18. See A Directory for the Public Worship of God (London, 1645), p. 85: “festivall daies, vulgarly called Holy daies, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.” 19. See Peter W. Thomas, “The Language of Light: Henry Vaughan and the Puritans,” Scintilla 3 (1999): 9–29. 20. See Imilda Tuttle, Concordance to Vaughan’s “Silex Scintillans” (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), 32. 21. Alan Rudrum, “For then the Earth shall be all Paradise,” Scintilla 4 (2000): 39–52; see also Rudrum, “Henry Vaughan, the Liberation of the Creatures, and Seventeenth Century English Calvinism,” The Seventeenth Century 4 (1989): 33–54. 22. I owe this point to Stephen Yenser, “How Coy a Figure: Marvelry,” in Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric, ed. Jonathan F. S. Post (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 230. 23. Humfrey, “Vaughan and Vegetables,” Scintilla 3 (1999): 137. 24. Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 1–16. The subsequent quotation from Heaney can be found on p. 8. 25. See “White Sunday,” l. 34 and “The Mutinie,” l. 34, mistakenly identified as l. 31 in Tuttle, Concordance, 162. 26. The sense of the epochal appearance of Silex blasting through clouds is made visually explicit in the emblem provided for the 1650 edition. See Donald R. Dickson, The Fountain of Living Waters: The Typology of the Waters of Life in

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Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 124 –30. 27. For a recent account of how the poems in the second part of Silex, especially the last ones, tend to fold in on themselves and become “static,” see Madeleine Forey, “Poetry as Apocalypse: Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans,” The Seventeenth Century 11 (1996 ): 161– 86, esp.174 –86. 28. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), 193–94. Among modern poets, Helen Vendler singles out Stevens as a “secular” Herbert in “Herbert and Modern Poetry: A Response,” in George Herbert in the Nineties: Reflections and Reassessments, ed. Jonathan F. S. Post and Sidney Gottlieb (George Herbert Journal: Special Studies and Monographs, 1995), 80– 89. 29. Rudrum, The Complete Poems, 345 (“To the Editor of the Matchless Orinda” from Thalia Rediva, 1678).

The “true, practic piety” of “holy writing”: Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Christopher Harvey, and The Temple Robert Wilcher

I

HENRY VAUGHAN’S SILEX SCINTILLANS APPEARED BEFORE THE public in 1650 with the same subtitle that had been attached to George Herbert’s posthumously printed collection of verse, The Temple, in 1633: “Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations.” When an augmented second edition was published in 1655, Vaughan made his discipleship explicit in “The Author’s Preface to the Following Hymns,” dated 30 September 1654, in which he launched an extended attack against “vicious verse” by writers who wallowed “in impure thoughts and scurrilous conceits.” Having admitted that he had himself once “languished of this very sickness,” he urged “gifted persons” to seek a remedy for “this pleasing and prevailing evil” by “a wise exchange of vain and vicious subjects, for divine themes and celestial praise”; and he offered as an inspiration and model, “the blessed man, Mr. George Herbert, whose holy life and verse gained many pious converts, (of whom I am the least).”1 Among such converts, however, none had approached the achievement of Herbert as a religious poet, and Vaughan went to some lengths to explain why this should be so: After him followed diverse,—Sed non passibus aequis; they had more of fashion, than force: and the reason of their so vast distance from him, besides differing spirits and qualifications (for his measure was eminent) I suspect to be, because they aimed more at verse, than perfection; as may be easily gathered by their frequent impressions, and numerous pages: Hence sprang those wide, those weak, and lean conceptions, which in the most inclinable reader will scarce give any nourishment or help to devotion; for not flowing from a true, practic piety, it was impossible they should effect those things abroad, which

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51

they never had acquaintance with at home; being only the productions of a common spirit, and the obvious ebullitions of that light humour, which takes the pen in hand, out of no other consideration, than to be seen in print. (ll.150–64)2

Both L. C. Martin and Alan Rudrum note the suggestion of an earlier editor, E. K. Chambers, that Vaughan may have been thinking of Francis Quarles as a writer of “common spirit” who signally fell short of Herbert in the task of nourishing the devotional life of his readers.3 But Quarles’s various collections of religious lyrics antedate the publication of The Temple and his Emblems (1635) and Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man (1638) are not noticeably indebted to Herbert in style or content.4 Besides, Vaughan’s reference to “diverse” followers seems to imply not a single culprit but a tradition of religious verse produced in the wake of The Temple. Such a tradition there certainly was, but much of it was still in manuscript in September 1654 and is very unlikely to have come Vaughan’s way in Breconshire.5 He may have included in his blanket condemnation the biblical paraphrases of George Sandys, Psalms of David (1636) and Divine Poems (1638), Robert Herrick’s Noble Numbers (1648), and Thomas Washbourne’s Divine Poems (1654), but the two most obvious candidates are Christopher Harvey and Richard Crashaw, both of whom invoked the poetic example of Herbert on the title pages of their volumes. Harvey’s anonymous collection of 1640, The Synagogue, Or, The Shadow of the Temple. Sacred Poems, and Private Ejaculations, reinforced the claim made in its two subtitles with a direct acknowledgment of debt—“In imitation of Mr. George Herbert.” Crashaw encouraged comparison with the poet who had been, like himself, a fellow of a Cambridge college, not only in the main title of his 1646 collection—Steps to the Temple—but also by adopting half of Herbert’s subtitle: Sacred Poems, With other Delights of the Muses.6 It is in “The Preface to the Reader,” however, that stronger evidence can be found to associate Crashaw with the followers of Herbert mentioned in the preface to Silex Scintillans. In a tribute to “our Divine Poet,” the “Authors friend” not only forestalls Vaughan’s diatribe against those “whose onely businesse in verse, is to rime a poore six-penny soule, a Subburb sinner into hell” with the “flashes of their adulterate brains,” but more significantly places Crashaw on a level with his revered predecessor: “Here’s Herbert’s second, but equall, who hath retriv’d Poetry of late, and return’d it up to its Primitive use; Let it bound back to heaven gates, whence it

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came.”7 It is hard to resist the conclusion that both this remark and the title of Steps to the Temple were in Vaughan’s mind when he quoted Virgil in connection with those who sought to follow Herbert: “Sed non passibus aequis” [But not with equal steps] (Aeneid, 2:724). Although he does not discuss the likelihood of Vaughan’s antagonism to a claim that Crashaw was the equal of Herbert, John N. Wall illuminates the different purposes that the two poets might have had in alluding to Herbert’s title page at a time when reforming Puritanism had triumphed over the Church of England: “Richard Crashaw could, of course, entitle his 1646 work Steps to the Temple because in 1645 he responded to the same events constraining Vaughan by changing what was for him the temple; by becoming a Roman Catholic, Crashaw could continue participation in a worshipping community but at the cost of flight from England and its church. Vaughan remained loyal to that English institution even in its absence by reminding us of what is now absent, or at best present only in a new kind of way in The Temple itself.”8 It is likely that Vaughan also had the author of The Synagogue in his sights when he composed his preface in 1654. Both Crashaw and Harvey had published second expanded editions of their sacred verse, the former in 1648 and the latter in 1647.9 The last item in Harvey’s 1647 collection (in which he maintained his anonymity) was a tribute to some of the new material, entitled “To His Ingenious friend, the Author of the Synagogue; upon his Additional Church-Utensils”: Thus much affirm I do, They’r like the father too; And you like him whose sublime paths you tread, Herbert ! to be like whom, who’d not be dead? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . He was our Solomon, And you are our Centurion; Our Temple him we owe, Our Synagogue to you.10 (sigs. C8r-v, ll.12–15,26–29)

Herbert’s Breconshire disciple may well have felt that the preeminent poet of the Church of England was being slighted by the elevation of a nameless and mediocre imitator to a similarly “sublime” status. Vaughan proceeds to develop the point that poetry which truly emulates the art of The Temple will flow “from a true, practic

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piety.” Talent must be united with the living faith and self-discipline that won for the Rector of Bemerton the reputation of a “blessed man”: It is true indeed, that to give up our thoughts to pious themes and contemplations (if it be done for piety’s sake) is a great step towards perfection; because it will refine, and dispose to devotion and sanctity. And further, it will procure for us (so easily communicable is that loving spirit) some small prelibation of those heavenly refreshments, which descend but seldom, and then very sparingly, upon men of an ordinary or indifferent holiness; but he that desires to excel in this kind of hagiography, or holy writing, must strive (by all means) for perfection and true holiness, that a door may be opened to him in heaven, Rev. iv I and then he will be able to write (with Hierotheus and holy Herbert) A true hymn. (ll. 164 –76)

A suspicion is prompted by the phrase, “a great step towards perfection,” that he may again have in mind the negative example of Crashaw, as the poet whose Steps to the Temple (with the baroque conceits of its imitations of Marino and the Roman Catholic overtones of its “contemplations” of St Teresa and the Assumption of the Virgin) comprised a step away from the perfected and practical piety of Herbert’s Anglican volume (with its rejection of the “painted” church on the hills of Rome and its scornful disavowal of a style that curled “with metaphors a plain intention”).11 The next paragraph in the preface may furnish a reason for the pains that Vaughan felt the need to take in September 1654 both to deplore the evils of “vicious verse” and to emphasize the inadequacy of those who had endeavored to emulate Herbert over the past twenty years: “To effect this [i.e., ‘to write . . . A true hymn’] in some measure, I have begged leave to communicate this my poor talent to the Church, under the protection and conduct of her glorious Head: who (if he will vouchsafe to own it, and go along with it) can make it as useful now in the public, as it hath been to me in private” (ll.177–82). The poet is here reasserting (in what Milton called “the cool element of prose”)12 the privileged role he had laid claim to in a poem that had been significantly located “at the exact structural center” of the 1650 edition of Silex Scintillans.13 “The Match” is a formal consecration of his life and his talents to the calling of priestly poet in direct succession to the author of The Temple.14 Herbert had made quasi-legal provision for the future in “Obedience,” a poem presented to God as “my speciall Deed” (l.10) to which he had “set his hand” (l.37) in the

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hope that “some kinde man would thrust his heart / Into these lines” (ll.42– 43) and “make the purchase spread / To both our goods, if he to it will stand” (ll.39– 40). Vaughan had responded with a solemn undertaking to carry on his master’s poetic mission in words that prefigure the diatribe against “vicious verse” and the affirmation of discipleship to “holy Herbert” in the 1654 preface: Here I join hands, and thrust my stubborn heart Into thy deed, There from no duties to be freed, And if hereafter youth, or folly thwart And claim their share, Here I renounce the poisonous ware. (ll.7–12)

This act of personal renunciation and commitment in “The Match,” which in its later stanzas recalls the rite for the ordination of priests in the Book of Common Prayer,15 was immediately preceded by a self-exhortation in “The Resolve” to abandon the poetic follies of his younger days and serve the outlawed church of Herbert in its time of sorrow: Follow the cry no more: there is An ancient way All strewed with flowers, and happiness And fresh as May; There turn, and turn no more; let wits, Smile at fair eyes, Or lips; but who there weeping sits, Hath got the prize.16 (ll.21–28)

Having resigned his “thoughts, words, actions” (“The Match” l. 25) to the will of God in his ceremony of ordination to the poetic priesthood, Vaughan took up his “most parsonlike” stance in the next poem, “Rules and Lessons,” which was written in imitation of “Perirrhanterium,” the sermon in verse placed at the entrance to the main body of Herbert’s religious poems, collectively entitled “The Church.”17 For the first time in Silex Scintillans, Vaughan had here adopted a fully public voice, admonishing and encouraging the faithful members of that oppressed church rather than exploring his own spiritual condition or addressing God:

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To God, thy country, and thy friend be true, If priest, and people change, keep thou thy ground. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seek not the same steps with the crowd; stick thou To thy sure trot; a constant, humble mind Is both his own joy, and his Maker’s too; Let folly dust it on, or lag behind. A sweet self-privacy in a right soul Out-runs the earth, and lines the utmost pole. (ll.43–54)

This public advice to “keep the ancient way” (“The Proffer” l. 43)18 by withdrawing into a “sweet self-privacy” (l.53)—the only means available in a part of the country where Parliament’s commissioners were particularly zealous in ejecting ministers and closing churches19 —looks forward to Vaughan’s later confidence in the 1654 preface that the “private” spiritual “ejaculations” of a poet who strives “for perfection and true holiness” may serve a “useful” function when communicated publicly “to the Church.” Publishing “the Following Hymns” (a word that emphasizes their use by a worshiping community) was one of the few practical acts of resistance that could be openly performed by an apostle of the “ancient way.”

II To get a clearer idea of what Vaughan meant when he dismissed the “weak, and lean conceptions” of those would-be followers of Herbert whose verse did not flow “from a true, practic piety,” it will be instructive first of all to consider the other published collection of religious poetry that shared a full subtitle with The Temple and Silex Scintillans and that, unlike Steps to the Temple, was written by a poet who remained faithful to the Church of England. The Synagogue has the added interest of existing in two editions that spanned the period of the Civil War, so that the 1640 volume reflects Harvey’s attitude before the church reforms effected by the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly and the augmented 1647 volume reflects Harvey’s response to that process of reformation. After a verse dedication of the volume to God, The Synagogue of 1640 opens with an imitation in Latin and English of the two poems that comprise the “Church-porch” section of The Temple, “Perirrhanterium” (an instrument used for sprinkling holy wa-

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ter) and “Superliminare” (the lintel above the entrance). Entitled “A stepping-stone to the threshold of Mr Herberts Churchporch” in its English version, this introductory poem leads into a group of emblematic poems modeled on Herbert’s “Church-floor”: “The Church-yard,” “The Church-stile,” “The Church-gate,” “The Church-wals,” “The Church,” and “The Church-porch,” all written in the same stanza form as “Perirrhanterium.” The last of these urges the reader to pause before embarking upon the rest of the volume: “Now ere thou passest further, sit thee down / In the Church-porch, & think what thou hast seen” (ll.1–2). In the collection of more devotional verse that follows, such titles as “Invitation,” “Resolution and assurance,” “Confusion,” “The Curbe,” “The Search,” “The Returne,” and “Sinne” bear witness to the general inspiration derived from The Temple, but as one of Harvey’s modern critics has observed, “Again and again, Herbert’s compelling sequence of passional feelings collapse into Harvey’s predictable, stolid didacticism.”20 The essentially “supplementary character of The Synagogue,” evident in its concentration on aspects of the church environs not featured in The Temple, is even more apparent in the augmented edition of 1647.21 Appended to the paginated section of the book, there is a set of poems devoted to church fittings and aids to worship neglected by Herbert.22 “Church Utensils,” steering a middle course between “Prophaneness” and “Superstition,” concludes that “they (and that’s enough) / Who love Gods house, will like his household stuff ” (sig. C1r, ll.15–16) and introduces a series of lucubrations on the font, the reading pew, the prayer book, the bible, the pulpit, the communion table, and communion plate. These apparently last-minute additions earned a compliment from the admirer who supplied the closing verses: “All good men will avow, / Your Synagogue built before, is furnisht now” (“To His Ingenious friend” sig. C8v, ll.32–33). In the main body of the collection, Harvey had supplemented The Temple with a batch of new poems for some of the holy days that Herbert had omitted, introducing such “Church Festivals” as “eternitie in brief / Compendiums Epitomiz’d” (ll.1–2). Ever since Rosemond Tuve drew attention to the links between “The Sacrifice” and the traditional liturgy for Holy Week,23 scholars have been revealing just how profoundly and intricately Herbert’s poetry was “inspired and fed by the church’s liturgy,” both in individual poems and in the overall structure of “The Church.”24 The opening sequence of meditations on the Passion and Resurrection of Christ prepares the way for “H. Baptisme,” “Repentance,” “Prayer” and

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“The H. Communion,” and both the daily and yearly patterns of worship established in the Elizabethan Book of Common Prayer are reflected in poems on Matins and Evensong and on the feasts of Whitsun, the Trinity, Christmas and Lent, which, following on from “Good Friday” and “Easter,” punctuate the earlier part of “The Church” in the correct liturgical order. Harvey’s more methodical and pedestrian mind transplanted “The Nativitie” and “The Circumcision” from the devotional section of his 1640 volume into their proper place in a new 1647 sequence that begins in Advent with “The Annunciation,” passes by way of Christmas and “The Epiphanie” to “The Passion,” “The Resurrection,” and “The Ascension,” and ends with the last major celebrations in the Anglican liturgical calendar, “Whitsunday” and “Trinitie Sunday.” Whereas the 1640 volume was “uncontroversially didactic,” the enlarged second edition had become “openly propagandist” in its promotion of aspects of church worship that had been declared illegal by Parliament.25 By 1647, the very fact of imitating Herbert had taken on a covert political significance glanced at in an introductory tribute by R.L. to “the Authour” as the successor of “our Church-Poet” (sig. A1v, 1.3).26 But to devote an entire section to “Church Festivals” was flying blatantly in the face of the new service book, which had been published by parliamentary order in 1645 and specifically laid down that “Festivall daies, vulgarly called Holy daies, having no warrant in the word of God, are not to be continued.”27 Several of the poems on church utensils also mounted a deliberate challenge to the new dispensation. For example, it had been ordained that the rite of baptism was to be administered “not in the places where Fonts in the time of Popery were unfitly and superstitiously placed,”28 which prompted Harvey to begin his poem on this particular piece of church furniture in defiant mood: “The Font I say. Why not? And why not neer / To the Church door?” (sig. C1r, ll.1–2). The Directory for the Publique Worship of God had been prefaced by an ordinance of Parliament, dated 3 January 1645, which forbade any further use of the Book of Common Prayer “in any Church, Chappell, or place of Publique Worship, Within the Kingdom of England, or Dominion of Wales”29 —a ban that was later reinforced by the prescription of fines and imprisonment for those who continued to use the Anglican liturgy.30 Harvey’s poem on this particular “utensil” of the Church of England, so central to Herbert’s practice of his religion and art, starts with an aggressive denial of Puritan objections—“What Pray’r by th’book? And

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Common? Yes, Why not?” (l.1)—and goes on to question the suitability of extempore prayers in the context of communal worship: But he, that unto others leads the way In publike pray’r, Should choose to do it so, As all, that hear, may know They need not fear To tune their hearts unto his tongue, and say Amen; nor doubt they were betray’d To blaspheme, when they should have pray’d. (sig. C3r, ll.18–25)

The more Harvey committed himself to the cause of the outlawed church, however, in the 1647 edition and in a further expansion of The Synagogue in 1657, the more his religious emphasis fell upon institutional authority and uniformity and the further his poetry retreated from the spiritual inwardness that had been the hallmark of Herbert’s approach to the private and public worship of God.31 Indeed, apart from half a dozen titles, some inventive stanza forms, two or three opening exclamations and a few other faint verbal echoes of The Temple, there is very little to suggest that Harvey’s idea of “imitation” in 1647 went much beyond a defense of the material arrangements for public services and the liturgical calendar of the Church of England as George Herbert had known them in the early 1630s.

III Henry Vaughan was a very different kind of poet from Christopher Harvey. In his secular poetry, published in Poems (1646) and Olor Iscanus (1651), he had worked “studiously within the existing traditions” of Caroline poetry, drawing upon such poets as Carew, Habington, Suckling and Randolph for theme, style and imagery.32 Apart from some translations of neo-Latin odes by Casimir Sarbiewski, there is nothing in his early life or poetry to suggest that “he took religion at all seriously,”33 but at some time between composing the dedicatory epistle for Olor Iscanus (dated 17 December 1647) and registering Silex Scintillans for publication on 28 March 1650, his imagination was fired by the contents of The Temple with an intensity and complexity that went far beyond anything normally covered by the term “imitation” or found in The Synagogue and Steps to the Temple.34

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Thomas Calhoun points out that, although “Vaughan’s unusual reliance upon prior texts” was derived from “methods of translation and imitative composition commonly taught in the seventeenth century,” the poet we encounter in Silex Scintillans “purposefully advances techniques of imitation to an extreme beyond pedagogical expectation”;35 and Jonathan Post argues that Vaughan’s commitment to Herbert as his new model entailed the deliberate exclusion of other poetic voices from his devotional discourse.36 Calculating that Vaughan appropriates twenty-six titles from The Temple and that “sixty-odd poems” in the two parts of Silex Scintillans draw upon “about fifty” poems by Herbert, E. C. Pettet distinguishes between “fairly exact quotations” of a line or more and shorter “reminiscences” of phrase and image, some of which are “of a remote and oblique kind” that may constitute a “subconscious echo” rather than a meaningful “allusion” and some of which carry with them “an active associational fringe of a subconscious kind.”37 Wall regards this “intricate interplay” between Silex Scintillans and The Temple as “a deliberate strategy” adopted by the later poet “to provide for his work the rich and dense context Herbert had ready-made in the ongoing worship of the Church of England”; while Calhoun considers that the echoes of “scriptural, poetic, and liturgical voices” in Vaughan’s religious verse were a means of binding it “to a tradition of sacred literature,” so that Silex Scintillans becomes an “expansion, or a verbal monument, perhaps, formed from the stones of the Anglican’s now ruined ‘Temple.’ ”38 As a prime example of this “mosaic synthesis,” Calhoun cites “Son-days,” which is “composed entirely of independent phrases, a number of which have been identified from Herbert’s ‘Prayer’ and ‘Sunday.’ ”39 He might have added that, in a typically creative engagement with Herbert, Vaughan takes over neither the stanza form of “Sunday” nor the sonnet form of “Prayer (I),” but imitates instead the most striking formal aspect of Herbert’s art in the latter poem—the omission of a main verb. The final stanza illustrates a technique which F. E. Hutchinson related to a feature of Welsh poetry known as “dyfalu, the piling up of comparisons, sometimes fanciful and even riddling, but all intended to present the object with greater effectiveness”:40 The Church’s love-feasts; time’s prerogative, And interest Deducted from the whole; the combs, and hive, And home of rest.

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The milky way chalked out with suns; a clue That guides through erring hours; and in full story A taste of Heaven on earth; the pledge, and cue Of a full feast; and the out courts of glory. (ll.17–24)

What makes this example of Vaughan’s “imitation” of Herbert more intriguing for the purposes of the present discussion is that an instance of this same technique occurs in the poem that introduced one of the new sequences of poems in the 1647 edition of The Synagogue. Judith Dundas quotes “Church Festivals” as an example of mere “ingenuity” to set against “Prayer (I),” in which “incongruities” and “far-fetched metaphors” are “controlled both formally and emotionally” by Herbert’s “sacred wit.”41 One mark of Harvey’s more pedestrian art is his failure to maintain to the end the avoidance of grammatical closure exploited so powerfully in the poems of Herbert and Vaughan. The retreat into statement in the last two lines turns an evocation of religious mystery into an exercise in didacticism: The florilegia of celestiall storyes, Spirits of joyes, the relishes, and closes Of Angels musick, pearles dissolved, roses Perfumed, sugar’d honycombs, delights Never too highly priz’d, The marriage rites, Which duly solemniz’d Usher espoused souls to bridall nights, Gilded sunbeames, refined Elixirs, And quintessentiall extracts of stars; Who love not you, doth but in vain professe That he loves God, or heaven, or happinesse. (sig. B5v, ll.9–20)

While the comparison of these poems by Vaughan and Harvey, and of both with their model in The Temple, may elucidate what Vaughan understood as the difference between Herbert’s brand of “holy writing” and the “lean conceptions” of those who “had more of fashion, than force,” it also raises the possibility that Vaughan had indeed read The Synagogue and that traces of the work of this lesser follower of Herbert had been absorbed into his own expressive idiom. The opening phrase of the quoted stanza from “Son-days” may be an echo of the title of Harvey’s poem; and the “combs, and hive” (l.19) may be a reminiscence of Harvey’s “sugar’d honycombs” (l.12). If these similarities do indicate a connection between the two poems, then further borrowings

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come into focus: Harvey’s “antidated gloryes” (l.5) may have prompted a line from the first stanza of Vaughan’s poem—“The next world’s gladness prepossessed in this” (l.3)—and Harvey’s “marriage rites” (l.14) ushering “espoused souls to bridall nights” (l.16) (another of the “love-feasts” of the Church’s liturgy) may lie behind Vaughan’s “pledge, and cue / Of a full feast” (ll.23–24). The likelihood that Vaughan was echoing Harvey (whether subconsciously or as an intended allusion to his stand against the Directory) is strengthened by the fact that “Church Festivals” is printed in the same opening of the 1647 edition of The Synagogue as a poem entitled “The Sabbath. Or Lords Day.”

IV When the London bookseller and printer, Philemon Stephens, first published The Synagogue in 1640, its title page was a close imitation of the title page of Herbert’s volume. Some of the extant copies were bound by Stephens with the sixth edition of The Temple (1641), which was produced like all the previous editions by the printer to the University of Cambridge. Harvey’s publisher eventually acquired the rights to The Temple himself and from 1656, when he brought out a seventh edition under his own imprint, The Synagogue was regularly bound with it.42 There is, however, a copy of The Temple later than 1641, without imprint or date, containing printers’ ornaments not found in any contemporary book from Cambridge, one of which is the same as that used on the title page of the 1647 edition of The Synagogue. Herbert’s modern editor conjectures that, prior to his acquisition of the rights, Stephens may have risked printing an unauthorized edition of The Temple (without his imprint) to accompany Harvey’s augmented collection of poems in 1647.43 If this were the case, then it is feasible that the copy of The Temple which made such an impact on Vaughan in the late 1640s would have come into his possession with the second edition of The Synagogue attached. Further support for this hypothesis may be provided by a comparison of items in Harvey’s sequence of poems on church festivals with the few poems devoted to “holy days” of the Anglican church in the 1650 Silex Scintillans. The first lines of “The Nativitie,” with what looks like an oblique criticism of the measures taken by Parliament in December 1644 to stamp out the observance of Christmas, may well have caught Vaughan’s eye—especially as Harvey’s imagery is very

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similar to that which he frequently employed himself to describe the effects of Puritanism:44 Unfold thy face, unmask thy ray, Shine forth bright sunne, double the day. Let no malignant misty fume, Nor foggy vapour, once presume To interpose thy perfect sight This day, which makes us love thy light For ever better that we could That blessed object once behold. (ll.1–8)

Vaughan’s two-part poem, “Christ’s Nativity,” owes something to Herbert’s “Christmas” (also in two parts), but the urgent imperatives of the opening are closer in tone to Harvey and an echo of the sun doubling “the day” may be heard in the evocation of approaching light: Awake, glad heart! get up, and sing, It is the Birth-day of thy King, Awake! awake! The Sun doth shake Light from his locks, and all the way Breathing perfumes, doth spice the day. (ll.1–6)

It is in the closing lines of each poem, however, that the antiPuritan sentiments of Vaughan—“Alas, my God! Thy birth now here / Must not be numbered in the year” (ll.47– 48)—chime most closely with those of Harvey—“Let not his birthday clowded be, / By whom thou shinest, and we see” (ll.25–26). Less tentative claims for Vaughan’s acquaintance with the 1647 Synagogue can be made in relation to a group of poems that demonstrate both the complex nature of the intertextual relationship between Silex Scintillans and The Temple and the poetic consequences of Vaughan’s resolution to “turn” into the “ancient way” of the Church of England and to take up his “duties” as Herbert’s successor. In the first half of the 1650 volume, there had been nothing like the strongly liturgical series of poems with which Herbert had begun “The Church,” from “The Altar” and “The Sacrifice” through “The Agonie,” “Good Friday” and “Easter” to “H. Baptisme.” An isolated poem on “The Incarnation, and Passion” had contemplated in a general way what Christ had done for humankind by living and dying on earth; and “Church-

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Service” (the only instance in Silex Scintillans of the kind of title that Harvey had adopted for his imitations of Herbert’s “Churchfloor”) had underlined the absence of a local community assembled in a church building by placing the solitary speaker in the context of the universal church, where he stands “in this thy choir of souls” and joins his “sighs, and groans” to “music” that is sealed “by thy martyrs’ blood” (ll.9–24). Three poems before “The Resolve” and “The Match,” however, a more personal meditation on “The Passion,” drawing phrases from Herbert’s “Good Friday” and “The Agonie,” had prepared the way for a sequence that Post describes as the “liturgical fulfillment” of the “ordination” rite enacted at the center of the volume.45 At the heart of this sequence are “Dressing,” “EasterDay,” “Easter-Hymn” and “The Holy Communion,” but as Calhoun has noted, the stage is set several poems earlier in “The Dawning” and this Eucharistic celebration of Easter concludes with “an appropriate hymn—a metrical version of Psalm 121.”46 Furthermore, Wall has revealed that “Dressing,” in which Christ is invoked in the language of the Anglican Order for Holy Communion as the “perfect, full oblation for all sin,” also “echoes the appointed Psalms and lessons for Maundy Thursday, the Thursday of Holy Week, March 22, 1649”; and that Psalm 121 was appointed to be read in the week after Easter in the same year.47 Whereas Vaughan enters into the private and public dimensions of spiritual experience in what he calls, in “Dressing,” the “mystical Communion” (l.14) of the Easter Eucharist, Harvey merely includes “The Resurrection” between poems on “The Passion” and “The Ascension” in his methodical charting of the liturgical year. Nevertheless, Harvey’s voice can be faintly heard among the more numerous echoes from The Temple and the Prayer Book in the course of Vaughan’s Easter ceremonies. Although the entire sequence from “The Dawning” to “The Holy Communion” is shot through with reminiscences of Herbert,48 the critical poem is “Easter-Day,” which must be quoted in full: Thou, whose sad heart, and weeping head lies low, Whose cloudy breast cold damps invade, Who never feel’st the sun, nor smooth’st thy brow, But sitt’st oppressed in the shade, Awake, awake, And in his Resurrection partake, Who on this day (that thou might’st rise as he,) Rose up, and cancelled two deaths due to thee.

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Awake, awake; and, like the sun, disperse All mists that would usurp this day; Where are thy palms, thy branches, and thy verse? Hosanna! hark; why dost thou stay? Arise, arise, And with his healing blood anoint thine eyes, Thy inward eyes; his blood will cure thy mind, Whose spittle only could restore the blind. (ll.1–16)

This is so closely modeled on Herbert’s “The Dawning” that Pettet describes it as “a continuous variation, from beginning to end” on the poem that supplied Vaughan with much more than a stanza form and a refrain:49 Awake sad heart, whom sorrow ever drowns; Take up thine eyes, which feed on earth; Unfold thy forehead gather’d into frowns: Thy Saviour comes, and with him mirth: Awake, awake: And with a thankfull heart his comforts take. But thou dost still lament, and pine, and crie; And feel his death, but not his victorie. (ll.1–8)

Vaughan’s “sad heart” (l.1) is picked up from the opening phrase (which had already been echoed at the start of “Christ’s Nativity,” along with the refrain “Awake! awake!”); the “weeping head” which “lies low” (l.1) is derived from Herbert’s second line; and the idea in Herbert’s third line is condensed into the second half of Vaughan’s third line. Vaughan’s sixth line runs together Herbert’s sixth line with the second line of the next stanza of “The Dawning”: Arise sad heart; if thou dost not withstand, Christs resurrrection thine may be: Do not by hanging down break from the hand, Which as it riseth, raiseth thee: Arise, arise; And with his buriall-linen drie thine eyes: Christ left his grave-clothes, that we might, when grief Draws tears, or blood, not want an handkerchief. (ll.9–16)

Herbert’s verbal play on “riseth/raiseth” (l.12) is echoed in Vaughan’s play on “rise / rose up” (ll.7–8) in his first stanza; and in the parallel phrases—“drie thine eyes” / “anoint thine eyes”

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(l.14)—Herbert’s unusually baroque conceit of the “buriall-linen” (l.14) left in the empty tomb as a handkerchief for mourners’ tears lies behind Vaughan’s striking transformation of the biblical story of the blind man whose sight was restored into an image of Christ’s power to restore the minds of those who sit “oppressed in the shade” (l.4). It is in the political connotations of Vaughan’s “oppressed” figure, whose “sad heart” and “cloudy breast” have been invaded by “cold damps” and whose “sun” has been usurped by “mists” (ll.1– 4,10), that one can catch an echo of those lines from Harvey’s “The Nativitie,” in which the sun is adjured to let “no malignant misty fume, / Nor foggy vapour” presume to “interpose thy perfect sight” (ll.3–5).50 Harvey’s own Easter poem, however, furnishes the most substantial evidence of Vaughan’s familiarity with The Synagogue. “The Resurrection” begins with an imperative that is mirrored in the refrains of Herbert and Vaughan: Up, and away, Thy Saviour’s gone before. Why dost thou stay, Dull soule, behold the doore Is open, and his precept bids thee rise, Whose pow’r hath vanquisht all thine enemies. (ll.1–6)

The sense of urgency, the encouragement of a “Dull soule” (l.4) to rouse itself from lethargy, and the word-for-word quotation of Harvey’s third line, together with the idea of vanquishing enemies, all merge with the influence of Herbert in Vaughan’s second stanza. The key idea of “Easter-Day,” that those sitting “oppressed in the shade” (l.4) should “partake” (l.6) in the new life of the Resurrection and rise with Christ, seems to owe as much to Harvey’s fourth stanza as to Herbert: In vain thou say’st Th’ art bury’d with thy Saviour, If thou delay’st To shew, by thy behaviour, That thou art risen with him. Till thou shine Like him, how canst thou say his light is thine? (ll.19–24)

The dispersal of usurping mists and the “weeping head” that “lies low” (l.1) read like reminiscences of the “foes” (l.27) frightened away by the rising of the Son/sun and of the “drowsie head” (l.30)

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that will be drawn “up” (l.30) by the noonday sun in the next stanza of “Resurrection”: Early he rose, And with him brought the day, While all thy foes Frighted out of the way. And wilt thou sluggard-like turn in thy bed, Till noon-sun beams draw up thy drowsie head? (ll.25–30)

And it is from Harvey rather than Herbert that the idea of restoring the sight of the “inward eyes” is developed: Open thine eyes, Sin-seiled soule, and see What cobweb tyes They are that trammell thee. (ll.31–34)

V Vaughan’s great Easter sequence was among the first fruits of the decisions recorded in “The Resolve” and “The Match” to “turn, and turn no more” (l.25) and to “join hands” (l.7) with the master poet of Anglicanism in the service of the now “ravished” and “pillaged” (ll.16–17) church that had been so memorably served and celebrated in The Temple.51 By the time he wrote the polemical preface to the second edition of Silex Scintillans, Vaughan might well have felt that his first volume of “Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations” and his prose works, Mount of Olives (1652) and Flores Solitudinis (1654), had earned him the right to be considered the legitimate heir to “holy Herbert.” In prose, he had provided a manual of “Solitary Devotions” for faithful members of “our Church” who were denied the public use of their official Prayer Book “in these times of persecution and triall”;52 and he had written in praise of another holy poet, who in his day “was a most chearfull and devout observer of Sacred festivals, or holy daies.”53 His own new collection of “sacred poems” in the second part of Silex Scintillans opens confidently with another liturgical sequence—“Ascension-Day,” “Ascension-Hymn,” “They are all gone into the world of light!” and “White Sunday”— and towards the end returns to the subject of the Eucharist in

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“The Feast,” which like the final poem in Herbert’s “The Church,” looks forward to “the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:9) at the end of time. Perhaps he had forgotten, when he was so dismissive of his “diverse” fellow laborers in the vineyard of sacred verse, that he was himself indebted in a small way to that anonymous poet who had modestly claimed no more than to write “in imitation of Mr. George Herbert.”

NOTES 1. Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 139– 42. Further quotations from the preface and from Vaughan’s poetry will be taken from this edition and line numbers will be given in the text. 2. For discussions of the 1654 preface, see James D. Simmonds, Masques of God: Form and Theme in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 34 –36; Jonathan F. S. Post, Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 72–77. 3. See The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 727; Rudrum, Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, 528. 4. Quarles does not figure in The Herbert Allusion Book: Allusions to George Herbert in the Seventeenth Century, compiled and edited by Robert H. Ray, Studies in Philology 83 (Fall 1986): 1–182. 5. Herbert is acknowledged as a model and example in three manuscript collections of poetry from the 1640s that have since been published: Henry Colman’s Divine Meditations (1640), ed. Karen E. Steanson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979); Ralph Knevet’s A Gallery to the Temple, in The Shorter Poems of Ralph Knevet, ed. Amy M. Charles (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), 275– 405; and Cardell Goodman’s Beawty in Raggs Or Divine Phancies putt into Broken Verse, ed. R. J. Roberts (Reading: University of Reading, 1958). The last of these incorporated Goodman’s earlier manuscript collection, which had the much more Herbertian title, Sacred Meditations and Private Ejaculations. 6. Herbert is treated as a fellow poet, not as a master, and there is no hint of any poetic influence from The Temple in Crashaw’s work. 7. The Poems English Latin and Greek of Richard Crashaw, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 75–76. 8. John N. Wall, Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 303. 9. Crashaw published another volume, entitled Carmen Deo Nostro, Te Decet Hymnus Sacred Poems in 1652, which reprinted many of the poems from the 1648 edition of Steps to the Temple. Vaughan may have had his three volumes in mind when he wrote slightingly of the “frequent impressions” of some of those who produced devotional verse in emulation of The Temple. 10. The Synagogue, Or, The Shadow of the Temple, The second Edition, corrected and enlarged (London, 1647). Further quotations from Harvey’s poetry will be taken from this edition.

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11. See “The British Church” and “Jordan (II)” in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 109, 102. Further quotations from Herbert’s poetry will be taken from this edition. 12. “The Reason of Church–government,” in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 1: 808. 13. Post, Henry Vaughan, 117. 14. Vaughan may have been recalling the significant position of “Sion,” the poem in which Herbert explores the various meanings of “the temple,” at the center of “The Church.” 15. See Wall, Transformations of the Word, 293–95. 16. Vaughan is echoing Herbert’s account of his youthful entry into the “way” of church “service” in “Affliction (I)”: “My dayes were straw’d with flow’rs and happiness” (1.21). He claimed in the 1654 preface that he had “suppressed” the “greatest follies” of his own youth. 17. Post, Henry Vaughan, 118. For Vaughan’s dedication of himself as a priestly poet, see Simmonds, Masques of God, 13; Wall, Transformations of the Word, 295; and Robert Wilcher, “Henry Vaughan and the Church,” Scintilla 2 (1998): 90–104. 18. “The Proffer” is a poem added in the 1655 edition of Silex Scintillans. 19. For the situation of the Church in Wales, see F. E Hutchinson, Henry Vaughan: A Life and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 109–26; A. M. Johnson, “Wales during the Commonwealth and Protectorate,” in Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth–Century History presented to Christopher Hill, ed. Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 233–56; and Alan Rudrum, “Resistance, Collaboration, and Silence: Henry Vaughan and Breconshire Royalism,” in The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted–Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 102–18. 20. Ilona Bell, “In the Shadow of the Temple,” in Like Season’d Timber: New Essays on George Herbert, ed. Edmund Miller and Robert Di Yanni (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 274. 21. A. C. Howell, “Christopher Harvey’s The Synagogue,” Studies in Philology 49 (April 1952): 234. 22. Herbert had written poems entitled “The Altar,” “Church-lock and key,” “Church-monuments,” “Church-musick,” and “The Windows.” 23. See Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 48, 69–70. 24. John E. Booty, “George Herbert: The Temple and The Book of Common Prayer,” Mosaic 12 (Winter 1979): 89. See also Sara W. Hanley, C.S.J., “Temples in The Temple: George Herbert’s Study of the Church,” Studies in English Literature 8 (Winter 1968): 121–35; Anthony Low, Love’s Architecture: Devotional Modes in Seventeenth–Century English Poetry (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 82–88; R. M. Van Wengen-Shute, George Herbert and the Liturgy of the Church of England (Oegstgeest: Drukkerij De Kempenaer, 1981); Wall, Transformations of the Word, 273–365 passim. 25. Graeme J. Watson, “The Temple in ‘The Night’: Henry Vaughan and the Collapse of the Established Church,” Modern Philology 84 (November 1986): 147. 26. Robert H. Ray calculates that 70 percent of the texts listed in his Herbert Allusion Book were written by loyal Anglicans and Royalists, in “Herbert’s

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Seventeenth-Century Reputation: A Summary and New Considerations,” George Herbert Journal 9 (1986): 1–15. 27. A Directory for the Publique Worship of God (London, 164[4]5), 85. 28. Directory, 40. 29. Directory, sig. A3v. 30. See John Morrill, “The Church in England, 1642–9,” in Reactions to the English Civil War 1642–1649, ed. John Morrill (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), 93. 31. See Bell, Like Season’d Timber, 269–73. 32. Post, Henry Vaughan, 10. 33. E. C. Pettet, Of Paradise and Light: A Study of Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 15. 34. Olor Iscanus was not published until 1651, although Vaughan had a volume ready for the printer in 1647. For the suggestion that Vaughan’s spiritual awakening may have begun with his encounter with the Christian odes of Casimir Sarbiewski, translations of which were among material added to the original collection of poems when Olor Iscanus was published, see my article, “ ‘Feathering some slower hours’: Henry Vaughan’s Verse Translations,” Scintilla 4 (2000): 160–61. 35. Thomas O. Calhoun, Henry Vaughan: The Achievement of Silex Scintillans (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981), 67, 71. 36. Post, Henry Vaughan, 79–80. 37. Pettet, Of Paradise and Light, 56–66. For other discussions of Herbert’s influence on Vaughan, see Post, Henry Vaughan, 70–188, passim; Gerald Hammond, “ ‘Poor dust should lie still low’: George Herbert and Henry Vaughan,” English 35 (Spring 1986): 1–22; and Robert Wilcher, “ ‘The present times are not / To snudge in’: Henry Vaughan, The Temple, and the Pressure of History,” in George Herbert: Sacred and Profane, ed. Helen Wilcox and Richard Todd (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1995), 185–94. 38. Wall, Transformations of the Word, 291; Calhoun, Henry Vaughan, 74, 232. 39. Calhoun, Henry Vaughan, 75. 40. Hutchinson, Life, 163. 41. Judith Dundas, “Levity and Grace: The Poetry of Sacred Wit,” The Yearbook of English Studies 2 (1972): 97–98. 42. In fact, in the final form established by the third edition of 1657, Harvey’s collection continued to appear as a physical supplement to The Temple until the nineteenth century. See Howell, “Harvey’s The Synagogue,” 229–34. 43. See The Works of George Herbert, ed. Hutchinson, lix–lx (where it is noted that the volume was recorded in the British Museum catalog as “?Cambridge ?1656”). 44. See, for example, the “mists” and “shadows” in “The British Church” (l.2); the “thick darkness” that “lies / And hatcheth o’er thy people” in “Corruption” (ll.37–38); the “darksome states-man” surrounded by “a thick midnight-fog” in “The World (I)” (ll.16–17); the “mists, and black days” of “The Constellation” (l.47). Vaughan’s attention may also have been arrested by the word “malignant,” which, although it was already present in the 1640 text, had developed distinctly antiroyalist connotations by 1647 and turned Harvey’s earlier images of mists and clouds into political metaphors. 45. Post, Henry Vaughan, 143. 46. Calhoun, Henry Vaughan, 178–80.

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47. Wall, Transformations of the Word, 326. 48. Among the Herbert poems echoed are “Praise (II),” “The Offering,” “The H. Communion,” “The Dawning,” “The Banquet,” and “Easter.” 49. Pettet, Of Paradise and Light, 52. 50. There may be an echo of Herbert’s “Unfold thy forehead” (l.3) in the first words of Harvey’s “Nativitie”: “Unfold thy face” (l.1). 51. See Vaughan’s “The British Church,” which harks back to Herbert’s poem of the same title. 52. The Mount of Olives, in The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. Martin, 156, 149. 53. Primitive Holiness, Set forth in the Life of the blessed Paulinus, printed as part of Flores Solitudinis, in The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. Martin, 377.

Milton’s Jarring Allusions John Leonard

MILTON’S ALLUSIONS HAVE PROVOKED LIVELY DEBATE IN RECENT years.1 Until the mid-1980s most critics agreed that Milton alludes often and widely, and that his allusions work in harmony with each other and with their larger poetic contexts. Davis P. Harding’s seminal study The Club of Hercules (1962) did much to establish this view. Harding defines allusion broadly. “Allusion,” he writes, “is a protean device, and may appear now in one guise, now in another, ranging all the way from the borrowed incident or direct quotation to the subtlest variations in old words, cadences, or rhythms.” For Harding, Milton’s allusions are more than “merely decorative.” Their purpose is to convey “an idea or an emotion” that could not be communicated in any other fashion.2 This view remains influential. Its two greatest monuments are Alastair Fowler’s two editions of Paradise Lost. Fowler identifies an unprecedented number of allusions in Paradise Lost and finds subtle significance in most of them. In his 1968 introduction he writes: “Milton’s allusions to earlier epics are so consistent as to constitute a distinct strand of meaning in the poem: even, sometimes, a kind of critical accompaniment.”3 Fowler makes the same point with only minor rewording in his 1998 introduction. The tradition of Harding and Fowler has much to recommend it, and I should say at the outset that the present essay is not an outright rejection of that tradition, even though I have expressed doubts about it in the past and shall raise more in what follows. Several critics have questioned Harding’s tradition in recent years. Two different (in some ways polar opposite) challenges have been mounted. The first faults Harding and Fowler for admitting too many allusions; the second faults them for admitting too few. Critical tangles like this are often a sign of something interesting in a poet. I hope to show that that is the case here. Let’s start, then, with the first challenge. It has a strong claim to our attention, coming as it does from two classicists, Charles Martindale and William M. Porter. Arguing independently, Mar71

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tindale and Porter claim that Miltonists have overestimated the number of literary allusions in Paradise Lost. “Modern scholars,” writes Martindale, “have something of a vested interest in . . . multiplying sources and allusions.”4 Martindale chides earlier critics for failing to distinguish allusion from “the use of traditional material, including the so-called commonplaces or topoi” (4). He insists that Milton need not be alluding to Homer or Vergil every time he uses an epic convention that Homer and Vergil had also used. He cites as an example the debate in Hell. He takes issue with Francis Blessington, who had supposed “that the ‘great consult’ of devils in Paradise Lost alludes to the council of war held by Agamemnon at the beginning of Iliad II,” and had offered “an elaborate reading on that basis.” Martindale replies that “such councils are a conventional feature of epic, and the reader would be just as likely to think of (say) Latinus’ council of war in Aeneid XI.” “Many supposed allusions, both verbal and structural,” Martindale concludes, “turn out, on careful inspection, to be mere will-o’-the-wisps that have led the amazed interpreter from his way into bogs and mires.” Porter shares Martindale’s skepticism. “Milton’s allusions,” he writes, “are rarer than previously thought.”5 Porter chides Harding for spinning allusions out of English translations. Harding had detected an allusion to Vergil, Aeneid 7:783-84, when Satan “Stood like a Towr.”6 For Harding, “Stood like a Towr” is enough to connect Satan with Turnus. He cites J. W. Mackail’s translation of Vergil, in which Turnus “towers a whole head over all.” Porter is unconvinced: Says Harding, “It seems probable that Vergil’s second line suggested the simile ‘Stood like a Tow’r.’ ” But no line or word of Vergil’s could suggest this particular connection to Harding. There is in the Latin no “tower” (turris—no cognate verb), only “supra est,” meaning literally “he is above,” “he is higher.” Is this an allusion—that is, a significant verbal link between Milton’s text and Vergil’s? I think not. (3)

Harding’s allusion depends on Mackail’s English, not Vergil’s Latin. Porter goes on to point out that Vergil uses “supra est” more than once. At Aeneid 11:683 he applies the phrase to “one Ornytus, a minor Trojan victim of Camilla’s killing spree.” Harding ignores Ornytus “because he believes a priori that Milton wants to associate Satan with Turnus.” Ornytus is “not nearly as sexy an association” (3– 4).

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Martindale and Porter make a strong case. Their cautionary examples can and should deter the excesses of those whom Porter drily dubs “the allusion-experts” (8). But the distinction between allusion and topos, useful as it is, is problematic. One classicist’s topos can be another classicist’s allusion. We can see this happening even with Martindale and Porter. Both quote Satan’s first words in Paradise Lost: “If thou beest he; But O how fall’n! how chang’d / From him” (1.84 –85). Porter, like many before him, hears an allusion to the Aeneid, where Aeneas seeing Hector’s ghost cries: “quantum mutatus ab illo / Hectore” (2:274 –75). For Porter, this is a “crucial Vergilian allusion,” one of the very few genuine allusions in Paradise Lost (144). He names his final chapter (“Quantum Mutatus: Language”) after it. Martindale, however, thinks that even this might be an epic commonplace: “a rhetorical formula of which the most famous example happens to occur in the Aeneid” (15). He finds other instances in Ovid, Statius, Valerius Flaccus, Dante, and Vida. Who are we to believe? Porter is as aware as Martindale that “how changed” is a topos, but he still hears a specific allusion to Vergil.7 Allusion and topos are distinguishable, then, but they are not always distinct. An allusion need not forfeit its status as allusion just because it is also a topos. One more example will illustrate the point. In book 10 of Paradise Lost Milton describes Satan’s invisible entry into Pandaemonium and sudden appearance on his throne. Thomas Newton in 1749 remarked that Milton’s episode “seems to be copied from a like adventure of Aeneas, Virg. Aen. i. 439.”8 In Vergil’s episode, Aeneas enters Carthage under cover of a cloud (1:439 f ), comes invisibly into Dido’s presence, then suddenly appears before her, “gleaming in the clear light” (1:588–89). Henry John Todd, quoting Newton in 1801, agrees that Milton is alluding to Vergil, but then adds another source: “Vergil here imitates the adventure of Ulysses in the seventh Odyssey, ver. 39, &c.”9 In Homer’s episode, Odysseus invisibly enters the palace of the Phaeacians, approaches Queen Arete under cover of mist, then suddenly appears clasping Arete’s knees (7:133– 45). At first sight, the fact that two well-educated editors have seized on two different classical sources might be thought to support Martindale’s case that topoi are by definition empty of specific reference. Milton is certainly employing a topos here. For that reason it would be rash to build an argument around the first source that comes to mind. But one can concede this point and still argue for a

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specific allusion. Satan’s invisible entry can be a topos and an allusion. I see a specific allusion to Tasso. The parallel is very close. In book 10 of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, the Sultan Solimano, hidden by a magic cloud, enters Jerusalem and walks through the hall where his Saracen allies are holding a council of war. Like Satan, who “round about him saw unseen” (10:448), Solimano “Unseene, at will did all the prease behold” (10:35).10 The Saracens have just suffered a defeat and their morale is low. Solimano wants to test their morale. Argantes (a precursor for Milton’s Moloch) is the first to speak. He urges the Saracen leaders to fight to the death. The golden-tongued coward Orcanes (a precursor for Belial) then rises. He applauds Argantes’ courage, but reminds the assembly of what happened to Solimano when he resisted Goffredo. Solimano might have kept his kingdom by suing for peace. Instead he made war and lost everything. Who knows where he is now? Maybe dead. Maybe imprisoned. Maybe “run away disguised.” Hearing this, Solimano tears his cloud “like a vaile” and “amid the prease he shin’de” (10:49). Fairfax’s “shin’de” translates Tasso’s rifulge. One might argue that Milton’s phrase “fulgent head” (10.449) is a direct imitation of rifulge. But Vergil also has refulsit (1:588). “Fulgent” alone is not enough to clinch an allusion. The decisive moment comes five lines later, when Milton conveys Satan’s commanding presence with a sudden syntactical compression: At last as from a Cloud his fulgent head And shape Starr bright appeer’d, or brighter, clad With what permissive glory since his fall Was left him, or false glitter: All amaz’d At that so sudden blaze the Stygian throng Bent thir aspect, and whom they wish’d beheld, Their mighty Chief returnd. (10.449–55)

That laconic “and whom they wish’d beheld” bears the unmistakable stamp of Fairfax’s Tasso: the smokie cloud was cleft and torne, Which like a vaile upon them stretched lay, And up to open heav’n forth with was borne, And left the Prince in vew of lightsome day, With princely looke amid the prease he shin’de,

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And on a sodaine, thus declar’d his minde. “Of whom you speake behold the Soldan here.” (10:49–50)

“Of whom you speake behold”: “and whom they wish’d beheld.” To my mind, the verbal and syntactical correspondences are sufficiently close to trigger an allusion even though both poets are using a topos. It is not just verbal echo that ties Satan to Solimano. Odysseus and Aeneas had made their invisible entrances as strangers and suppliants. Solimano, like Satan, enters a place where he is sorely missed, and his sudden, unlooked-for appearance restores hope to a dejected army. There are differences. Milton’s allusion is calculated to bring these out. Solimano really does turn things around for the Saracens. He inspires a counterattack that will cause the Christians much consternation. Satan hopes to inspire such a sortie and for a moment it seems that he will succeed: “But up and enter now into full bliss” (10.503). Then triumph turns to shame as Satan is answered with a “dismal universal hiss” (10.508). This is a reversal of Solimano’s authentic triumph, where King Aladine himself “resinde his throne / To Soliman” (10:54). The allusion to Solimano builds Satan up to bring him down. As if to clinch the allusion, Milton refers to Pandaemonium as a “Dark Divan” (10.457). The Divan was the Turkish sultan’s council of state. Homer and Vergil are not irrelevant to Milton’s lines. They have created the topos that Tasso and Milton both use. But Milton’s allusion is to Tasso. It is now time to turn to the second challenge that has been brought against Harding’s view of Milton’s allusions. As noted above, this second challenge is the opposite of the first. Whereas the first challenge complains that critics have admitted too many allusions, the second complains that they have admitted too few. In particular, it faults editors for exercising a kind of unconscious censorship. Editors like Hughes and Fowler (so the argument goes) admit allusions that support Milton’s declared didactic intent and suppress others that threaten to thwart or compromise that same intent. The objection is that the editorial canon is unfairly selective. It privileges safe allusions. Several recent critics have argued along these lines. Writing independently in the 1990s, John Rumrich, Julia Walker, and I drew attention to a difficult moment in Milton’s Ludlow Masque. The Elder Brother, assuring his Younger Brother that chaste

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virgins enjoy supernatural protection from rape, suddenly asks a rhetorical question: What was that snaky-headed Gorgon sheild That wise Minerva wore, unconquer’d Virgin, Wherwith she freez’d her foes to congeal’d stone? But rigid looks of Chast austerity, And noble grace that dash’t brute violence With sudden adoration, and blank aw. (447–52)

This is troubling because the face on Minerva’s shield was that of Medusa. Ovid (Metamorphoses 4:798–803) relates that she had been put there as a punishment for being raped in Minerva’s temple. Not the most reassuring myth, in the circumstances! Rumrich, Walker, and I addressed the problem simultaneously. I persuaded myself that the allusion was a deliberate irony intended to discredit the Elder Brother’s naive but well-intentioned idealism.11 Rumrich took a different tack. For him, Medusa’s story highlights “one of the more perplexing problems in Comus: whether it is possible to be an innocent victim.”12 Walker’s approach was different again. She had no doubt about Medusa’s innocence, but she did have a few suspicions about Milton: “no woman is safe in a male world—a world of male actions and of male narrative.”13 Meanwhile, I had had second thoughts about Ovid’s Latin. Ovid’s word vitiasse might mean either “raped” or “seduced” (both interpretations are found in both Renaissance and modern translations). If Medusa consented (as Sandys among others thought she did), her punishment would make sense, given Minerva’s values. Medusa’s face on Minerva’s shield would be a warning to other potential transgressors.14 This is not the place to rehash the details of these rival interpretations. The immediate question is whether critics have grounds for raising awkward questions. Stella Revard would rather leave well enough alone. She thinks that Ovid’s story of Medusa (however we construe it) is simply irrelevant to the Elder Brother’s speech. The real allusion, she argues, is not to Ovid, but to Homer, Iliad 5:738– 42, “where Athene arms herself with Zeus’s gorgon-embellished aegis before going down to do battle with the Trojans.”15 Discouraging further inquiry, Revard has recourse to a series of plaintive rhetorical questions: Must we . . . read the myth of Medusa back to its beginning? Does Milton’s reference to the gorgon shield necessitate diving so deeply

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into the Medusa story that we bring up either the lewd or the lost Medusa to the surface? That is, need every mythic allusion take into account every detail in all versions of a myth? May Milton not be selective? (31)

These questions are pertinent, and I would agree that critical curiosity can probe too deeply and can degenerate into mere prurience. But does it in this instance? In framing the matter like this, I have joined Revard and the Elder Brother in falling back on the tendentiousness of a rhetorical question. Rhetorical questions are dangerous because they risk (even court) an unwelcome answer. Milton’s Moloch is an impressive orator—all the more so for his laconic bluntness— but he delivers himself into Belial’s hands the moment he asks “what can be worse / Then to dwell here?” (2.85–86). Belial’s whole speech is a reply to Moloch’s question (“What can we suffer worse? is this then worst,” “that sure was worse,” “this would be worse,” “better these than worse”).16 Milton himself cannot refrain from answering Moloch when he drily concludes: “such another Field / They dreaded worse than Hell” (2.292–93). The Milton who answered Moloch in this way is unlikely to have been deaf to the irony in “What was that snaky-headed Gorgon sheild,” even though the Elder Brother does not end his question there but passes blissfully on: “That wise Minerva wore, unconquer’d Virgin, / Wherwith she freez’d her foes to congeal’d stone?” Revard thinks that the Elder Brother’s confidence is vindicated by events. We can agree that Milton’s Lady “is not defenseless” (32). Revard rightly insists that the Lady’s defiant answer fills Comus with “a cold shuddring dew” (802). But Revard exaggerates Comus’s discomfiture when she triumphantly concludes: “Is this not freezing your foes?” (33). The short answer is no, this is not freezing your foes. Comus is shaken, not frozen, and he is not shaken so thoroughly that he cannot immediately recover and seize the initiative: “I must dissemble, / And try her yet more strongly. Com, no more, / This is meer moral babble” (805–7). Six lines later, the brothers rush in to find their sister “In stony fetters fixt, and motionless” (819). Pace Revard and the Elder Brother, it is Comus who freezes the Lady to “congeal’d stone,” not the other way round. We give small credit to Milton if we assume that he was blind to this clear reversal of the Elder Brother’s expectations. To my mind, the Elder Brother’s “What was that snaky-headed Gorgon sheild” not only gives us a license to ask awkward questions; it actively invites us to do so. Yes, good

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prevails over evil in the end, but it does not prevail by the simple expedient of freezing evil with an icy stare. Evil has some freezing powers of its own, and the Elder Brother’s hidden allusion testifies to those powers even as it affirms the “hidden strength” (415) of chastity. Many of Milton’s allusions work like this. They jar with and against their contexts. Fowler’s editions are indispensable here because Fowler, like Revard, is too honest a critic to ignore jarring allusions, though he too would prefer to dismiss them. Fowler’s notes are remarkable for the way they tell us not to think of things. A good example of this occurs in his 1968 note to “Doing or Suffering” (1.158)—a phrase used by Satan, and later taken up by Belial. Fowler writes: Doing or suffering] Some will choose to hear an echo of Livy ii 12: Et facere et pati fortia Romanorum est, the famous words of Mutius Scaevola when he demonstrated Roman fortitude by voluntarily burning his right hand, and thus frightened the Etruscan Porsenna into withdrawing his army. But the phrase also recalls Horace, Odes III xxiv 43, where it is covetousness that impels men “to do and to suffer” anything, and to desert the path of virtue.17

“Some will choose to hear”: Martindale and Porter might object that this unwittingly pinpoints the problem with allusionhunting. Critics “choose” whatever allusion suits their preexisting bias. Fowler, seeing Satan as a villain, feels a need to distance him from the patriotic hero Scaevola. Accordingly, he proposes an alternative allusion, one that associates Satan with covetousness, not courage.18 My own vote is for the Livy allusion, not because I am committed to the Devil’s Party, but because the story of Scaevola has the depth and resonance characteristic of Milton’s best allusions. Fowler sees the Livy allusion as a liability, but in Belial’s case it can be an asset even for God’s party. Echoing words can point to contrasting deeds. Such is the case when Belial says: To suffer, as to doe, Our strength is equal, nor the Law unjust That so ordains. (2.199–201)

Scaevola said “facere et pati” (“to do and to suffer”) even as he thrust his hand in the flames. Belial’s whole purpose is to avoid the flames. His word “suffer” is ambiguous. At first it seems that

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Belial, like Scaevola, is referring to physical pain and boasting of his power to endure it. But “suffer” could have the nonphysical senses “be passive,” “wait patiently,” and “consent to be something” (OED 4, 6, 15). To appreciate the irony of this moment, we need to look at what has preceded it. The antithesis between doing and suffering had entered some forty lines earlier, when Belial first took up Moloch’s question “what can be worse / Then to dwell here?” Say they who counsel Warr, we are decreed, Reserv’d and destin’d to Eternal woe; Whatever doing, what can we suffer more, What can we suffer worse? is this then worst, Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in Arms? (2.160–64)

One might expect “do” to mean “fight,” and “suffer” to mean “endure.” But Belial does not use the words in this way. For Belial, “doing” includes “sitting.” “Suffer more” and “suffer worse” glance at the dire consequences of military action, but they do this in order to push “suffer” in the direction of painless passivity. After this, we should be suspicious when Belial declares “To suffer, as to doe, / Our strength is equal” (2.199–200). Belial’s “To suffer, as to doe” works differently from Scaevola’s facere et pati. Scaevola forged defiant doing out of physical suffering. On Belial’s lips, “to doe” advocates armchair activism; “To suffer,” craven capitulation. The irony is strong even without an allusion to Livy, but the allusion enlivens Belial’s lines with a pointed contrast. Belial sounds like a Roman hero, but his courage is false and hollow. For all his skepticism about “the allusion-experts,” Porter is open to jarring allusions. “The true allusion,” he writes, must contain an element of contrast as well as comparison. This is what I call the critical allusion . . . the allusive text distinguishes itself from its target at least in part by means of verbal caricature or parody, a kind of subtextual mockery of the target that deliberately provokes—or should provoke—an attentive reader to object. (33)

The case we have just considered is somewhat different. Here it is Belial, not Livy or Scaevola, who is the target of “subtextual mockery.” But Porter’s essential point—that there is “an element of contrast”—still holds. I would not go so far as to see “verbal caricature or parody” as a defining element of allusion. When Satan says “Doing or Suffering” (1.158) I can see no irony at

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either Satan’s or Scaevola’s expense. Satan, unlike Belial, has genuine Roman fortitude. He earns his allusion. Fowler evokes Horace in an attempt to taint Satan with covetousness, but this smear feels dragged in. If Milton did intend the Horace allusion, it is a cheap shot, unworthy of his powers. For this reason alone I choose not to hear it, even as I do “choose to hear an echo of Livy.” One might argue that “Doing or Suffering” alludes to Livy and Horace. I would be skeptical of such a claim in this particular instance, but there are times when competing sources do pull Milton’s text in opposite directions. Satan is the focus of several such double allusions. Consider the following lines, spoken by Satan as he spies on Adam and Eve: Hell shall unfold, To entertain you two, her widest Gates, And send forth all her Kings; there will be room, Not like these narrow limits, to receive Your numerous ofspring. (4.381–85)

Most critics hear this as cruel irony. Many use the word “sarcastic.” Editors invariably cite Isaiah’s prophecy of the fall of Babylon: “Hell from beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming: it stirreth up the dead for thee, even all the chief ones of the earth; it hath raised up from their thrones all the kings of the nations” (14: 9). This allusion does accord with a cruel, ironic Satan. But “irony” is a complex matter. In Some Versions of Pastoral Empson remarks that “an irony has no point unless it is true, in some degree, in both senses.” Empson famously (some would say “notoriously”) believed that Satan was sincere in offering humankind high honor in Hell.19 Most Miltonists have dismissed Empson’s reading, but it draws support from a second possible allusion in Satan’s soliloquy—one that critics have neglected. The allusion is to Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae. As Pluto abducts Proserpine, he tries to console her by foretelling the glorious destiny that awaits her in Hades. He tells her not to miss the earth, for Hades is roomy (immensum) and even has its own sun and stars. This is close to Satan’s contrast between earth’s “narrow limits” and Hell’s “room.” Pluto concludes: “sub tua purpurei venient vestigia reges” (2:300), “To thy feet shall come purple-clothed kings.”20 This is very close to “send forth all her kings”—arguably as close as the oft-cited verse from Isaiah. Both potential allusions are appropriate to the moment, but they evoke different responses. The biblical one makes Satan sound

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gloating; the classical one suggests that he is capable of finer feelings even when he knowingly commits a wrong. Pluto is a violent ravisher, but he really does want Proserpine to be happy in her new home. Hospitality was a traditional attribute of the god Hades. The Greeks frequently gave him the epithets Polydegmon and Polydektes (both literally “receiver of many”). These titles contain an element of euphemism but that does not mean that they were not intended seriously. Ludwig Preller has argued that Hades was called Polydegmon and Polydektes by analogy with Zeus Polyxenos (Zeus the very hospitable).21 Milton might be playing on Hades’s epithet when Satan promises “to receive / Your numerous ofspring.” This would work very well with an allusion to Claudian. Satan Polydegmon is all the more terrifying for his sincerity. Like Pluto, he means what he says.22 We coarsen his speech if we follow the example of most critics and write it off as “sarcasm.” Satan is ironic, not sarcastic, and his irony has point because “it is true, in some degree, in both senses.” Empson was not the first critic to argue that Satan’s offer is sincere. Sir Walter Raleigh, writing in 1900, had come to the same conclusion: “He seeks alliance with them, and is prepared to give them a share in all he has—which, it must be allowed, is true hospitality.”23 Raleigh and Empson push Satan’s speech too far in the direction of benevolence but their intuition is not so wildly eccentric as Miltonists have made out. Satan does show “true hospitality”— the hospitality of Hades Polydegmon, the All-Receiver who always finds room for one more guest. Adam and Eve, like Proserpine, are special guests, and Satan means to give them a royal welcome. The case for an allusion to Proserpine becomes stronger when we remember the larger pattern of allusions to Proserpine in Paradise Lost. Satan’s soliloquy comes a hundred lines after the great and memorable simile likening Paradise to “that faire field / Of Enna, where Proserpin gathering flours, / Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis / Was gatherd” (4.268–71). After this, it takes only a nudge to see Eve as Proserpine. Later we see Eve leave Adam’s side like “Ceres in her Prime, / Yet Virgin of Proserpina from Jove” (9.395–96). There may be yet another allusion to Proserpine in book 9 when Adam weaves a garland for Eve, not knowing that she has already eaten the forbidden fruit: Adam the while Waiting desirous her return, had wove Of choicest Flours a Garland to adorne

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Her Tresses, and her rural labours crown, As Reapers oft are wont their Harvest Queen. Great joy he promis’d to his thoughts, and new Solace in her return, so long delay’d. (9.838– 44)

This simile refers primarily to English rural life. There is no need to hunt for classical sources, but one moment in De Raptu Proserpinae is so appropriate that I find it hard to believe that Milton was not thinking of it. When Claudian’s Proserpine gathers flowers in Enna, she weaves a garland for herself, in blissful ignorance of the symbolic significance of her act: Aestuat ante alias avido fervore legendi frugiferae spes una deae: nunc vimine texto ridentes calathos spoliis agrestibus implet; nunc sociat flores seseque ignara coronat, augurium fatale tori. (2:136– 40) [Beyond her companions, she, the one hope of the fruit-bearing goddess, burned with an eager longing to gather flowers. Now she fills her smiling, osier-woven baskets with the spoils of the fields; now she twines flowers into a garland and crowns herself with it, not seeing the omen of her fated marriage.]

A few moments later Pluto emerges from the earth. The reversal of expectations is beautifully poignant. An allusion to this moment when Adam weaves his garland would help to prepare for the sudden reversal of expectations when Eve appears, holding the forbidden fruit (9.851). Adam, seeing Eve, drops his garland: From his slack hand the Garland wreath’d for Eve Down drop’d, and all the faded Roses shed. (9.892–93)

Even this moment might recall Proserpine, though the allusion in this instance would be to Ovid, not Claudian. Ovid’s Proserpine, swept into Pluto’s chariot, grieves to see her gathered flowers fall from her slack tunic: collecti flores tunicis cecidere remissis, tantaque simplicitas puerilibus adfuit annis, haec quoque virgineum movit iactura dolorem. (5:399– 401)

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[The flowers which she had gathered fell out of her loosened tunic; and such was the innocence of her girlish years, the loss of her flowers even at such a time aroused new grief.]24

This Ovidian moment profoundly moved Milton. The pathos of the plucked Proserpine grieving for her flowers surely prompted the great lines “Her self, though fairest unsupported Flour” (9.432) and “Her self a fairer Floure by gloomie Dis / Was gatherd” (4.270). The point is not that Adam’s garland contains a specific allusion to Ovid. I am suggesting that Adam’s garland weaves together several details from Proserpine’s story as told by Ovid and Claudian. Even the reference to a “Harvest Queen” fortifies the connection with Claudian, for Claudian’s Pluto promises Proserpine that she will eat from a golden tree and hold blessed autumn in her sway (“fortunatumque tenebis / autumnum,” 2:292–93). English poets often used the phrase “Harvest Queen” of Ceres. Joseph Hall in one of his satires says that Pluto “stole the daughter of the Haruest-Queene.”25 Most critics who use the word “allusion” assume that it must imply conscious authorial intent. “Allusion,” writes Martindale, “implies conscious design by the writer” (1). Porter agrees. While finding “the notion of authorial intentionality” “suspiciously vague when considered in general terms,” Porter still considers it “an essential part of the ordinary understanding of any particular allusion” (35). Critics who reject the concept of authorial intention usually speak of “intertextuality” rather than “allusion.” I have avoided the former word because I think it obscures rather than clarifies the important issues. Preeminent among these is the question of whether there can be such a thing as an unconscious allusion. For many critics, the term “unconscious allusion” is a contradiction in terms. But the idea is no more absurd than any other concept of unconscious intention. Some of Milton’s allusions are so jarringly incongruous that some have found it hard to believe that he could have known what he was doing when he did it. A famous instance is the final line of “Elegy Tertia,” Milton’s elegy for Bishop Lancelot Andrewes. Recalling his dream of heavenly bliss, Milton writes: “Talia contingant somnia saepe mihi” [“May I often be lucky enough to have dreams like this”]. Critics have long recognized that this is an adaptation of the final line of Amores 1:5, where Ovid wishes for more lustful midday encounters like the one he has just enjoyed with Corinna. Not everyone sees this allusion as unconscious. Martindale thinks that “the echo is justified, despite the embarrassing difference of context, because Milton is writing an elegy in the Ovidian style” (14).

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Martindale might be right in this case. We must beware of projecting our notions of decorum onto Renaissance poems. But some of Milton’s classical recollections are so jarring as to defy easy accommodation. John H. Finley, writing in 1937, drew attention to a difficult case in the opening lines of “Sonnet 11”: A book was writ of late call’d Tetrachordon; And wov’n close, both matter, form and stile; The Subject new: it walk’d the Town a while, Numbring good intellects; now seldom por’d on.

Finley hears an echo of Horace, Epistulae 1:20, where Horace addresses his book and “by innuendo” likens it “to a prostitute” walking the streets. Finley asks: “May one dare to suggest that Milton felt and echoed Horace’s meaning?”26 Horace’s meaning is hard to miss. Innuendo asserts itself from the first two lines: “Vertumnum Ianumque, liber, spectare videris, / scilicet ut prostes Sosiorum pumice mundus” [“You seem, my book, to be looking wistfully toward Vertumnus and Janus, in order, forsooth, that you may go on sale, neatly polished with the pumice of the Sosii”].27 It is hard to capture the effect of this in translation. Much is implied by the place names. Vertumnus’s temple was in the Vicus Tuscus; Janus’s was in the Argiletus. Both quarters were noted for brothels. These nuances bring out a pun in “prostes.” The innocent sense (used of wares) is “to be set out for sale,” but the seedy context invites a play on the other sense: “to sell one’s body, prostitute oneself.” Two lines later, Horace’s book yearns for “communia.” Communia [“what is open to all”] here means “public life,” but the word also has sexual overtones playing on communis locus—a euphemism for a brothel. After this, Horace’s voice inevitably assumes a tone of mock contempt when he exclaims: “Fuge quo descendere gestis” [“Off with you, down to where you itch to go”]. Milton could hardly have failed to “feel” these nuances. Does he “echo” them? The case for an allusion does not rest solely on the image of a walking book. There is a further point of contact a few lines later in the Latin poem, when Horace predicts the grim fate that will finally befall his promiscuous volume. Having “been well thumbed [contrectatus] by vulgar hands,” it “will begin to grow soiled [sordescere]” (11–12). There are more sexual overtones here, for contrecto could mean “touch carnally” as well as “touch,” and sordesco could imply moral as well as physical squalor. Sullied from hard perusal, Horace’s book will end its days in Rome’s suburbs teaching schoolboys to spell: “stammering age

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[balba senectus] will come upon you as you teach boys their A B C [pueros elementa docentem] in the city’s outskirts” (17–18). The joke is that Horace’s book will stutter with senility like its own pupils stumbling over their letters. Some memory of these lines may carry over into Milton’s picture of the bewildered stall readers who “Stand spelling fals” (7). Finley makes a plausible case for an allusion to Horace’s ribald epistle, but he fails to ask why Milton would want the allusion. There is one good reason why he should not want it. It plays into the hands of his Presbyterian detractors, whose whole case against the divorce pamphlets was that they encouraged libertinism. Herbert Palmer, addressing Parliament in The Glasse of Gods Providence (1644), had denounced The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce with these stinging words: “a wicked booke is abroad and uncensured, though deserving to be burnt, whose Author hath been so impudent as to set his Name to it, and dedicate it to your selves” (55). For Palmer, it is a sign of Milton’s wickedness that his book is “abroad.” I suggest that Milton’s image of a walking book is in part a response to Palmer. It is as if Milton were saying “Why should a good book not be ‘abroad’ ”? Undaunted by icy stares and incredulous gasps, Tetrachordon steels itself to step out. But how should it walk? Milton worried at this question while composing “Sonnet 11.” The Trinity Manuscript has two versions of the poem: a working draft and a fair copy. The original version of line 3 read: “It went off well about ye town a while.” “Went off well about” implies a solemn gait, full of airs and graces. In this first version, Tetrachordon paces forth with defiant dignity, nose in the air, walking stick tapping, sublimely contemptuous of groundless slander. This cuts the ground from under Palmer’s feet, but a price must be paid for such pompous perambulation. “Went off well” just doesn’t come off well. It makes Milton sound self-important and stuffy. It also sells Tetrachordon short. This pamphlet of all pamphlets should have a winsome walk. So Milton makes it fresh: “The Subject new: it walk’d the Town a while.” This is Tetrachordon’s true gait: no staid stomp, but a peppy prance, primping and preening at the caesura, then flaunting its charms with nymphlike step and goddesslike deport. In putting the case as provocatively as this I am inviting the retort: “Why do you think Tetrachordon is a she?” So far as (grammatical) gender is concerned, Tetrachordon is an “it,” not a “she.” But part of the humor of the line comes from the way in which a sexless object is made to exude sexuality. In Horace the joke is

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deliberate and might involve a sly ambiguity. Most modern editors assume that Horace is thinking of a female prostitute, but liber is masculine in gender, so it is possible that the imagined prostitute is male in sex. One recent editor notes that Horace’s book offers itself “like a modern-day rent-boy.”28 Milton’s book is neither masculine nor feminine, but its appearance and walk are still calculated to allure and entice. Dressed up to the nines (“wov’n close, both matter, form and stile”), it hits the streets and struts its stuff. It solicits: “it walk’d the Town a while, / Numbring good intellects.” Editors have been puzzled by “Numbring.” Most accept the interpretation of the OED, which cites this as the earliest instance of the sense “comprise in a number” (OED 7). It is simpler to suppose that “number” here means “collect” or “count” (OED v 2d, 1). Tetrachordon accosts customers and keeps a tally. So far I have emphasized the similarities between Horace and Milton, but there is one important difference. Horace’s book offers itself to anyone who can pay; Milton’s reserves itself for “good intellects.” Horace’s book heads downtown looking for communia; Milton’s seeks an interpretive community. Tetrachordon (we are given to understand) is a high class pamphlet: not some tart for that cordon of cretins who “in file / Stand spelling fals.” It moves in the most exclusive circles (Cambridge, King Edward) and even boasts expertise in Greek. This is reassuring but it does not remove all the difficulties. If Tetrachordon is as classy as all that, why walk the town? “Streetwalker” had been a derogatory term for a common prostitute since at least the end of the sixteenth century (OED 2). Jessica A. Browner has usefully distinguished the social strata of the world’s oldest profession in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London: “Contemporary brothels, of course, varied in style and character, from magnificent and costly establishments like Holland’s Leaguer in Paris Garden to private houses, where the mistress acted as bawd for her servants. And, of course, many ladies worked the streets and alleys. Prices, naturally, varied accordingly.”29 Robert Ashton gives some prices: In the 1590s Thomas Nashe describes “sixpenny whoredome” as flourishing in the suburbs, though elsewhere in the same passage he gives half-a-crown—more or less—as “the sette price of a strumpet’s soule.” At the other end of the price range, a visit to Holland’s Leaguer in Paris Garden and a dinner with the queen of all strumpets, Bess Broughton, was reported . . . to work out at £20 a head, which presumably did not include the cost of post-prandial entertainment.30

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“Numbring good intellects,” Tetrachordon presents itself as rare and refined, but it works the streets like a sixpenny whore. The problem is not that it has targeted the wrong market. It knows the kind of customer it wants: it wants to draw the devout and deter the profane. But what if it has the opposite effect? What if it deters the devout and draws the profane? Milton had reluctantly addressed this problem in the second edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. In the prefatory address “To the Parlament of England, with the Assembly,” he writes: “What though the brood of Belial, the draffe of men, to whom no liberty is pleasing, but unbridl’d and vagabond lust without pale or partition, will laugh broad perhaps, to see so great a strength of Scripture mustering up in favour, as they suppose, of their debausheries.” (YP 2:225). There is a touch of nervousness in that “What though.” Milton sounds all the more nervous for echoing (and inverting) a biblical question involving “what” and “Belial”: “what concord hath Christ with Belial?” (2 Cor. 6:15). St. Paul’s “what” is curt and clipped. It marks an unbridgeable divide. Milton’s “What though” is defensively preemptive. It reaches accord with Belial even as it makes a show of disowning him. Milton wants very much to distinguish “good intellects” from “the brood of Belial,” but willy nilly “Sonnet 11” threatens to collapse this distinction when Tetrachordon takes a walk on the wild side. Milton could not have been entirely deaf to his own nuances. He knew luxurious cities. Witness the streets of London: “when Night / Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons / Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine” (1.500–502). Do not misunderstand me. I am not claiming that Milton was of Belial’s party. I am not suggesting (even for a moment!) that he patronized prostitutes. I am arguing that “Sonnet 11” makes an unconscious allusion to Horace because Milton feels a secret shame at having pandered (however innocently) to Belial’s brood. In later life Milton would regret having written his divorce pamphlets in English. Had he published them in Latin, “the vulgar” (vulgus) might not have read them.31 I submit that the seeds of this self-reproach already infiltrate “Sonnet 11” when Milton casts Tetrachordon as a streetwalker. The notion of unconscious allusion is clearly difficult. The danger of overreading, of indulging in merely subjective impressions, is acute. But that is no reason to reject the idea. Everything depends on the particular case. Consider the following description of Adam and Eve’s loving embrace:

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half her swelling Breast Naked met his under the flowing Gold Of her loose tresses hid: he in delight Both of her Beauty and submissive Charms Smil’d with superior Love, as Jupiter On Juno smiles, when he impregns the Clouds That shed May Flowers. (4.495–501)

I have long been troubled by “impregns the Clouds.” As Roy Flannagan notes, the image of Jupiter impregnating clouds “may jar some readers.” It jars on me, and my misgivings are not dispelled by the usual scholarly explanations, though something has to be conceded to each of them. Editors usually cite one or more of three sources. I shall briefly look at each in turn, before proposing my own candidate. Hughes and Fowler refer us to an allegorical tradition in which Jupiter was the aether, and Juno the air. Fowler cites Natale Conti’s Mythologiae. Conti does describe the union of Jupiter and Juno in elemental terms, but he offers nothing so daringly literal or visually graphic as “impregns the Clouds”: Ubi enim Iupiter Iunonis amore incaluit, eamque complectitur, omnium pullulant herbarum fructuumque genera. aer enim nisi superiorum corporum calore comoueatur, generare omnino non potest. (2:4)32 [When Jupiter grows hot with love for Juno, and embraces her, all kinds of vegetation and fruit sprout forth. For unless the air is stirred up by the heat of a higher body, it is unable to engender anything.]

Conti says that Jupiter agitates the air, causing it to engender vegetation in the earth. This is pertinent to Milton’s lines, but it is not the same image. Conti’s Jupiter embraces Juno, who is identified with the air, but the air then plays a masculine role in raining on the earth. Many editors cite Vergil’s Georgics as Milton’s source. At first sight, the parallel looks close: tum pater omnipotens fecundis imbribus Aether coniugis in gremium laetae descendit et omnis magnus alit magno commixtus corpore fetus. (2:325–27) [Then Heaven, the Father almighty, comes down in fruitful showers into the lap of his joyous spouse, and his might, with her mighty frame commingling, nurtures all growths.]33

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Fowler cites only these lines (and then only in English), and so gives the impression that Vergil is describing the union of Jupiter and Juno. Vergil is indeed describing a primal coupling, but the gods engaged in it are Aether and Earth, not Jupiter and Juno. This is clear from the preceding two lines: ver adeo frondi nemorum, ver utile silvis; vere tument terrae et genitalia semina poscunt. tum pater omnipotens fecundis imbribus Aether . . . [Spring it is that aids the woods and the forest leafage; in spring the soil swells and calls for life-giving seed. Then Heaven, the Father almighty, comes down in fruitful showers.]

Aether’s “joyous spouse” is the earth, not the air. Vergil does speak of rain, which implies clouds, but the rain is Aether’s own “life-giving seed” (“genitalia semina”). As in Conti, the air plays a masculine role. Juno is not even mentioned. The third oft-cited source for Milton’s simile is Iliad 14, where Hera seduces Zeus on Mount Ida. Homer’s lines do lie behind Milton’s, but they only make “impregns the Clouds” all the more troubling. Homer, like Milton, mentions a cloud—but he has a very different use for it: the son of Kronos caught his wife in his arms. There underneath them the divine earth broke into young, fresh grass, and into dewy clover, crocus and hyacinth so thick and soft it held the hard ground deep away from them. There they lay down together and drew about them a golden wonderful cloud, and from it the glimmering dew descended.34 (14:346–51)

Zeus makes love within the cloud, not to it. He summons the cloud for one reason only: to placate Hera, who is reluctant to have sex in a public place (“here on the peaks of Ida, everything can be seen”). Zeus reassures her that he can summon a cloud so thick that “not even Helios can look at us through it” (342). Neither Zeus nor Hera shows any sexual interest in the cloud. Hera will not put out without it, but she certainly would not put up with it. She wants Zeus all to herself, and he (for once) wants only her. Milton’s Jupiter is more easily diverted. He is not such a cad as to ignore Juno. It is on Juno, not the clouds, that he bestows his precious “smiles.” But he “impregns the Clouds.” This surely is a bizarre (even a kinky) threesome—yet critics have pretended that there is nothing odd about it. Martindale writes as if Milton’s lines were straightforwardly erotic: “There is a considerable

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erotic charge: ‘smiles’ is powerful in its suggestive reticence . . . while ‘impregns’ is even more specific than anything in the classical exemplars” (89). From this one might suppose that Milton made no distinction between Juno and the clouds, but his syntax clearly does distinguish them: “as Jupiter / On Juno smiles, when he impregns the Clouds.” The “suggestive reticence” that Martindale rightly attributes to Jupiter’s “smiles” is all the more suggestive when one considers that Jupiter is reticent where he ought to be active, and active where he ought to be reticent. My next move will probably be no surprise. Conti, Vergil, and Homer all fail to deliver the specific image of coitus with a cloud. Yet there is a mythical precedent. Ixion, the would-be seducer of Juno, fathered the centaurs on a cloud that Jupiter put in Juno’s place. In Milton it is Jupiter himself who impregnates clouds, but the phrase “impregns the Clouds,” coming right after the name “Juno,” strongly suggests Ixion. Before I say anything else, let me admit the obvious. A reference to Ixion at this moment is exactly what is not wanted. Adam and Eve’s kiss is one of their most tender moments. Even Satan turns aside for envy. The intrusion of Ixion would make this scene of domestic bliss anything but enviable. One can see why editors prefer to invoke Conti. Ixion raises all kinds of problems. So why dredge him up? An allusion to Ixion might seem far-fetched. But it is from Milton that I have fetched it. Milton in Tetrachordon explicitly compares Eve to Ixion’s cloud when he considers God’s motives for creating the first woman. He insists that God’s intentions were good. To suppose otherwise would be blasphemous: Nay such an unbounteous giver we should make him, as in the fables Jupiter was to Ixion, giving him a cloud instead of Juno, giving him a monstrous issue by her, the breed of Centaures a neglected and unlov’d race, the fruits of a delusive mariage, and lastly giving him her with a damnation to that wheele in hell, from a life thrown into the midst of temptations and disorders.35

Milton’s whole point in this passage is to deny that Eve was a cloud-Juno, but there is a note of doubt amid the earnest protestations. Milton writes about Adam and Eve as if the Fall had never happened. It is especially odd that he should write the words “temptations,” “damnation” and “fruits” as if they applied only to Ixion and had no relevance for Adam and the wife God gave him. Milton wanted very much to see Eve as a true Juno, goddess of marriage. The Juno simile in Paradise Lost both affirms and complicates this wish. On the one hand, it affirms

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Adam and Eve’s happiness. Theirs is no “delusive mariage.” Eve is a true Juno. Even if we see her as a cloud-Juno, we can still reassure ourselves that this cloud-Juno conceives May flowers, not centaurs. On the other hand, “impregns the Clouds” sows seeds of doubt: the barest hint that Eve is not what she seems. For all his protestations to the contrary, Milton cannot quite shake the suspicion that maybe God did give Adam “a cloud instead of Juno.” At this point a skeptical reader will want to object that there is a crucial difference between “impregns the Clouds” and the passage I have quoted from Tetrachordon. The prose passage includes Ixion’s name. The Paradise Lost lines do not. True, but there are other places where Milton alludes to Ixion without naming him. In Paradise Regained Jesus remarks that whoever seeks Wisdom from the pagan philosophers either “finds her not, or by delusion / Far worse, her false resemblance only meets, / An empty cloud” (4:319–21). Milton also alludes to Ixion in “The Passion.” This unfinished poem falters and dies when Milton likens himself to one who has “got a race of mourners on som pregnant cloud.” In both of these cases editors readily supply the name Ixion in their footnotes. But Ixion is conspicuous by his absence from most editors’ notes to Paradise Lost 4.500. Setting aside my Penguin edition, the only other editor to have mentioned Ixion in this connection is Richard Bentley. Bentley made the connection scoffingly, confident in his belief that so incongruous a simile must be an interpolation, foisted on Milton by that scoundrel, “our Editor”: “Our busy Editor could not leave a thing quiet,” Bentley snarls, he could not refrain from his Juppiter and Juno; and from mixing confess’d Fable with what is at least deliver’d as Truth. But to pardon him this; yet who can pardon what follows; Juppiter from a Person chang’d into the Element, Pater Aether impregning the Clouds? So Adam smil’d upon Eve, no otherwise than as the Aether smiles upon a Cloud. Is not this Ixion’s Deception, a Cloud instead of Juno? (124).

Bentley can be an incorrigible crank, but this note is a triumph. Bentley is as learned as Conti and Fowler. He knows about Pater Aether. But he also knows better than to be deceived by mists of scholarly obfuscation. Penetrated by Bentley, Milton’s simile delivers. Bentley’s last five words (“a Cloud instead of Juno?”) deliver Milton’s exact words in Tetrachordon (“giving him a cloud instead of Juno”) though Milton chose not to risk a rhetorical question.

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I cannot leave “impregns the Clouds” without mentioning William Kerrigan’s splendid essay “Milton’s Kisses.” I have intimated that Milton’s cloud simile emerges from anxiety about Eve. Kerrigan independently connects “impregns the Clouds” with Ixion, but he does so in a spirit of joyful exuberance. Kerrigan names Ixion in a footnote. His point is not to implicate Eve, but to celebrate Milton, whose cloud simile brings to triumphant birth a metaphor that he had failed to bring forth in several earlier poems: The mythological fancy here is that clouds are pregnant air, or, recalling from “L’Allegro” the genealogy of Mirth, “debonair.” It would appear that Milton had been trying, Ixion-like, to produce the image in his early verse. “The Passion,” that fragment above his years, breaks off with the false surmise that the poet’s loud sorrows have “got a race of mourners on a pregnant cloud.”36

Citing other Miltonic precedents (“Elegia Quinta,” “Sonnet 5,” and “L’Allegro”) Kerrigan concludes: “Finally, in the kiss of Paradise Lost, Milton delivers the metaphor in its full elated glory” (134). Kerrigan’s elation is contagious and it is tempting to concede him the whole case. I do readily concede that Kerrigan is truthful to one aspect of Milton’s simile. But we oversimplify if we conclude that “impregns the Clouds” transcends ominousness by the simple expedient of expressing it. The real issue is not Milton’s struggle (however “Ixion-like”) to deliver a metaphor, but the implications that his metaphor has once he has delivered it. That said, Kerrigan offers a most valuable insight when he describes Adam and Eve’s kiss as “the one and only example” in seventeenth-century poetry of “the kiss that impregnates” (127). The point is not, of course, that Adam literally impregnates Eve by kissing her, but that “the smiles and kisses glance ahead” to the consummation at the end of book 4 (129). For Kerrigan, there is nothing sinister, nothing delusive, about Eve’s association with “Clouds.” Eve, feeling Adam’s lips pressing on hers, experiences the “dissolution” of “ego boundaries” described by psychoanalysts. Kerrigan pertinently reminds us that when we kiss “we really do experience some melting of ego boundaries and a sense of merger with another person” (128). One might then ask why Adam does not also dissolve in cloudy raptures. Kerrigan anticipates this objection and turns it into a delicate tribute to Eve. “Her mind,” he writes, “produces a perfect image of carnal pleasure being refined in the direction of heavenly love: kisses aspire toward heaven in Eve’s imagination; sexual pleasure so

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conceived is an aspect of animate materialism” (129). Most intriguingly, Kerrigan likens Adam’s impregnating kiss to God’s Spirit that “with mighty wings outspread / Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss / And madst it pregnant” (1.20–22). Kerrigan: “And so the omnific Word of the Old Testament Jupiter impregnated the Juno of the vast abyss” (128). This is excellent criticism. Kerrigan’s kisses go a long way toward allaying the misgivings provoked by “impregns the Clouds.” They do not go all the way. The passage from Tetrachordon (not mentioned by Kerrigan) is still a problem, and Ixion also refuses to dissolve into raptures. But more than any critic before him Kerrigan opens truly positive possibilities for Milton’s simile. He achieves this, however, not by retreating from Ixion, but by embracing his relevance. It is an approach that too few other critics have shared. I shall conclude with a jarring allusion that is, I believe, entirely deliberate. I have kept it until the end partly because it addresses all of the problems we have been considering, and partly because I think it the most beautiful of all Milton’s allusions. I am referring to Eve’s love lyric: Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, With charm of earliest Birds; pleasant the Sun When first on this delightful Land he spreads His orient Beams, on herb, tree, fruit, and flour, Glistring with dew; fragrant the fertil earth After soft showers; and sweet the coming on Of grateful Eevning mild, then silent Night With this her solemn Bird and this fair Moon, And these the Gemms of Heav’n, her starrie train: But neither breath of Morn when she ascends With charm of earliest Birds, nor rising Sun On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, floure, Glistring with dew, nor fragrance after showers, Nor grateful Evening mild, nor silent Night With this her solemn Bird, nor walk by Moon, Or glittering Starr-light without thee is sweet. (4.641–56)

Numerous critics have likened this sixteen-line speech to a sonnet. Barbara Lewalski has argued that it alludes to William Drummond’s sonnet “The Sunne is faire when he with crimson Crowne.” There are resemblances, even though Drummond’s volta, as Lewalski admits, “comes in the final couplet.”37 Drummond’s sonnet does not share the chief structural pattern of Eve’s love lyric. It is an enumeratio, but it not a double enumeratio,

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repeated with negatives. Yet there is a precedent, and a famous one: Hector’s farewell to Andromache in the Iliad. The two declarations of love could not be more different so far as content is concerned. Eve grounds her love lyric on the delights of Paradise; Hector grounds his on his grim knowledge that Troy will fall. And yet the parallels are there. I shall first cite the transliterated Greek, then Lattimore’s translation: eu gar egˆo tode oida kata phrena kai kata thumon: essetai eˆ mar hot’ an pot’ olˆolˆei Ilios hirˆe kai Priamos kai laos eummeliˆ ¨ o Priamoio. all’ ou moi Trˆooˆ n tosson melei algos opissˆo, out’ autˆes Hekabˆes oute Priamoio anaktos oute kasignˆetˆon, hoi ken polees te kai esthloi en koniˆeisi pesoien hup’ andrasi dusmeneessin, hosson seu, hote ken tis Achaiˆon chalkochitˆonˆon dakruoessan agˆetai eleutheron eˆ mar apouras: kai ken en Argei eousa pros allˆes histon huphainois, kai ken hudˆor phoreois Messˆe¨ıdos eˆ Hupereiˆes poll’ aekazomenˆe, kraterˆe d’ epikeiset’ anankˆe.38 (6:447–58) [For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it: there will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish, and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear. But it is not so much the pain to come of the Trojans that troubles me, not even of Priam the king nor Hekabe, not the thought of my brothers who in their number and valour shall drop in the dust under the hands of men who hate them, as troubles me the thought of you, when some bronze-armoured Achaian leads you off, taking away your day of liberty, in tears; and in Argos you must work at the loom of another, And carry water from the spring Messeis or Hypereia, all unwilling, but strong will be the necessity upon you.]

It is rhetoric that draws the two passages together. Eve and Hector both list the things that are dear to them, then repeat the list, in the same order, with a negative (“nor . . . nor,” out’ . . . oute) before each item. Eve’s “But neither,” coming between her two lists, has reminded Miltonists of the volta in a Petrarchan sonnet, but its true model is Homer’s all’ ou, which is similarly placed between Hector’s positive and negative lists. Both speeches are tender confessions of love, but neither immediately declares itself to be so. Eve and Hector seem to be talking about something other than Adam and Andromache while they list the things they hold dear. In both cases, it is the unexpected appearance of the second

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person pronoun (held back until the end of the repetitions) that makes everything fall into place as a declaration of love. Eve’s “without thee” (656) corresponds to Hector’s hosson seu (454). At this pivotal moment the Greek is more concise than any English translation. The words literally mean “as ( ) of you.” The reader or auditor supplies melei moi (Lattimore’s “troubles me”) and some such noun as algos, “grief.”39 Hosson seu is more poignant for being sudden and succinct. Milton, alert to Homer’s economy of phrasing, achieves a similar effect in “without thee is sweet.” Hector and Eve have transformed their speeches into glorious love lyrics even before we have had time to register that that is what they have done. The result is a sudden startling of consciousness. We (and we may suppose Adam and Andromache) experience that slight, electrifying tremor now known as a “double take” (here doubly “taking” because Hector and Eve really have said it all twice). The rhetorical parallel is close, but is it enough to trigger an allusion? Hector’s lines do satisfy one of Martindale’s requirements for admission into the canon of allusions. “Allusion,” writes Martindale, “should be to something which a properly informed reader has a reasonable chance of recalling” (1). Hector’s speech was well known. It had been celebrated since ancient times. Two of Hector’s lines had famously been quoted from memory on one of history’s most momentous occasions. When temple and tower went to the ground at Carthage in 146 BC, the great Roman conqueror, Publius Scipio Aemilianus (soon to be Africanus) gazed upon the once proud city sinking in the flames and quoted Iliad 6:448– 49. Appian recounts the event: eyther of purpose, or by chaunce, this worde fel from him. The day shall come when mighty Troy muste fall, And Priamm and his warlike nation all.40

Polybius, Scipio’s friend and sometime schoolmaster, stood beside his old pupil as he quoted the lines. When Polybius asked Scipio why he had quoted Homer, Scipio confessed that he had done so with a foreboding reference to Rome’s own inevitable fate. Hector’s speech echoes down the centuries because it has universal significance: for Troy, Carthage, Rome—and Paradise. Despite this illustrious history, someone might still object that I am imagining an allusion. Even the story about Scipio might be turned against me. Modern editions of Appian and Homer inform us that Scipio was quoting Iliad 6:448– 49; but these two lines are also found elsewhere in the Iliad. The first part of Hector’s

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speech—the list without negatives (6:447– 49)—is an oral formula repeated verbatim from Iliad 4:163–66. It is possible (though unlikely) that Scipio was thinking not of Hector’s celebrated speech, but of the earlier occurrence in book 4. Clearly, the presence in Homer of oral formulae complicates any argument about allusion. But while Hector’s speech contains formulaic expressions, these are forged into something wholly new when Hector bids farewell to Andromache. The pattern I have described— a double enumeratio, repeated with negatives, linked with a “but,” and ending with a sudden direct address in the second person—is not a commonplace. It is not one of the textbook rhetorical figures. Critics have had trouble naming it. Edward Le Comte calls Eve’s lines “a masterly example of the rhetorical device known as ‘the recapitulator,’ or the cancrizone.”41 The former term comes from Puttenham, but it describes something different from the pattern we have seen in Homer and Milton. The cancrizone (“moving backward like a crab”) is a figure that repeats itself in reverse. There is the barest trace of this figure in the epanadiplosis “Sweet is . . . is sweet” (641–56), but the intervening repetitions are not in reverse. I submit that Eve’s lyric is sufficiently specific in its formal patterning to make an allusion to Hector’s speech. The parting of Hector and Andromache was (and still is) the most famous conversation between a husband and wife in all epic poetry. It would be surprising if Milton did not have a use for it when marriage plays such a prominent part in his own epic. Early biographers report that Milton could repeat Homer almost “without Book.”42 Hector’s lines would have been as familiar to Milton as Eve’s are to us. Here, as with any putative allusion, the question to ask is “what does it add?” Eve’s Homeric echo surprises the reader who catches it, because it introduces a note of melancholy into a moment of intense joy. Here I cannot refrain from a personal anecdote. I first argued for Eve’s Homeric allusion in a lecture I gave at the Fifth International Milton Symposium in 1995. During the question period a young woman in the audience, in an obvious state of distress, announced that Eve’s love lyric was the poem that she had chosen to have read on her wedding day, and now I had gone and ruined it, so what was I going to do? She need not have worried. The note of melancholy makes Eve’s joy all the more present and real. Like all great allusions, this one is built out of pertinent unlikeness as well as pertinent likeness. Both the likeness and the unlikeness relate to time. Eve conversing with Adam forgets all time. Hector conversing with Andromache feels time pressing upon him. This difference is reflected in the

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rhetoric. Hector’s repetitions are simple and paratactic. Milton borrows this pattern, but places it in a hypotactic frame. Eve’s speech is contained by an epanadiplosis. It traces a cyclical orbit from “Sweet” to “sweet.” Eve imagines the possibility of loss, but “without thee” turns out to be a negation that negates nothing. (How different are these same words when they recur in Adam’s mournful cry “How can I live without thee . . . To live again in these wilde Woods forlorn?”) With perfect timing, Eve ends her lyric in the very moment that she offers it to Adam as a gift of love: “without thee is sweet.” Hector’s hosson seu is a beautiful moment—one that radiates tender warmth to his whole speech—but it is powerless to stop the relentless flow of further miseries: working at another’s loom, carrying water, shedding tears. Eve’s allusion evokes, in order to suspend, the linear flow that Hector’s speech both describes and enacts. Jarring allusions are of value to Milton criticism because they open the poems up. Editors and critics have tended to close things down by privileging allusions that are safe. This is a pity because Milton’s poetry draws much of its power from allusions that are unsafe. These unsafe allusions are often more, not less, obvious and accessible than their tame alternatives. Many of the canonized allusions (canonized because they have been passed down from one editor to another) seem straightforward when we encounter them in an explanatory note, but incongruities start to appear when we look more closely. When editors declare that “Doing or suffering” has no connection with Livy, or when they inform us that “impregns the Clouds” is a meteorological commonplace, they are doing Milton a disservice. Porter points in the right direction when he argues that “the true allusion . . . must contain an element of contrast as well as comparison.” I too think that the best allusions are created out of contrast as well as comparison. But Porter cheapens his own insight by recognizing only one kind of contrast, that of “verbal caricature or parody” (33). Such allusions do occur in Milton, but there are also contrasts of a different kind. Milton’s very best allusions evoke not mockery, but wonder and poignant sorrow mixed with a bittersweet joy. The allusion to Hector’s speech is an allusion of this kind.

NOTES 1. Allusion has been a concern of Milton’s editors since the publication of Patrick Hume’s Annotations on Milton’s “Paradise Lost” (1695). In addition to works by Martindale, Porter and Walker (see notes 4, 5 and 13), valuable studies of Milton’s literary allusions include the following: Douglas Bush, “Ironic

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and Ambiguous Allusion in Paradise Lost,” Journal of English Germanic Philology 60 (1961): 631–40, Francis C. Blessington, “Paradise Lost” and the Classical Epic (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), Mario Di Cesare, “Paradise Lost and the Epic Tradition,” Milton Studies 1 (1969): 31–50, and Claes Schaar, The Full Voic’d Quire Below: Vertical Context Systems in “Paradise Lost” (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1982). 2. Davis P. Harding, The Club of Hercules: Studies in the Classical Background of “Paradise Lost” (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), 1. 3. John Carey and Alastair Fowler, eds., The Poems of John Milton (London: Longmans, 1968), 11. 4. Charles Martindale, John Milton and the Transformation of Ancient Epic (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1986), 1. 5. William M. Porter, Reading the Classics and “Paradise Lost” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 9. 6. Paradise Lost 1.591. All citations of Milton’s poetry are from The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). 7. This instance is complicated by the fact that it compresses two allusions. “How changed” translates quantum mutatus, but “how fall’n” points to Isaiah 14:12 (“how art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer son of the morning!”). Martindale argues that the “Vergilian echo, if it is that” is subsidiary to the “more important” biblical one. I have elsewhere argued that the two allusions work together to underscore the devils’ loss of their former names. See John Leonard, Naming in Paradise: Milton and the Language of Adam and Eve (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 77–79. 8. Thomas Newton, ed., Paradise Lost . . . A New Edition, With Notes of Various Authors, 2 vols. (London, 1749), 2:247 (note to 10.441). 9. Henry John Todd, ed., The Poetical Works of John Milton: With Notes of Various Authors, 6 vols. (London, 1801), 3:273 (note to X 441). 10. Godfrey of Bulloigne: a critical edition of Edward Fairfax’s translation of Tasso’s “Gerusalemme Liberata,” together with Fairfax’s Original Poems, ed. Kathleen M. Lea and T. M. Gang (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981). All citations of Fairfax’s Tasso are from this edition. 11. John Leonard, “ ‘Good Things’: A Reply to William Kerrigan,” Milton Quarterly 30 (October 1996): 117–27 (see esp. 119–20). 12. John P. Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 78. 13. Julia M. Walker, “The Poetics of Antitext and the Politics of Milton’s Allusions,” Studies in English Literature 37 (Winter 1997): 151–71 (162). 14. John Leonard, “ ‘Thus They Relate, Erring’: Milton’s Inaccurate Allusions,” Milton Studies 38 (2000): 96–121 (113–17). 15. Stella P. Revard, “Milton and Myth,” in Re-assembling Truth: Twentyfirst Century Milton, ed. Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2003), 23– 47 (see p. 30). 16. Paradise Lost 2.163, 169, 186, 106. 17. John Carey and Alastair Fowler, eds., The Poems of John Milton (London: Longmans, 1968), 471 (note to 1.158). 18. Fowler is more generous to Satan in his 1998 edition. He now hears a double allusion (to Livy as well as Horace) and acknowledges that “Satan does not lack fortitude” (note to 1.158). 19. Empson makes his general point about irony in his essay on “Double Plots.” See Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto and Windus, 1935), 56.

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He discusses Satan’s soliloquy in all three of his major works on Milton. See Some Versions, 168, The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto and Windus, 1951), 103, and Milton’s God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), 68. 20. Claudian, De Raptu Proserpinae, in Claudian, ed. and trans. Maurice Platnauer, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1922 repr. 1972), 2:340. 21. Ludwig Preller, Griechische Mythologie, 2 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1964 –67), 1:804. I owe this reference to Christopher Brown. 22. Empson’s reading also draws some support from several suggestive puns buried in Satan’s soliloquy. I examine these in “Self-Contradicting Puns in Paradise Lost,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 393– 410. 23. Sir Walter Raleigh, Milton (London: Edward Arnold, 1900), 137–38. 24. Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1916, rpt. 1984), 2:266–67. 25. Joseph Hall, Vergidemiarum 5.2.80, in The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. A. Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1949), 81. 26. J. H. Finley, “Milton and Horace,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 48 (1937): 29–73 (see p. 71). 27. Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, ed. and trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (London: Heinemann, 1955), 389. 28. Roland Mayer, ed., Horace: Epistles Book I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 269. 29. Jessica A. Browner, “Wrong Side of the River: London’s Disreputable South Bank in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century,” Essays in History 36 (1994): 57, http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/journals/EH/EH36/browner1.html, [12 February 2003]. 30. Robert Ashton, “Popular Entertainment and Social Control in Later Elizabethan and Early Stuart London,” The London Journal 9, no. 1 (Summer 1983): 3–20 (see p. 14). Ashton is citing Thomas Nashe, Christs Teares Over Jerusalem (1593), 77. 31. Letter to Leo Van Aizema (5 February 1655), in CM, 12:73. Milton had expressed a similar regret in Defensio Secunda (1654). Critics often assume that both expressions of regret were provoked by the approbation of vulgar supporters. This might be true of the letter to Van Aizema, but the case is different in Defensio Secunda. There the term vernas lectores (“vernacular readers”) refers to hostile detractors, not overzealous supporters. See CM, 8:114 –115: “vellem hoc tantum, sermone vernaculo me non scripsisse; non enim in vernas lectores incidissem; quibus solemne est sua bona ignorare, aliorum mala irridere” [“I could wish only that I had not written in the vernacular tongue; for I had not fallen upon vernacular readers, with whom it is usual to be unconscious of their own good fortune, and to ridicule the misfortune of others”]. 32. Natalis Comes, Mythologiae, sive explicationis fabularum (Venice, 1567), 44. 33. Virgil, ed. and trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1916, rpt., 1978), 1:138–39. 34. The Iliad of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951). All English quotations of Homer are from this translation. 35. Yale Prose, 2:597–98. John Rumrich cites this passage, and makes many valuable comments about Milton’s use of the Ixion myth, in Matter of Glory: a New Preface to “Paradise Lost” (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 112–16. Obviously I do not agree with Rumrich when he states that “the

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myth of Ixion does not appear in Paradise Lost to characterize the marriage of Adam and Eve” (114). Rumrich does not cite “impregns the Clouds.” 36. William Kerrigan, “Milton’s Kisses,” in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 117–35 (134). 37. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, “Paradise Lost” and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 188. 38. The Greek is transliterated from Homeri Opera, 5 vols., ed. David B. Monro and Thomas W. Allen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920). 39. The two most famous English translations both try to capture some of the terseness of the original. Chapman adds an adjective and a noun but not a verb: “As thy sad state” (6.492). Pope boldly goes one better and translates hosson seu literally, but then he spoils the effect by adding a proper name and an exclamation mark: “As thine, Andromache!” 40. Appian, Roman History 7.19.132. I have cited the English translation by “W. B.,” printed by Ralph Newberie and Henry Bynniman (London, 1578), 246. 41. Edward Le Comte, Milton and Sex (London: Macmillan, 1978), 5. 42. John Toland writes: “He has incontestably exceeded the fecundity of Homer, whose two Poems he could almost repeat without book.” See also Jonathan Richardson: “He had Read and Studied all the Greatest Poets, and had made All his Own: Homer he could Almost repeat without Book.” Richardson later adds that Milton had “a most Intimate Knowledge of All the Poets worthy his Notice, Ancient or Modern: Chiefly the Best, and above All Homer.” See The Early Lives of Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (London: Constable, 1931), 179, 211, 290.

Milton and the Index Nigel Smith

THIS ESSAY POINTS TO NEW WAYS IN WHICH BOTH MILTON, HIS relationship with Counter-Reformation (and counter-CounterReformation) polemic, the history of skepticism, and that of censorship, may be understood. The first section deals with the career and writings of Paolo Sarpi, and Milton’s knowledge of and reference to them. It locates Sarpi and Milton’s accounts of censorship in the context of recent work on the history of the Index of Prohibited Books and the machinery of book suppression and expurgation that came with it. The second section is concerned with the broader ramifications of Milton’s encounter with Sarpi, with other religions and cultures, and how this had a short and long-term impact on his poetics.

I For a year and two months, starting in the spring of 1617, a series of small diplomatic bags began to arrive in London. They had traveled overland and by sea from Venice, and were among the papers of James I’s ambassador to the Serene Republic, Sir Henry Wotton. Nathaniel Brent had traveled to Venice on the order of the archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, specifically to arrange the transcription of a manuscript, and its dispatch in this way in weekly installments over fourteen months. The bags were labeled canzoni, as if they contained the latest Italian madrigals.1 In reality the bags contained the disassembled parts of the most dangerous critique of papal power to emerge from within the Catholic world in the early modern period: “four pounds of dynamite” as a modern commentator calls it. This was Paolo Sarpi’s Istoria del Concilio Tridentino published in printed form for the first time in England in 1619, and one year later in an English translation by Nathaniel Brent, Warden of Merton Col101

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lege, Oxford, later part of Charles I’s judiciary, and the man who would eventually license Milton’s 1645 Poems. Sarpi’s devastating critique of the abuses of ecclesiastical power and his defense of Venice’s right to govern its church was joy to the ear of any Protestant power. Sarpi had become famous for his fierce defense of Venetian independence in the first decade of the seventeenthcentury (he had been wounded in 1607 by assassins allegedly sent by papal agents), but the religious politics of peninsular Italy continued in a state of high tension in the second decade.2 Even in 1618, Venice had quelled a coup d’etat from the Spanish ambassador, designed to take Venice for Spain and universal Catholicism. Wotton wasted no time in making sure that his royal master and his nation capitalized on Sarpi’s powerful antipapal ammunition, produced in an era when Venice herself had seriously considered becoming a Protestant state. As the text was edited, so it was substantially altered by Marcantonio De Dominis (1560–1624), Sarpi’s fellow Venetian and critic of papal power, an Italian cleric who had, for the time being, converted to Protestantism and the Church of England.3 The story of the smuggling of the Istoria in fragments was not known until after Sarpi’s death in 1623, after which Brent leaked details of his adventure and Sarpi’s authorship to his Oxford circle.4 But whatever the circumstances of its production, the impact of the Istoria in seventeenth-century Europe, let alone England, was massive: it rapidly became a cornerstone of the anticlerical literature that would eventually power the Enlightenment and the break-up of ancien r´egimes toward the end of the eighteenth century.5 In more recent historiography, a controversial picture of Sarpi as even an atheist, or at least proto-atheist, has emerged.6 He celebrated Mass in public until his death in 1623, but, it is alleged, his unpublished treatises show that he had no place for God in his picture of the universe, and rejected any supernatural cause for earthly events. The human sense of God, he claimed, springs from ignorance and incapacity; the wise can rise above these fears and live a moral life without fear of God or the afterlife.7 Such views enabled Sarpi to develop an entirely original account of (Venetian) republicanism, based on human self-interest.8 Sarpi’s startling account of human nature, which was set out in the unpublished Pensieri, is hard to glimpse in the Istoria, although these views do show through in the History of the Inquisition (1626), which was originally written only as private advice for the doge and the Council of Ten:

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There be some in the World who doe worke for the love of honesty, the great number of the rest is divided into two sorts. The one sort are they who doe well for feare of spirituall punishments, and the other for feare of temporall punishments. When spirituall feare is taken away, their obedience is lost who thinke that they shall lye concealed, and shall through favour and other meanes, hinder and eschew the punishment: And those also which doe make no account of it, which both put together does make a great number.9

In the last decade of his life, Sarpi’s ideas and works were known in the circle of Francis Bacon through his secretary Fulgenzio Micanzio. Significant in this group was his secretary, Thomas Hobbes. Sarpi’s view of the civil function of religion, it is now alleged, played a key role in the formation of the Erastian and “Christian Atheist” view of religion in Leviathan. Sarpi himself may have been influenced by early seventeenth-century English analyses of comparative religion emanating from the Bacon circle.10 Sarpi was widely read in England both before and after 1640: a key text in understanding the politics of religion in western Europe.11 One highly authoritative reader was John Selden.12 The most influential Parliamentarian propagandist of the early 1640s, Henry Parker, whom Milton echoed extensively in his earlier 1640s writings, followed Sarpi’s attack on autonomous ecclesiastical power closely, notably in his A Discourse Concerning Puritans (1641). In it, he attacked Presbyterianism as well as episcopacy.13 The only aspect of Sarpi’s Istoria that does not survive Protestant veneration is the English of Brent’s translation, which Samuel Johnson considered a serious impediment to the intelligibility of the work.14 Milton’s interest in Sarpi, whom he read most extensively in the second half of 1643, is well documented, and this is not surprising given his interest in Italian intellectual and literary life, and his personal connection with figures like Wotton, who were at the center of Anglo-Venetian relations.15 In Of Reformation, Milton ranked Sarpi alongside Chaucer as an authority on church history.16 Yet despite the fact that Milton made more references to Sarpi’s Istoria in the Commonplace Book than to any other text of recent European history, with the exception of Bernard de Girard, Seigneur du Haillan’s L’Histoire de France (first ed., 1576) and Jacques de Thou’s Historia Sui Temporis (1620, 1626), scarcely any attention has been made to this clutch of allusions and the relationships that they documented.17 Sarpi provided Milton with a way of understanding a structural fea-

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ture of the English state: a weak king would lead to exploitation by bishops, who would intrude papal power and steal the kingdom away. Thus was England, its French possessions and the crown itself, lost to Rome in the reign of King John.18 In contemporary Europe, the equivalent specter was evident in the mutual reinforcing of the papacy and king of Spain, which many feared would lead to universal monarchy.19 Sarpi’s Istoria is referred to thirteen times in Milton’s Commonplace Book. Until recently, there has seemed no reason to doubt Ruth Mohl’s judgment that Milton used Sarpi’s Italian original, and derived from it a series of observations concerned with the following matters: arguments for and against the marriage of the clergy; marriage between Queen Mary and Philip II as a way of reducing England to papal domination; clerical profit from divorce; the secrecy surrounding papal decisions; the history of book censorship within the church; the Pope’s legal authority for granting indulgences; the matter of the loyalty of Protestant subjects to Catholic kings; and the definition of professed faith as rebellion by tyrannical rulers.20 The status of indulgences is repeated in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, where there are further references to papal support for secret marriages.21 That Milton added these references to the second, revised edition of the treatise, published in early 1644, suggests that he was reading Sarpi’s Istoria most intensively in the late summer and fall of 1643, and adding the references to the Commonplace Book at that time. Earlier echoes, hitherto unnoticed by the Yale University Press Complete Prose Works editors, suggest that Sarpi’s The History of the Inquisition may have exerted an equally powerful pull at an earlier stage.22 In Milton’s writings from 1645 onward, Sarpi surfaces again as an authority on Romish practices: once in Tetrachordon (1645) on the hostility of the Council of Trent to delegates who argued any departure from church tradition, and once again in Eikonoklastes (1650) on the observation that weak princes resulted in “vigorous and potent” and hence destructive bishops, and once more on the matter of whether councils are superior to popes, and hence whether parliaments are superior to kings.23 Standing alone in the brief period of the recalled Rump Parliament is a sole quotation from the Istoria in The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (August, 1659) concerned with the fact that even the Council of Trent decided to condemn as simony the taking of fees for christening, marriages, and burials.24 But most of all, Sarpi is important to Milton for the extended section in book 6 of Sarpi’s Istoria that deals with censorship, and

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in particular the matter of the Index of Prohibited Books, introduced for the first time in any extensive and policed sense in 1559. There are four important places of reference in Areopagitica (1644), the earliest of which is extensive and draws heavily on Sarpi’s account of book censorship in the history of the church, and three passages in Sarpi’s History of the Inquisition (1626; trans. Robert Gentilis, 1639) that were highly suggestive for Milton’s development of his imagery.25 The first is, according to Sirluck, a source additional to Ovid for the imagery of armed men springing from the dragon’s teeth, used to describe the “vigorously productive” nature of books. The second is the longer history of licensing, censorship and book suppression in the church, ending in the “new Purgatory” of an Index of Prohibited Books, vividly populated by the bobbing heads of licensing monks, who themselves correspond to clerics recorded in dialogue in Sarpi’s Istoria. As we shall see later, the absent detail from Milton’s picture of the piazza was the books burning in the brazier next to the friars. The third concerns the reading of evil books, and the fourth the impractical strictness of the Council of Trent in respect of the impossibility of preventing improper books produced in a foreign country from entering a nation state. Sarpi’s section on the history of censorship in book 6 of his Istoria denies any prohibition on reading in the early church except that which was self-imposed by pious men. While ecclesiastical councils might dis-recommend books, the banning and burning of books, says Sarpi, was left to emperors and the popes. But these were in small numbers until the “present age.” A confusion of practice prevailed (since both doctrines, movements, and individuals were condemned) until, for the sake of clarity, Philip II of Spain encouraged the establishment of the Index of Prohibited Books, which went as far as to deprive men of the ability to understand the forces that were usurping their liberties. This is what enrages Sarpi and is the insight at the heart of his critique. While some books were banned that had been read and sanctioned by the popes for the previous three hundred years, the Index condemned the books by which secular authorities defended themselves from papal usurpation: “a better mystery was never found, then to use religion to make men insensible.”26 In so far as Sarpi’s text records the discussions at Trent, it equivocates. Thus, in the first instance, the sentiments of the speakers in the council are often in direct contradiction to the argument of Areopagitica. Becatelli, the archbishop of Ragusa,

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thinks that there are in any case too many books in existence, especially since the beginning of printing, and that it is better to “forbid a thousand books without cause, then to permit one that deserved prohibition.” Giving any reason for suppression is also dangerous, since it will lead to challenges from those being governed, and hence harm both the credit of the Index and the authority of the legislator. Yet, in a rather Areopagitica-like way, other speakers at the council in Sarpi’s account undercut the force of the Index, noting that it harmed the reputation of the Roman church in Protestant Europe, and that the Inquisition was so strict its rules were unenforceable. But then again, completely opposite to Areopagitica is the idea that the number of books is limited: the council should arrange for the remaining books to be censored, and for the findings of the censors to be communicated to the authors by committees. Those authors who were still alive and who had not condemned themselves by leaving the church should be summoned before the council to hear how their books would be banned, corrected, or expurgated. The council debated whether to summon Protestant authors in order that they hear the arguments as to why their books were placed in the Index, or whether to avoid this proposal on the grounds that it was the Catholic reader who mattered. The church was thus the physician of each believer, recommending that he consume only the appropriate, healthy foods: a book might be good in itself but harmful to particular people (with “sick minds”) at a specific time.27 Sarpi’s The History of the Inquisition, originally written for the sole use of the Venetian government, is a commentary on the articles of its 1551 concord with Pope Julius III. The twentyninth article limited the power of the Inquisition to prohibit books over and above Venetian secular authority. The opening of Sarpi’s commentary here acknowledges one Areopagitican paradox, and an alarm to Erastians: very few copies of the 1551 agreement had been written, so that people were more prone to believe the printed Indexes that flooded the markets, and “there is not a yeare but there comes forth a Catalogue of new prohibition, under the name of the Master of the Sacred Palace.”28 The famous sentence in Sarpi, which is the partial cause of an even more famous sentence in Areopagitica, is in fact a warning to the Venetian oligarchy with regard to what Rome knows very well: The matter of bookes seemes to be a thing of small moment, because it treats of words, but through these words comes opinions into the

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world, which cause partialities, seditions, and finally warres. They are words, it is true, but such as in consequence draw after them Hosts of armed men.29

Moreover, Sarpi says that books produced from within the church have gradually ceased to be concerned with matters of belief, and are solely about the political power of the church, while the church in itself is more concerned with challenging the authority of secular rulers than with heresy. Most perniciously, the rewriting of books is regarded as a form of cultural sterilization: one of the places where Sarpi has been seen to influence Milton’s imagery directly: “They have gelded the bookes of ancient Authors by new printing of them, and taken out all which might serve for Temporall Authority.”30 Sarpi’s account of the debate on censorship at Trent touched in outline the complex machinery by which some books placed on the Index were suppressed, and others rewritten or “expurgated.” The Italy that Milton visited was permeated by a network of Church-driven censorship machines: different levels of censoring authority—the Curia, parochial clergy, and the Inquisition, each internally divided as well as at odds with each other, and with no overall, coherent policy for the implementation of censorship. However much in England the Star Chamber, the Court of High Commission, and the Stationers Company combined to operate what would be regarded by Puritans as a tyranny, it was not the heavy-duty operation that existed in Italy, and it was relatively coherent. Part of the incoherence in Italy was due to the attempt in Rome to superimpose a very rigid censorship, and in particular the application of the Index promulgated by Clement VIII in 1596. Sarpi’s account can be supplemented and tested by the recent findings of historians of early modern Italy, who have benefited significantly from the recent opening of hitherto closed archives in Rome.31 As in the rest of western Europe, the invention of the printing press created in Italy a considerable rise in the number of book readers, especially those from social groups previously excluded from literacy. The church in its different branches knew it had to exert some attempt at control but pondered the means by which it would be enforced. Legislation of 1543 gave the Inquisition the right to inspect libraries, printing works and bookshops, houses and churches, seizing and burning that which was forbidden. Although scarcity of evidence in the earlier period of the operation of the Index compromises accurate judgment, it would

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seem that the effective operation of this system was vitiated by internal squabbling and by the scarcity of resources available to the papacy and the Inquisition to run an effective censorship. Until the Council of Trent, and periodically thereafter, compromises were made by moderates who hoped for reconciliation with Protestants. Matters were different after 1596, with the Inquisition playing a key role in the expurgation of offensive books, and the Holy Office maintaining a firm grip on the control of book circulation. While levels of activity by the censors fluctuated as new inquisitors were appointed, or when a new work was added to the Index, local censors also evidently operated with wide margins of discretion: many books not denounced were nonetheless subject to suppression. The cardinals insisted that bishops were more effective sources of censorship than the Inquisition since they were more diffused across the country, and with a bigger administrative resource. The bishops would make sure that books were burned in public places, as opposed to Inquisition cloisters, and that suspended books be kept in safe places, under episcopal supervision. Despite some resistance from secular authorities, such as the dukes of the northern citystates, like Mantua, the Index was imposed throughout the Italian peninsula. Only Savoy and Venice resisted effectively, the latter winning a compromise for its printers, by which many stipulations of the Index could be avoided. Yet in central and northern Italy (but not in the Kingdom of Naples), the gathering of books after the 1596 Index was relatively efficient. In some cases, books were burned “for good edification” or “satisfaction of the lay people” before the orders for their collection had been issued. Only the effort it would take to investigate a huge library slowed this process down. What would have been particularly shocking to Milton was the large body of secular Italian literary works on the Index, in addition to the writings of Erasmus and vernacular Bibles. In the lists of offensive books found by censors, and sent to Rome in the late sixteenth century, the names of transalpine Reformers and Italian heretics were rare. More frequent were works by Italian authors who had expressed some sympathy with Reformation ideas, while Erasmus’s works evidently remained in widespread circulation and hence were a source of continuing anxiety for the church: a consequence of the confusion caused by his rehabilitation from condemnation in 1564, while some of his works remained on the Index. In “A Post-Script” to The Judgement of Martin Bucer (1644), Milton recognized the particular problem of

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Erasmus, comparing it ironically with his own threatened suppression in a time of supposed freedom of speech.32 Condemned books on dueling remained resolutely in circulation, as did the much larger body of literary works that had been condemned as lascivious or obscene. The Index itself had condemned works that had enjoyed great popularity and continued to do so: Bandello, Sansovino, Ariosto, Aretino, Vittoria Colonna, Boiardo, Castiglione, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Poliziano, Boccaccio, Bembo, and Cinzio are merely the most famous (to Anglo-American ears) of the Italian authors whose works were banned. They are no less than the Italian sources for much great late medieval and sixteenth-century English literature. Neither could the bishops and the Inquisition prevent the circulation of vernacular Bibles, and devotional works based on biblical texts. The burning of huge quantities of biblical or biblically based text was painful to many executors, as much as it would have been for a Protestant to witness. Protests were in fact made, eventually even by bishops and cardinals. Nonetheless, unlicensed and unannotated books remained destined for the flames. It is now argued that the result was a widespread social trauma among common people, since, as was the case with northern Europe, vernacular devotional reading had become common in Italy in the century after the invention of printing.33 So in the Italian popular imagination, vernacular Bibles became associated with heretical writing. Just as offensive to Milton was the second major activity that came with the Index: expurgation. A widespread project to rewrite a great many books, and not just those technically defined as “in need of correction,” followed the implementation of the Clementine Index. Not surprisingly, the control of Rome over the process failed, and unskilled revisers proliferated. When local centers of control (“congregations of expurgation”) were introduced, there were simply insufficient suitable revisers to carry out the process of revision. Myriad problems of all kinds vitiated the process, and typically, congregations could not agree within themselves with regard to what and how to rewrite, even before each act of expurgation was sent to Rome, from where a compendious index expurgatorius would be published. During the Council of Trent, Sarpi reported that expurgation was objected to on the grounds that it would weaken the Church’s authority by displeasing both those who objected to what was left out, and those who objected to what was left in.34 On an organizational level, this nonetheless looked like institutionally driven literary

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dismemberment, with different kinds of works being sent to the cities where they might be most appropriately rewritten (e.g., medical books to Padua). Here, academics and academies tended to be obstructive (as was the case in Florence) when answering requests from inquisitors for help with expurgation. But this meant that some suspended works were never reprinted. Proposals for passages worthy of expurgation were submitted in frustratingly abbreviated form, as if a wholly inaccurate surgery was being offered, something that one cardinal tried to rectify by suggesting that excisions be minimal, and a placebo of appropriate alternative but acceptable wordings replace that which was deemed offensive. No wonder then that, despite the fact that only fifty-three books were listed in the Index Expurgatorius when it was finally published in 1607, many were discouraged from publishing at all, for fear of subjection to the revisers. The Tuscan academies in which Milton found literary kinship and profound friendship during his Italian tour thus stood at the end of a tradition of literary glory that the Index and expurgation threatened to destroy. This was the case even when religion was avoided as a topic in academy debate, and when, it is hinted, Milton did enter such difficult and forbidden ground in an academy conversation.35

II The treatment of book censorhip in Sarpi’s history, or his histories, effectively introduces two kinds of martyrdom: the martyring of people, and the martyring of books. This was a perception that Milton, by the time he wrote Areopagitica, could not resist exploiting. The interest has been seen as a notable adaptation of a wholly English, Tudor, Protestant, apocalyptic account of elect nationhood and martyrdom, where persecution serves as a necessary test of verity.36 If a good book “is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit”: We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of publick men, how we spill that season’d life of man preserv’d and stor’d up in Books; since we see a kinde of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdome, and if it extend to the whole impression, a kinde of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elementall life, but strikes at that ethereal and fift essence, the breath of reason it selfe, slaies an immortality rather then a life.37

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And by this “immortality,” Milton means the collective body of ideas that belong to a nation: “revolution of ages doe not oft recover the losse of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole Nations fare the worse. We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against the living labours of public men, how we spill that season’d life of man preserv’d and stor’d up in books.” Note also the use of “spill,” meaning both “kill” or “destroy” (OED v. I.1.a), and with the sense of spilling or squandering semen (OED, v.I.6.a.). This suggests a correlation between book censorship and Milton’s fear of unfruitful coition in a marriage without a fit conversation, as he had recently argued in the divorce tracts. Censorship was a waste of seed. After the bobbing friars section (see above, 107), the blame for pre-publication licensing is put firmly on Catholicism: “the most Antichristian Councel, and the most tyrannous Inquisition that ever inquir’d.”38 Reformation publishing, Milton appears to be saying, provoked from Rome a reinvigorated or redefined picture of judgment and hell: “new limbo’s and new hell wherein they might include our Books also within the number of their damned. And this was the rare morsel so officiously snatcht up, and so illfavouredly imitated by our inquisiturient Bishops, and the attendant minorities, their Chaplains.”39 Here, the image is not phallic but contrarily one of obstructed vaginas as an image for pre-publication censorship: “no envious Juno sat cros-leg’d over the nativity of any man’s intellectuall off spring.”40 William Shullenburger regards Milton’s reference to the permissions on the title page of the Tacitean writer Bernardo Davanzati Bostichi’s Scisma d’Inghilterra (1638) as signaling just such an emasculated or malformed, if not unborn, text, written and published under the sway of the Index.41 Without the Index and its history, as recounted by Sarpi, Milton could not have imagined the history of publishing in these terms, since English publishing history, with its peculiar notion of saleable copyright, differed from all cases on the continent.42 Indeed, it is precisely the parallels between England and Italy that serve Milton’s polemical purpose. Thus, the very insertion of the names of the licensers on the title pages or in the preliminaries of tracts reveals their neo-popish tyranny over the people: in such a sick and weak estate of faith and discretion, as to able to take nothing down but through the pipe of a licenser. That this is care or love of them, we cannot pretend, whenas in those Popish places

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where the Laity are most hated and despis’d the same strictnes is us’d over them.43

What follows is the famous passage where Milton confesses his time in Italy with the academies. He recounts his meeting with Galileo, and mentions the “inquisition tyrannies” that have “dampt the glory of Italian wits” into a “servil condition.”44 For Milton’s most recent biographer, the experience of Italy and especially Rome during the visit of 1638–39 was profoundly ambiguous for the poet: a font of civilization and cultural achievement, but also the seat of idolatry and religious tyranny.45 It is here that Milton’s assimilation of Sarpi is folded within a larger context. Being a glorious Italian wit equates with Milton’s description of virtue as opposed to bondage, a mode of being that presupposes a healthy state of being in the body and an equally vigorous expression of language, beyond the stultification of mere grammar rules and schoolhouse exercises. The latter is typified by an authentic vernacular expression, and where one vernacular is respectful of the features of others it may refer to within itself.46 Milton’s attempts to make English function in this way are a famous feature of his early verse. The idea also fits with the charge, made by Milton and his contemporaries from the early seventeenth century forward, that any compromise of these virtues by a government is a tyranny.47 The freedom to speak in this way makes possible a nurturing of precious insights so good for the nation that rulers will no longer need to disguise themselves and eavesdrop on citizens by hiding under windows to listen to conversations in order to escape from evil counsel, and hence risk hearing unpleasant critical satire (“the over-head emptying of some salt lotion”).48 Optimal judgment in individuals is produced by healthy church discipline and the proper governance of the self, over and above the order offered by laws and just rule. In The Reason of Church Government (Jan./Feb. 1642), this is viewed as an economy of the household and of education that results in each man, if he is ever able to achieve it (and not everyone will), being a magus: Which is so hard to be of mans making, that we may see even in the guidance of a civill state to worldly happinesse, it is not for every learned, or every wise man, though many of them consult in common, to invent or frame a discipline, but if it be at all the worke of man, it must be of such a one as is a true knower of himselfe, and himselfe in whome contemplation and practice, wit, prudence, fortitude, and eloquence must be rarely met, both to comprehend the hidden causes of

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things, and span in his thoughts all the various effects that passion or complexion can worke in mans nature.49

The opposite is a fatal compromise of style and a destruction of virtue. The Italian example was again attractive to Milton when attacking Bishop Hall in An Apology against a Pamphlet (1642): “I have heard it observ’d, that a Jesuits Italian when he writes, is ever naught, though he be borne and bred a Florentine, so to thinke that from like causes we may go neere to observe the same in the stile of a Prelat.”50 There is here more than a hint of the anti-priestcraft tradition, with its roots in Plato, and looking through Harrington and his followers toward deism, a tradition that venerated Sarpi as a truth teller.51 Milton’s adherence to a prophetic if not sacerdotal conception of personhood and authority was that element that deists like John Toland attempted to purge when they imitated Milton in their own writings.52 But did Milton think that Sarpi’s style escaped from such weaknesses? In Milton there is the articulation of a physically aggressive liberty here that has no patience with the taint of licensing: witness the aggrieved and frustrated reader, “dinging” the licensed book a “coit’s distance” from himself.53 It is such a wrenching physicality that, as I have argued elsewhere, both wrenches Sarpi’s syntax out of shape, but does not finally free itself from the connotations of Sarpi’s text: The genesis of Milton’s sentences admits this ambivalence of invention and militant strength. In the same sentence as the Dragon’s teeth is an echo from Sarpi that words can cause wars. Milton begins the sentence with the image of the “vigorously productive” society, but he ends it with Sarpi’s indication that books can help cause destruction. The syntax is libertine in the literal sense that it is apparently out of control. The impression given is that Milton is unable to free the text from the connotations in Sarpi. Milton’s orator is unable to free his from Sarpi’s printed text. . . . The syntax manages to express opposites by means of the very mode of appropriation of its source texts, behind which lie the very acts of reading which Milton would have the censors leave unhindered.54

It is just such a struggle with a source that delivers Milton his sense of contrariness that is so characteristic of his writing in these years, and that he said was an inevitable part of reformation.55 We might press further and ask the reason for this textual struggle. For the most part, Sarpi deliberately wrote in a simplistic way, without eloquence or any extensive commentary in his

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account of events. Milton’s church history, by contrast, was a paragon of plenitude—in respect of imagery, allegory, reference to learned authorities, autobiographical self-defense, and his own imagined poetic futures. In its way, it is no less than poetry. The freedom to read recommended by Milton, and, in a more reserved way, by Sarpi, opens up for both authors the vista of a plenitude of reading. It is initially registered by Milton as a chaos of cross-confessional, cross-philosophical experience in a variety of ways. Chaos, says Milton in Animadversions (July 1641), is where Rome and England meet.56 Milton quotes Ovid from the famous description of chaos at the start of Metamorphoses, I, where weightless things coincide with heavy objects in a confused mass—an appropriate metaphor for the meeting of Catholic and Protestant theology. The connection with the renderings of Chaos in Paradise Lost (2.890–1044; 7.90–260) is evident not merely through the ancient literary reference in Animadversions, but also because the passage in Ovid was a well-known point of reconciliation between Christian and pagan belief systems. “For Hot, Cold, Moist, and Dry, four champions fierce/ Strive here for mastery, and to battle bring/Their embryon atoms” (PL, 2.898–90) foregrounds Chaos, which remained a worry for commentators as “endless evil,” while the idea of atoms themselves was not accepted by several major ancient and modern authorities, including Aristotle.57 In Animadversions, the clash of Rome and England replaces the elemental clashes in Chaos, and the clash of pagan and Christian cultures that Ovid’s lines occasioned. It is a state where English bishops, in the undoing of their piety and Protestant learning with courtly politics and ineffective anti-papal polemic, are no better than Sarpi’s editor De Dominis, who returned to Catholicism after his conversion to the Church of England.58 In The Reason of Church Government, the turbulent arguments between Christian sects is imagined on the one hand as chaos, and on the other, as a woman in labour, before the creation/birth from Chaos that is Reformation.59 Furthermore, “if we look but on the nature of elementall and mixt things, we know they cannot suffer any change of one kind, or quality into another without the struggl of contrarieties.”60 Chaos is the consequence of bringing together two systems for the public regulation of belief, two confessions, two sets of selfhoods, all reconciled in one pen: Milton’s. For Sarpi, to give such powers to anyone who was not the secular authority was to create chaos: “There is no question, but those Bookes wherein such absurdnesses are found ought to be condemned:

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but every one may not doe it, it were a breeding of confusion in the World, if every one who knoweth an order to be good, might Decree it: That belongeth to publicke authority, which onely can make a Law upon that which belongeth to her Government.”61 But Milton rejoices in this chaos. A similar kind of confusion is created as a consequence of the traduction that was part of interconfessional polemic. In Animadversions, Milton refers to The Epistle Congratulatorie of Lysimachus Nicanor, a work in which the Anglican John Corbet pretended to be a Jesuit congratulating the Scottish Presbyterians, and thereby suggesting the sameness of Catholics and Presbyterians.62 In Paradise Lost Chaos is the neutral place of contending elements that looks different depending on the perspective of whoever looks at it, be it Satan in book 2, or Raphael in book 7. Likewise, the meeting of English (Edwin Sandys, Bacon, Hobbes, Milton), Venetian (Sarpi) and Roman (papal) perspectives produces a relativity of awareness in which the truth claims of each are demystified through the interpretative lens of the other.63 In The Reason of Church Government, the reference to chaos, contrariety, and reformation is followed by the image of dross and waste being the inevitable consequence of creation, before an attack in kind on the Catholic polemicist John Barclay for his assertion in Icon Animorum that the English lack manners. Milton casts Barclay as a wandering exile, “a fugitive Papist traducing the Island whence he sprung,” and therefore shunning the natural aversion to atheism in England.64 Barclay is figured as an outcast Satan; by leaving the island homeland, he exposes himself to the dangers that the church and education in England prevents—a further lapse from barbarous habits into error. It takes other nations, “better compos’d to a naturall civility,” to survive these threats without such nurture.65 It is presumed that Milton means the Italians here, but they, of course, also lie in bondage under the depravations of the Index. And like that Italian exile, Marcantonio de Dominis, Barclay moved between England and Rome, writing against Catholicism in the hope of preferment from James I, but reconciling himself to Catholicism in 1616, and living in Rome until his death in 1621.66 Across the “wild abyss” (PL, 2.917) of Chaos Satan travels, but without clear coordinates, and in an utter confusion of elements, where the “crude consistence” (PL, 2.941) of hardtop, sea and air all intermix, fails to make clear headway. Traveling upward is falling downward. The final confrontation with Chaos, Night, and the

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classical gods of Hell is enough definition to give Satan the direction he needs to travel to Earth (PL, 2.968–1009). In one of the poem’s registers, the figured theme here is empire: Chaos is threatened by his diminishing realm—loss of territory to the fallen angels in Hell, and the newly created Earth, as well as Heaven. But Satan’s journey and encounter also feel like a test of faith, especially in the light of the “difficulty and labour” of the journey. Satan is given certainty by the definition of his own demense as distinct from Chaos, and this is made more certain by the sight of his old home, Heaven, and the object of his future attention, Earth. The subjection to chaos is not merely a way of registering a trial of faith. It is also, as we have seen, the figure of reading, and of being open to all truths in order to choose freely. This takes us to the famous emendation in Areopagitica of “wayfaring” corrected to “warfaring” reader.67 The set of associations elaborated above makes the former, originally printed reading just as appropriate as the latter, which is usually preferred by modern scholars. At the same time, the Protestant/Catholic, atheism/ pagan/Christian crossovers, intricately arranged inside Milton’s text as they are, point to the relevance of persistent cross-confessional tensions within individuals and communities in early modern England that the recent work of Michael Questier in particular has foregrounded.68 Long ago, Ernest Sirluck showed that Milton not only reorganizes Sarpi, but also corrects him. Milton resorts to Foxe, Eusebius and Socrates Scholasticus to make Sarpi’s account of the censorship more accurate, and, in the way of being more accurate, even more negative in its portrayal of papal authority.69 Why, though? One inference is that in knowing fuller sources, Milton was silently correcting a degree of Indexical emasculation in Sarpi himself: Sarpi either did not know because the texts were not available to him, or if he did, even he was not prepared to make certain allegations against the church in his writing. Milton would have encountered his patristic sources and would have had the time to become familiar with them during his sojourn at Horton. Eusebius’s Historia Ecclesiastica, with Socrates Scholasticus’s work in the same name, was available in the Kedermister Library at Langley Marish, next to Horton, and where he would also have had access to Brent’s translation of Sarpi.70 The reference from Foxe restores Wycliffe and Huss as victims of extreme persecution. It is as if Milton is replenishing Sarpi with Protestant vigor, and writing with books first read not in the city

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of refuge, but in a rural village. But this itself slips into the “chaos” of inconsistency that marks Areopagitica: Sarpi provides the source for the story of St. Jerome being whipped in a dream for reading Cicero, which suggests disciplinary repression, but Eusebius provides the story of Dionysius Alexanderinus, who had a vision that told him that he could read any book, a liberal position that is perplexingly both Arminian and Antinomian.71 This discovery of Milton’s construction of a Reformation history exemplifies the trial of reading, moving away from reading as chaos, be it imagined as Psyche’s labor of sorting out the huge pile of mixed seeds, or the description of that most prohibited book, the Bible, as a frustrating reservoir of contradictions.72 But this sense of construction is linear in shape: the force of godly history as we are given it in the last two books of Paradise Lost. It is also limited. In teaching and thinking about Milton intensively across some twenty years, I had formed the view that it was in the years 1643–1644 that something truly remarkable happened to Milton, something that transformed an accomplished young poet into a notable Protestant heretic, and saw the appearance in his work of elements of contrariety that made his later work and especially his great long poem so astonishing. Contrariety opens the way to having the devil in one’s party. I had always thought that this moment must have centered on the divorce tracts, and the first edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce in particular, with the shocking demonstration that Moses’ permission for divorce is consistent with Christ’s denial of it. But we can now argue for another picture, which pushes the date for the emergence of “amazing Milton” back into the early 1640s, with a possible gestation period in Milton’s reading of the later 1630s. We have to reconsider Milton’s encounter with international religious conflict, the polemics that grew out of it, and his final contact as a visitor with the culture whose literature he had always aspired to equal in English. This in itself is a good reason for further exploration of Milton’s use of Bacon and the Bacon circle in the context of the long-term history of Anglo-Italian intellectual relations. Much has been made of when it was that Milton first adopted republicanism in his writings, but the obsession with this matter of dating has obscured other features that are probably more significant in the earlier construction of what has been called Milton’s “activist” ethics.73 As Milton turned from Lycidas in 1637 to face the problem of how he would address growing discontent in the English state, he started to read. He

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started to read as he had never done before, and he encountered a chaos from which he would finally retrieve his free-will theology. Not without a struggle. All of this began to happen while Milton wrote some of the most personally moving verse of his career. Significantly, they were beyond the linguistic nationhood of both England and Italy: two Latin poems, the panegyric to Mansus and the elegy to Diodati. It is impossible not to be struck by the intricate beauty of these two poems that play on poetic friendship across the divides that vernacular cultures create—and Diodati himself was an AngloItalian cultural hybrid. They are the epitome of the virtuous energy and activity that Milton so values. That Milton should then, in 1646, in a most difficult situation of internally divided loyalties within England, still praise Henry Lawes for his music by claiming that this would make the most beloved subject for a poem by Dante is testimony that these values prevailed during the Civil War, as much as we can also see them earlier in the antiepiscopal tracts. But for the struggle to be virtuous, in the context of the later 1630s and 1640s, it was necessary to have contact with materials from the country where wit was a natural resource: not at all the case in England, as Milton saw it. Apart from poetry, this provided on the one hand and in the case of Sarpi very useful polemical ammunition. On the other hand, Milton could not see quite what made Sarpi’s account so remarkable and penetrating. What was there was an early modern “atheist” thinker: Milton is uneasy with him, wrestles with him, revises him and finally casts the reading habits that surrounded Sarpi as a Satanic investiture of perpetual roaming. Sarpi himself, like Hobbes, was made of stronger stuff. Milton runs instead into the free will theology of Areopagitica, but the anti-episcopal tracts document the “struggle of contraries” that takes place as both Roman Catholic polemic and “atheistic” church history are accommodated by a Protestant poet, whose fellow countrymen were busy making a “Christian Atheism” out of Sarpi’s insights.

NOTES 1. Correspondence of Basil Brent (son of Nathaniel) published in Lewis Atterbury, ed., Some Letters Relating to the History of the Council of Trent (1705), 2–3, quoted in John Leon Livesay, Venetian Phoenix: Paolo Sarpi and Some of his English Friends (1606–1700) (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973), 46– 47. 2. See Paul F. Grendler, The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press,

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1540–1605 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 3. For De Dominis, see Noel Malcolm, De Dominis (1560–1624): Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist and Relapsed Heretic (London: Strickland & Scott, 1984). I am grateful to John Mulryan for information concerning alterations of sense in the English translation. 4. It has also been conjectured (doubtfully) that de Dominis took the work to England and had it published without the author’s permission: Izaak Walton, “The Life of Sir Henry Wotton,” Lives, ed. S. B. Carter (1951), 91; Peter Burke, “Introduction,” in Paolo Sarpi, History of Benefices and selections from History of the Council of Trent, trans. and ed. by Peter Burke (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967), xxiii–xxiv. 5. Burke, xxiii–xxiv. For eighteenth-century responses to Sarpi, see, e.g., Giusto Nave, Fra Paolo Sarpi giustificato: disssertazione epistolare (Lucca, 1752). Sarpi and his writings remain a site for confessional contestation. On the one hand, the Catholic Encyclopedia is naturally keen to discredit Sarpi’s reputation. Accordingly, the Istoria “is a bitter invective against the popes, and even Protestants, like Ranke, consider it devoid of all authority.” (http://www. newadvent.org/cathen/13477b.htm. The latest source cited in this article is 1906, and the following paragraph sits at the foot of the page: “The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XIII. Copyright  1912 by Robert Appleton Company. Online Edition Copyright  1999 by Kevin Knight. Nihil Obstat, 1 February 1912. Remy Lafort, D.D., Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York.”) On the other hand, Sarpi is a hero in the history of science: “He discovered, and in part explained, the valves of the vein, which were to be important for the impending discovery of the circulation of blood in the body; he was the first person in Italy to be informed of the Dutch invention of the telescope and he also kept a journal of scientific and philosophical speculations, in which there are several entries on the subject of motion.” (http:// www.galileo.imuss.firenze.it/museo/b/esarpip.html). 6. See David Wootton, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 7. See Nicholas Davidson, “Atheism in Italy, 1500–1700,” in Michael Hunter and David Wootton, eds., Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 73, 77–8. See also David Wootton, “New Histories of Atheism,” in Hunter and Wootton, eds., Atheism, 37, 41, 43, 46. 8. As discussed in Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 97–101. 9. The History of the Inquisition, trans. Robert Gentilis (London, 1639), 82. 10. See Jeff Collins of the University of Chicago, “Hobbes and the Uses of Christianity,” in his forthcoming study of Hobbes [Oxford: Oxford University Press]. See also below, n. 63. 11. See Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 79, 123, 179, 300. 12. In his Uxor Hebraica (1646); see Jason Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in Paradise Lost (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 89. 13. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 227; Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the making of the Answer to the XIX Propositions (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 143, n. 52; Henry Parker and the English Civil War: the Political Thought of the Public’s Privado (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 53–54, 57.

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14. See Burke, “Introduction,” xliii. 15. For the dating of Milton’s reading of Sarpi, see Ruth Mohl’s footnote 14, Complete Prose Works, 1.396. 16. Complete Prose Works, 1.595. 17. See William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biographical Commentary, 2nd ed., rev. Gordon Campbell, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 2.883. The exception is Sirluck’s work on the commentary in Complete Prose Works, 2, and in Modern Philology, 50 (1953): 226–31. 18. Of Reformation, Complete Prose Works, 1.581. 19. Of Reformation, Complete Prose Works, 1.582. 20. Complete Prose Works, 1.396–98, 402, 406–7, 424, 451, 467, 500–502. For a qualification of Mohl’s view, see below, 107. 21. Complete Prose Works, 2.300–301. 22. See Animadversions (July 1641), in Complete Prose Works, 1.669, where the English bishops are guilty of “Monkish prohibitions, and expurgatorious indexes, your gags and snaffles, your proud Imprimaturs.” Cp. Sarpi, The History of the Inquisition, trans. Gentilis, 71. 23. Complete Prose Works, 2.648; 3.581, 589. 24. Complete Prose Works, 7.297–98. 25. Complete Prose Works, 2.492, 500–503, 510–11, 517, 529. 26. Sarpi, The Historie of the Councel of Trent, conteining eight Bookes, trans. Nathaniel Brent (London, 1620), 473. 27. Sarpi, History, ed. Burke, 208–10. 28. The History of the Inquisition, 68. 29. The History of the Inquisition, 69. See also above, 104 and below 110– 111. 30. The History of the Inquisition, 71. 31. The following section is indebted in particular to the evidence gathered in Gigliola Fragnito, ed., Church, Censorship and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 32. Complete Prose Works, 2.479. 33. Eduardo Barbieri, “Tradition and Change in the Spiritual Literature of the Cinquecento,” in Fragnito, ed., Church, Censorship and Culture, 111–33 (116, 125–80); Fragnito, “Central and Peripheral Organization of Censorship,” in Fragnito, ed., Church, Censorship and Culture, 13– 49 (33). See also Gigliola Fragnito, La Bibbia al rogo : la censura ecclesiastica e i volgarizzamenti della Scrittura : 1471–1605 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997); Leszek Kolakowski, Chr´etiens sans Eglises: la conscience religieuse et le lien confessionnel au XVII si`ecle (Paris: Gallimard, 1969). 34. Sarpi, trans. and ed. Burke, 208. 35. See Estelle Haan, From Academia to Amicitia: Milton’s Latin Writings and the Italian Academies (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1998), 7, 127. 36. See Genelle C. Gertz-Robinson, “Still Martyred after All These Years: Generational Suffering in Milton’s Areopagitica,” English Literary Renaissance, 70(2003): 963–87. 37. Complete Prose Works, 2.493. 38. Complete Prose Works, 2.505. 39. Complete Prose Works, 2.506–7. 40. Complete Prose Works, 2.505. See also Diane Purkiss’s discussion of Areopagitica in her forthcoming study, Gender, Politics and Literature in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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41. William Shullenberger, “ ‘Imprimatur’: The Fate of Davanzati,” in Milton in Italy: Contexts, Images, Contradictions, ed. Mario di Cesare, 175–96 (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991). 42. See Joseph Loewenstein, The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). See also Complete Prose Works, 2.532–33. 43. Complete Prose Works, 2.536–37. 44. Complete Prose Works, 2.537–38. Sarpi was involved in bringing the telescope to Galileo’s attention. 45. Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000), 105. 46. Complete Prose Works, 1.666–70. 47. See Quentin Skinner, “John Milton and the Politics of Slavery,” in Graham Parry and Joad Raymond, eds, Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–22. 48. Complete Prose Works, 1.670. 49. Complete Prose Works, 1.753. 50. Complete Prose Works, 1.874. 51. See above, 102. See also J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 52. See Nigel Smith, “The English Revolution and the End of Rhetoric: John Toland’s Clito (1700) and the Republican Daemon,” Essays and Studies 49 (1996):1–18, “Poetry and Politics,” 1–20. 53. Complete Prose Works, 2.553. 54. Nigel Smith, “Areopagitica: Voicing Contexts 1643– 45,” in David Loewenstein and James G. Turner, eds., Discourses of Truth: Milton’s Prose Works and the Seventeenth-Century Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 113. 55. Complete Prose Works, 1.796. 56. Complete Prose Works, 1.671. 57. See commentary in John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (2nd ed., 1997), 154, nn. 895–910. For poetry and atoms in the period, see Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, trans. Lucy Hutchinson, ed. Hugh De Quehen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 7–6; and Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,1998). 58. Complete Prose Works, 1.731. 59. Complete Prose Works, 1.795. 60. Complete Prose Works, 1.795. The similarities with a famous passage in Areopagitica will be evident to the Miltonist: “Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is triall and triall is by what is contrary.” 61. Sarpi, The History of the Inquisition, 72. 62. Complete Prose Works, 1.667–68. See also Complete Prose Works, 1.905. 63. Sarpi’s views on religion may have been influenced by another early seventeenth-century Englishman, Edwin Sandys, whose comparative analysis of religions, Relation of the State of Religion, appeared in 1605. 64. Barclay was in fact born in France to a Scottish father. 65. Complete Prose Works, 1.796–67. 66. For Barclay, see Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700: A Critical History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 148–76; Susanne

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¨ Siegl-Mocavini, John Barclay’s Argenis: und ihr staattheoretischer Kontext: Untersuchung zum politischen Denken der Fruhen ¨ Neuzeit (T¨ubingen: Niemeyer, 1999). 67. Complete Prose Works, 2.515. 68. Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580– 1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); see also Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Ann Cotterill, “Marvell’s Watery Maze: Digression and Discovery at Nun Appleton,” English Literary History 69 (2002):103–32. 69. Ernest Sirluck, “Milton’s Critical Use of Historical Sources,” Modern Philology, 50 (1953), 226–31. 70. Edward Jones, “Milton, Horton and the Kedermister Library,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 53 (2002), 45– 48, 53–54. 71. Complete Prose Works, 2.510–11. 72. Complete Prose Works, 2.514, 517. 73. The list of citations could be very long indeed, but I will leave it starting with J. G. A Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) and ending with David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). There are important essays by Blair Worden in Gisela Bock, et al., Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Martin Dzelzainis in David Armitage et al., Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and Janel Mueller in P. G. Stanwood, ed., Of Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and his World (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Text and Studies, 1995).

Raphael, Diodati Karen L. Edwards

INDIGNATION, TOO, MUST BE READ HISTORICALLY. MILTON’S COMparison of Raphael to a phoenix in book 5 of Paradise Lost provokes Richard Bentley to demand, “[A]mong so many real Birds of grand Magnitude and fine Feather, could none content you but a Phoenix, a fictitious Nothing, that has no Being but in tale and Fable?”1 The trouble centers on what is real: for Bentley, angels are real and phoenixes are not, and the comparison undermines Raphael’s ontological status. To modern readers, much less certain about how or whether angels are real, Bentley’s indignation seems quaint. But what he points to is genuinely puzzling. A rapidly growing body of scholarship on Milton and the new philosophy of the mid-seventeenth century has taught us to be alert to the complexities surrounding the poet’s representations of the natural world.2 The phoenix simile does present a problem for natural history, though not the problem worrying Bentley. Except in the instance of Raphael and the phoenix, Milton likens only fallen angels to fabulous creatures in Paradise Lost (griffin, amphisbena, island-like leviathan, Python). Satan and his followers, that is, are made to embody what they entertain, a false conception of Creation.3 This stems, necessarily, from their false conception of the Creator. In comparing a faithful archangel to a creature from ancient Egyptian myth, Milton seems to be violating the representational decorum of his own poem. It is possible, of course, that late seventeenth-century readers were not entirely convinced that the phoenix was a fiction. The fact that denials of its existence abound may point to lingering pockets of belief. But a glance at some of the denials suggests not so much the need to refute entrenched beliefs as the desire to reform lazy habits of thought. Thus the existence of the phoenix heads George Hakewill’s 1630 list of those opinions in natural philosophy “justly suspected, if not rejected, though commonly received.”4 Thomas Browne devotes a chapter to the opinion in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), declaring at the outset, “we can123

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not presume the existence of this animall, nor dare we affirme there is any Phænix in Nature.”5 Dean Wren (father of the architect) endorses Browne’s skepticism in the margin of his own copy of Pseudodoxia Epidemica.6 If, as seems likely, the phoenix had been securely relegated to fiction by the late seventeenth century, then why does Milton depart in this instance from the rule otherwise governing his representation of unfallen creatures? The question is all the more pressing because of what has long been recognized as the peculiar nature of the phoenix simile: it is not “just” a simile. Thomas Greene commented in a classic work of New Criticism, The Descent from Heaven (a study of epic conventions culminating in Raphael’s descent), that the phoenix functions “both within and without the simile.”7 Although the archangel “seems / A Phoenix” (PL 5.271–72) as he “Sailes between worlds and worlds” (5.268), he returns to “his proper shape” (5.276) upon alighting, suggesting that he has assumed the body of the phoenix during his descent to earth. What seems at first to be simile, that is, may after all be embodiment, Milton thus exacerbating an apparent sin against Baconianism. In The Advancement of Learning Bacon specifically warns that repeating fabulous material about the natural world, especially in “similitudes and ornaments of speech,” perpetuates error, a warning taken to heart by the new experimental philosophers.8 To go beyond simile and suggest that Raphael takes on the body of a phoenix seems a distinctly un-philosophical tactic. Moreover, the potential damage to Milton’s stance as a reforming poet appears to be disproportionate to any gain, for the relevance of the phoenix to the archangel is, finally, unclear. In its uniqueness and capacity for self-regeneration, the phoenix has traditionally been read as a figure for Christ. But Raphael is not unique; he is one among several archangels who visit or protect paradise. Nor does his immortality result from regeneration. Greene ends by finding the relevance of the phoenix simile to be incommensurate with its affective power and wonders, “Why introduce a phoenix here at all, figurative or real?”9 The answer, this essay will argue, has to do with the resurrection of a unique friendship, Milton’s friendship with Charles Diodati.10 For that resurrection to be accomplished, the phoenix itself—the ancient symbol of resurrection outmoded in an era of Baconian experimentalism—must be renewed. Raphael’s flight “through the vast Ethereal Skie” is straightforwardly that of an angel,

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till within soare Of Towring Eagles, to all the Fowles he seems A Phœnix, gaz’d by all, as that sole Bird When to enshrine his reliques in the Sun’s Bright Temple, to Ægyptian Theb’s he flies. At once on th’Eastern cliff of Paradise He lights, and to his proper shape returns A Seraph wingd; six wings he wore, to shade His lineaments Divine; the pair that clad Each shoulder broad, came mantling o’re his brest With regal Ornament; the middle pair Girt like a Starrie Zone his waste, and round Skirted his loines and thighes with downie Gold And colours dipt in Heav’n; the third his feet Shaddowd from either heele with featherd maile Skie-tinctur’d grain. Like Maia’s son he stood, And shook his Plumes, that Heav’nly fragrance filld The circuit wide. (PL 5.270–87)11

Metaphor seems to yield to embodiment at line 276, when Raphael alights and returns to his “proper shape.” As Greene observes, the line exerts retroactive pressure on the preceding ten lines, forcing us to reconsider the nature of what we had assumed to be simile. But line 276 is itself subject to retroactive pressure; the ten lines following it describe the color and texture of Raphael’s wings in surprising detail. Surely the thin materiality of angel wings does not call for such attention? Isaiah 6:2 merely states of the seraphim that “each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.” The glosses of the 1560 Geneva Bible move the wings immediately into the realm of the symbolic, noting that the first pair signifies “that they were not able to endure the brightnes of Gods glory”; the second, “that man was not able to se the brightnes of God in them”; and the third, “the prompt obedience of the Angels to execute Gods com[m]andement.”12 But Milton insists upon the physicality of Raphael’s wings: they are downy; they mantle, gird, skirt, and shadow; they cover virtually his entire body; and they have the remarkable coloring that Pliny attributes to the plumage of the phoenix. Raphael, that is, seems more bird-like after he lands in paradise than before. He even fluffs up his feathers when he alights. In short, he seems fleetingly to assume another bird shape in an intermediate stage as he changes from phoenix to archangel. “Which other bird?” natu-

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ral history demands. The plot gives the answer. Raphael, flying to earth as a phoenix, alights in paradise and becomes, necessarily, a bird of paradise. Pliny’s first English translator, Philemon Holland, renders the account of the phoenix as follows: By report he is as big as an Ægle: for colour, as yellow & bright as gold; (namely, all about the neck;) the rest of the bodie a deepe red purple: the taile azure blew, intermingled with feathers among, of rose cornation colour: and the head bravely adorned with a crest and pennache finely wrought; having a tuft and plume thereupon, right faire and godly to be seene.13

This description, Pliny’s Victorian editors point out, is “exactly that of a bird which does exist, the golden pheasant.”14 Modern editors have generally concurred.15 But sixteenth-century naturalists preferred to identify the phoenix with the bird of paradise, which European voyagers to the East Indies came upon early in the century. Pierre Belon’s Portraits d’oyseaux, published in 1557, contains two distinctly different illustrations of the phoenix. One of them is the traditional phoenix in a flaming nest of spices; the other is a bird of paradise, obviously drawn from a dead specimen.16 There is of course some irony here: since the bird of paradise can die (a fact irrefutably demonstrated by the drawing), then it is identified with the phoenix at the price of the central element of the myth. Nonetheless, the beautiful plumage of the bird, apparently confirming Pliny’s account, made the identification irresistible to sixteenth-century naturalists—the beautiful plumage, and the mystery surrounding the bird of paradise. Subjected to crude processes of preservation and drying, birds of paradise had usually lost their legs and feet by the time they were offered for sale in European cities. There was thus much speculation about the bird’s inability to land. It was emblematized as “Vita irrequieta” in 1564, and variations on the theme of its “restlessness” abounded.17 These John Ray reviews with distaste in The Ornithology of Francis Willughby (1678), generally considered the first modern work of ornithology: That Birds of Paradise want feet is not only a popular persuasion, but a thing not long since believed by learned men and great Naturalists. . . . This errour once admitted, the other fictions of idle brains, which seemed thence to follow, did without difficulty obtain belief; viz. that they lived upon the coelestial dew; that they flew perpetually without any intermission, and took no rest but on high in the

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Air, their Wings being spread; that they were never taken alive but only when they fell down dead upon the ground: That there is in the back of the Male a certain cavity, in which the Female, whose belly is also hollow, lays her Eggs, and so by the help of both cavities they are sitten upon and hatched. . . . They are called Birds of Paradise, both for the excellent shape and beauty of their bodies, and also because where they are bred, whence they come, and whither they betake themselves is altogether unknown, sith they are found only dead upon the earth, so that the Vulgar imagine them to drop out of Heaven or Paradise.18

“All which things,” Ray concludes, “are now sufficiently refuted, and proved to be false and fabulous, both by eye-witnesses, and by the birds themselves brought over entire.”19 Perhaps because the legends surrounding the bird of paradise were growing as unthinkable as those surrounding the phoenix, seventeenth-century naturalists tended to resist linking the two creatures. Decades before Ray’s authoritative treatment of the bird of paradise, Thomas Browne had already declined to identify it with the phoenix. He clearly fears that to do so would further enhance the mystery surrounding the bird of paradise, and to undo the mystification of creatures is one of the primary aims of Pseudodoxia Epidemica. In order to boost their sales, Browne argues, traders have turned an essentially common bird into an object of superstition. The Manucodiata or bird of Paradise, hath had the honour of this name, and their feathers brought from the Molucca’s, doe passe for those of the Phænix; which though promoted by rarity with us, the Easterne travellers will hardly admit, who know they are common in those parts, and the ordinary plume of Janizaries among the Turks.20

The legend of the phoenix, Browne concludes, could not be based on a fowl so familiar and so plentiful. It seems that Milton rejoins in Paradise Lost what Browne puts asunder, the phoenix and the bird of paradise. Yet the effect of that rejoining is demystification, precisely the effect that Browne seeks. Raphael’s quicksilver metamorphosis from phoenix to bird of paradise is not in any case asserted as a firm identification. On the contrary, it emerges and disappears in the twinkling of a contextual pun. Yet the account of Raphael’s descent and visit to the garden of Eden manages to refute all the “false and fabulous things” alleged about the bird of paradise. Not only does the archangel alight (PL 5.276) and stand (PL 5.285) on explicitly mentioned feet (PL 5.283); he is also likened to “Maia’s

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son,” whose chief iconic representation is the winged sandal (PL 5.285). In heaven Raphael does indeed eat “mellifluous Dewes” (PL 5.429), as the bird of paradise is reported to do, but on earth he consumes fruit with “keen dispatch / Of real hunger” (PL 5.436–37). He accepts at once Adam’s invitation “in yonder shadie bowre / To rest” (PL 5.367–68), and he explains, later in the conversation, that angelic sexuality requires “conveyance” even less “restrain’d” than that required by other creatures (PL 8.628). As for dropping inadvertently “out of Heaven or Paradise” (as “the Vulgar imagine” birds of paradise to do), Raphael “Sailes between worlds and worlds” (PL 5.269) and purposefully “speeds” (PL 5.267) from heaven to paradise. In thus identifying the phoenix with the bird of paradise and then wittily incorporating a refutation of the fabulous things said even of the bird of paradise, Milton demonstrates his sympathy with the attitude of the new natural history. Both skeptical and re-creative, his treatment of Raphael’s transformation generates such energy that the phoenix is not lost or exhausted in its transitory identification with the bird of paradise. On the contrary, the identification demonstrates that the phoenix has been revitalized as a symbol of renewal and transformation. The phoenix to which the Semichorus compares Samson at the conclusion of Samson Agonistes is a similarly revitalized symbol (a fact that supports arguments for the late composition of the play). So vertue giv’n for lost, Deprest, and overthrown, as seem’d, Like that self-begott’n bird In the Arabian woods embost, That no second knows nor third, And lay e’re while a Holocaust, From out her ashie womb now teem’d, Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most When most unactive deem’d, And though her body die, her fame survives, A secular bird ages of lives. (SA 1697–1707)

This version of the phoenix story is also marked by the new natural history, reshaped, that is, in light of the knowledge that the phoenix is a fabulous creature. The phoenix in Samson Agonistes does not rise from her own ashes. Rather, her death (her “ashie womb”) gives birth to her fame, a naturalized version of

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the myth. The retelling of the story enacts the point of the fable: discredited and defunct, the traditional version of the phoenix story becomes vital again when the poet reinterprets it and represents it as a story not about physical resurrection but about poetic re-creation. In order to have life, symbols of renewal must themselves be renewed. By renewing the phoenix in Paradise Lost, Milton prepares the way for the poetic resurrection of his friendship with Charles Diodati, symbolized by a phoenix in Epitaphium Damonis. The differential impact of a writer’s lived experience upon the shape and force of the writing itself has been a magnet for critical uneasiness since Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault undermined confidence in our ability to point to the historical author in the text. Yet even if, as Michael Wood observes, we can no longer know the author in an “old-fashioned, metaphysical sense” (a sense which claims “to know for sure and to know in only one way”), we can “name the voices we hear” in a text.21 “There is no reason,” Wood observes, “why these voices, in their sheer plurality, should not be ‘Balzac’ ”—or “Milton.”22 In the course of naming the voices in Nabokov’s English novels, Wood distinguishes between the “signature” of a writer and the “style.” Style, he suggests, is so subtle that it reflects not a meticulous control of a fictional world but a disciplined vulnerability to the shocks of a historical one. Of course, the control and the vulnerability are related to each other, the first presumably an answer to the second. When the answer is difficult, scarcely manageable, only style will allow the writer to continue to write, and may produce some of his or her most powerful work. When the answer is too easily had, the writing accumulates excesses of signature.23

Rich in its theoretical implications, this distinction provides a way of thinking about the Miltonic voice that represents the archangel Raphael as a phoenix. It helps us see that what has been taken as the sonorous voice of the epic simile maker (public, learned, lofty, his singing robes about him) needs instead to be taken as the voice of a man who struggled against the losses imposed by time. The forms taken by meticulous control and disciplined vulnerability are of course historical. The disciplined vulnerability of Vladimir Nabokov, which “works largely through syntax and small words,” is not that of John Milton.24 The latter manifests itself in the controlled rhetorical display of the phoenix passage

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in Paradise Lost, which creates a powerful effect apparently surplus to requirement. To use Wood’s terms, the phoenix passage, almost invariably analyzed as signature, needs instead to be analyzed as style. The “answer” that is “difficult, scarcely manageable,” is the bringing to life of an eternal friendship temporarily interrupted by death, a friendship symbolized by the phoenix that appears near the conclusion of Epitaphium Damonis: In medio rubri maris unda, & odoriferum ver Littora longa Arabum, & sudantes balsama silvæ, Has inter Phœnix divina avis, unica terris Caeruleum ` fulgens diversicoloribus alis Auroram vitreis surgentem respicit undis. (ED 185–89) [in the middle the waves of the Red Sea, and the spice-smelling spring, the long coastline of Arabia, the woods sweating balsam, in which the Phoenix, eternal bird, unique on earth, gleaming sky-blue with varicolored wings, watches Aurora riding glassy waves.]

To resurrect the cerulean phoenix of Epitaphium Damonis in the “Skie-tinctur’d” phoenix of Paradise Lost is indeed a difficult, scarcely manageable, task. To resurrect the dead, poetry does not simply recall; it creates anew. The visit that Raphael pays to Adam does precisely that; it re-creates Milton’s friendship with Diodati. Wit, gentle humor, seriousness about a divinely imposed task, earthly fellowship, and the natural world and its creatures—all the qualities that characterize the correspondence and undoubtedly the actual conversation between Charles Diodati and John Milton are present in the description of Raphael’s descent. They are also present in the long conversation between Raphael and Adam in books 5–8 of Paradise Lost. These central books of the epic, which belong to Raphael, return to and address the poetic questions raised in Epitaphium Damonis. By so doing, they fulfill the second part of the vow made in the poem, that Damon’s fame will live on: Quicquid erit, cert`e nisi me lupus ant`e videbit, Indeplorato non comminuere sepulcro, Constabitque tuus tibi honos, longumque ´ vigebit Inter pastores: Illi tibi vota secundo Solvere post Daphnin, post Daphnin dicere laudes Gaudebunt, dum rura Pales, dum Faunus amabit:

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Si quid id est, priscamque fidem coluisse, piumque, ´ Palladiasque ´ artes, sociumque ´ habuisse canorum. (ED 27–34) [Whatever will be, this is sure: unless a wolf takes me first, you will not crumble to dust in the grave without being mourned. Your reputation will outlive you, in the words of shepherds, for many years to come. They will be pleased to make their vows to you, second only to Daphnis, and to praise you, second only to Daphnis, as long as Pales or Faunus loves the country; unless it is worthless to cherish oldfashioned faith, a pious man, the intelligence of an Athene, or a poet as comrade.]

If Epitaphium Damonis is the site of the mourning implied by line 28, Paradise Lost is the guarantor of the promise made in line 29, that Damon’s fame will live “for many years to come.” In the epic of 1667, Milton reconstrues as vital presence the loss recorded in the Latin elegy of 1637. Unlike Shakespeare, who promises that his ink will confer immortality upon a friend who nonetheless remains anonymous, Milton concludes Epitaphium Damonis by meditating on the name his friend may now bear in heaven: placidusque ´ fave quicunque ´ vocaris, Seu tu noster eris Damon, sive æquior audis Diodotus, quo te divino nomine cuncti Cœlicolæ norint, sylv´ısque vocabere Damon. (ED 208–11) [please favor me, whether you will be known as our Damon, or more fairly Diodati, by which divine name all in Heaven will know you, and in the woods you will still be called Damon.]

Diodati’s very name reveals that he has been given by God and so can be reclaimed by God for an immortality that is not the poet’s to bestow. Gordon Campbell has discussed the word play on Diodati’s name in the passage above, observing that it affords us “a tantalizing glimpse of the private level of allusion in the poem.”25 Such word play is characteristic of Diodati’s practice, as the surviving letters to Milton reveal. Thus the play on Diodati’s name in Epitaphium Damonis “serves as an affectionate recollection” of and tribute to Diodati’s style of thinking and writing.26 In contrast, it is Milton’s style of word play that informs the phoenix passage in Paradise Lost. Just as he riddlingly points to the name

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“Emilia” in the first of the Italian sonnets, he points to Diodati’s name in the archangel’s descent.27 Raphael, meaning “divine healer” or “health of God,” evokes Diodati’s profession. The archangel flies to earth at God’s command and so comes explicitly as Adam’s god-given (deo-dati) friend. “Go therefore,” God says to Raphael, “half this day as friend with friend / Converse with Adam” (PL 5.229–30). Having relinquished Diodati to heaven in Epitaphium Damonis, Milton does not explicitly name—that is, recall—him in the epic. Paradise Lost renders the friendship not as it was, at the point of its interruption (which is the subject of Epitaphium Damonis), but the friendship as it might have become. In the dialogic exchange between Adam and Raphael in books 5–8 of Paradise Lost, Epitaphium Damonis is revisited and updated, and the best part of Milton and Diodati’s friendship, their conversation, is new supplied, literally restored, with subject matter befitting the greater maturity of the participants. Raphael’s advent represents for Adam the sudden availability of new topics for discussion. Whereas Adam’s conversation with Eve is founded upon a close similarity of experience and increases the pair’s sexual and emotional intimacy, his conversation with Raphael reconciles vastly different experiences and ultimately turns sexual and emotional intimacy into the subject of conversation. Significantly, it is the difference in the experiences of man and archangel that makes possible their lively exchange, a difference rendered spatially in the poem, in the distance between heaven and earth. Raphael traverses that distance with easy strength, symbolically erasing in his journey to Adam the pain of Thyrsis’s journey away from Damon.28 In answer to Thyrsis’s anguished question in Epitaphium Damonis, “Ecquid erat tanti Romam vidisse sepultam?” (115) [“Was it so valuable to see the tombs of Rome?”], the elegy can only imply an answer, and then only in terms of the future: it looks forward to the lofty note, the serious new strain, the poet has begun to sound as a result of his journey: Ipse etiam, nam nescio quid mihi grande sonabat Fistula, ab undecimaˆ jam lux est altera nocte, Et tum forte novis admˆoram labra cicutis, Dissiluere tamen rupta compage, nec ultra Ferre graves potuere sonos, dubito quoque ne sim Turgidulus, tamen & referam. . . . (ED 155–60)

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[And I—for my pipe was playing some lofty piece, I don’t know, some eleven nights ago—I had by chance set my lips to a new set of panpipes; nevertheless, when their binding broke, they could not carry a serious tune. I fear as well that I am being pretentious, yet I will sing in that mode]

In Epitaphium Damonis Thyrsis grieves that he was not with Damon to close his eyes in death and to say, “vale, nostri memor ibis ad astra” (123) [“goodbye . . . proceeding to heaven, remembering me”]. In Paradise Lost, Raphael flies down from the stars specifically to seek Adam, and their conversation embodies the new note announced in Epitaphium Damonis. The epic, in short, realizes the poetic promise implicit in the elegy; the very existence of Paradise Lost manifests the value of Thyrsis’s journey. Thus the refrain rendered in a minor key in Epitaphium Damonis—“Ite domum impasti, domino jam non vacat, agni” [“Go home unfed, lambs, your master has no time for you now”]—is transposed to a major key upon Raphael’s descent in Paradise Lost. “For know,” he says to Adam and Eve, “whatever was created, needs / To be sustaind and fed” (PL 5.414 –15), explaining not only his consumption of earthly fruit but also the purpose of his visit, the nurturing of God’s youngest and tenderest creatures. The epic thus redeems Thyrsis’s inability to feed his lambs (an image of grief ’s frozen isolation) and transforms it into a celebration of communion. Raphael later sets out the dynamic nature of the whole created universe in terms of nourishment and growth: Wonder not then, what God for you saw good If I refuse not, but convert, as you, To proper substance; time may come when men With Angels may participate, and find No inconvenient Diet, nor too light Fare: And from these corporal nutriments perhaps Your bodies may at last turn all to Spirit, Improv’d by tract of time, and wingd ascend Ethereal, as wee, or may at choice Here or in Heav’nly Paradises dwell; (PL 5.491–500)

In book 7 Raphael uses the notion of nourishment to underline what may be regarded as the central, structuring theme of Paradise Lost: “Knowledge is as food, and needs no less / Her Temperance over Appetite” (PL 7.126–27).

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Even as he consumes their proffered fruit, Raphael nourishes Adam and Eve with his account of heavenly matters and is himself nourished. As they learn to converse, the interaction between Adam and Raphael grows increasingly sophisticated, becoming both more intellectually demanding and more personally engaged. Adam’s intellectual growth is represented as occurring very rapidly: he merely listens, rapt, to the story of the War in Heaven, but he supplements Raphael’s account of Creation with the story of his own beginning, and when archangel and human being arrive at the subject of Adam’s passion for Eve, they argue as equals. There are implications here for Raphael’s intellectual growth as well. If we see the archangel’s first narrative exercise as preparing Adam for more demanding explorations of the self, then the common critical assumption—that the War in Heaven is Raphael’s rather inept attempt at epic writing—cannot be valid. On the contrary, Raphael must be seen as an extremely sophisticated narrator from the outset. His narrative of Satan’s rebellion not only sets out the nature of disobedience; the form of the narrative embodies a warning that martial epic allows disobedience to God to represent itself as heroic resistance. Raphael’s apparently unskillful epic exposes the shortcomings of martial epic, the poetic strain described with such excitement in Epitaphium Damonis, the Arthurian epic Milton might have undertaken had conflict between king and Parliament not intervened. Raphael is responding, that is, to the proposal Milton sets out for Diodati’s consideration in Epitaphium Damonis, for Milton’s habit of conversing with Diodati about his poetic aspirations has been incorporated into the elegy mourning the cessation of that conversation.29 By removing any specifically British features from his tale of war, Raphael’s epic makes the point that all martial, nationalist epics can be reduced to the same essential elements: deceit, treachery, seduction, vainglorious boasting, “tribute” demanded and refused, individual martial prowess and discomfiture, massed attack and resistance, defeat and flight. Just as Diodati might have done, Raphael in effect points out the limitations of the epic subject chosen by a younger Milton.30 Literary critical insights are revealed just as astutely in Raphael’s account of the Creation, which can be seen to push beyond even the naturalistic pastoralism of Epitaphium Damonis to new degrees of representational freedom. In the elegy, Thyrsis seeks out elements of the landscape (thickets, dark valleys, stormy twilights) that echo his somber mood. We thus see him construing nature to make it answer his emotional needs, a process

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epitomized in the treatment of his sheep. By neglecting them and allowing them to grow hungry, Thyrsis produces in them the appearance of sadness—or even, as Gordon Campbell notes, of mourning.31 Adam and Eve do not tend sheep in Paradise Lost, and Milton assigns to Raphael the immortal perspective on earthly pastoralism that is now Diodati’s. Raphael makes it clear that the good Creation answers God’s “great Idea” (PL 7.557), an implicit rebuke to Thyrsis, who would make the natural world and its creatures answer the limited outlook of an individual human being. As a more mature Diodati might have done, Raphael subtly undermines the assumptions inherent in pastoral lament. His account of Creation emphasizes the naturalistic qualities of sheep: their behavior in groups (they flock together, PL 7.461, 472), their ability to feed themselves (they pasture, PL 7.462), and their distinctive physicality (they have fleeces and they bleat, PL 7.472). Raphael’s sheep do not belong to the “emblematic natural history of the Renaissance”;32 they belong rather to the beginnings of modernity. Thus the epic moves beyond the pastoralism that was so pronounced a feature of Milton and Diodati’s early correspondence and of Epitaphium Damonis to suggest a renovated representation of the natural world. Raphael himself learns, through Adam’s account of his first moments of life, what it means for humanity to be “the Master work, the end / Of all yet don” (PL 7.505–6). Raphael repeats in his account of the Creation God’s command to humankind to fill and subdue the earth, “and throughout Dominion hold / Over Fish of the Sea, and Fowle of the Aire, / And every living thing that moves on the Earth” (PL 7.532–34). Adam interprets “Dominion” for Raphael, telling him that God brought “each Bird and Beast” to receive their names from Adam and to pay him “fealtie / With low subjection” (PL 8.342, 344 – 45). If the pathetic fallacy is revealed to be an inadequate model for humanity’s relationship with the natural environment, so too is a model of dominion without knowledgeable and sympathetic involvement. When Raphael acknowledges at the beginning of the astronomical debate in book 8 that “Heav’n / Is as the Book of God before thee set, / Wherein to read his wondrous Works, and learne / His Seasons, Hours, or Dayes, or Months, or Yeares” (PL 8.66–69), he and Adam disagree about a particular interpretation of heaven but not about the necessary (and necessarily incomplete) activity of interpretation. Paradise Lost embodies a recognition central to the burgeoning new philosophy, that the relationship of the rest of the

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natural world to humanity is a matter for careful and continued study. Only after the discussion of astronomy does Adam propose that he and Raphael “descend / A lower flight, and speak of things at hand / Useful” (PL 8.198–200). First they express their admiration for each other, as if an assurance of mutual regard is necessary before the sharing of intimacies. Their sharing culminates in Raphael’s blush, which suggests that he learns most from this last part of the conversation (for which Eve’s absence is a necessary precondition). In their moment of privacy, Adam recounts for Raphael his experience of the love of a woman, an experience that the young Milton had only imagined in the Italian sonnets he shared (or intended to share) with Diodati.33 Adam, here, is Raphael’s teacher. Precisely because it is “union of pure with pure,” angels’ love-making can know nothing of the joys of the flesh: “Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure / Desiring; nor restrain’d conveyance need / As Flesh to mix with Flesh, or Soul with Soul” (PL 8.627–29). To represent flesh as a restraint is to elide those joys, so that Raphael’s defense of the embrace of spirits merely convicts him, ironically, of virginity. Fowler’s much-cited claim that Raphael’s rosy red blush is the proper “colour of angelic ardour” is undoubtedly correct, but there is more to it.34 In Raphael’s blush, it is impossible not to see the modest blush that Epitaphium Damonis attributes to the virginal Diodati. Qu`od tibi purpureus pudor, & sine labe juventus Grata fuit, qu`od nulla tori libata voluptas, En etiam tibi virginei servantur honores; (ED 212–14) [Because the blush of modesty was all you knew, and because your youth was without blame, because you never married, likewise the honors of virginity are retained for you]

Significantly, the discussion about passion does not end in Adam’s submissively yielding to Raphael’s advice. Though “half abash’t,” he maintains that his delight in Eve does not make him passion’s slave, and Raphael can only repeat his warning to Adam to persevere in obeying God. Solely in the area of sexual experience with women, Adam-Milton’s knowledge surpasses Raphael-Diodati’s. Readers of Paradise Lost assume, without undue concern, that the “I” represented in the proems to books 1, 3, 7, and 9 has a

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connection to John Milton, the historical person. If, as I am suggesting, the friendship between Raphael and Adam represented in books 5–8 bears some relationship to the historical friendship between Charles Diodati and John Milton, then it follows that there is some relationship between the historical Charles Diodati and the portrait of Raphael—and between the historical John Milton and the portrait of Adam. We know that another Raphael used his wife as a model when painting the Madonna, for the imagination builds on the concrete foundations of reality when it seeks to embody the archetypal or the universal. But by delicately signaling that the archangel Raphael reflects some aspect of Charles Diodati, Milton suggests not simply that we construe paradise from this fallen world, but that we know paradise from it. If, that is, we can imagine the communion that took place in paradise between archangel and first man by means of the communion of friends in the fallen world, then the prelapsarian must be immanent in the postlapsarian. Paradise in its beauty and perfection has not been wholly lost, to be restored only after apocalypse; it may be revivified in our daily experience, in the “human face divine.” In a letter to Diodati of 1637, Milton confesses to his friend that he is thinking of “an immortality of fame.”35 “What am I doing?” he asks as in Diodati’s voice and then answers: “Growing my wings and practising flight. But my Pegasus still raises himself on very tender wings. Let me be wise on my humble level.”36 In Paradise Lost, the poet can “soar / Above th’ Aonian Mount” (PL 1.14 –15) only after the muse descends to him. In book 5, the descent of the phoenix ushers in the tale of war in heaven, which places Raphael-Diodati in the structural position of muse sent by God. Michael has a similar role in book 11. The descent of the two archangels thus completes the interrupted sequence of invocations in books 1, 3, 7, and 9.37 As muse, Raphael uniquely allows the poet to resolve the tension between a desire for flight and a desire for humble wisdom. Diodati’s human qualities— learnedness and sociability, integrity and versatility in conversation, gentleness, and affability—are preserved and distilled, not sloughed off, in the transition to immortal Raphael. The phoenix and the bird of paradise, the archangel and the human being, are “Each to other like, more then on earth is thought” (PL 5.576). And if Adam in conversation with Raphael is (in whatever degree) a self-portrait of John Milton? Not surprisingly, given that the conversation is a portrait of friendship, the qualities displayed by Adam-Milton complement those of Raphael-Diodati.

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The archangel is sociable, learned, and versatile; the first man, hospitable, intelligent, and curious. The angel’s integrity is matched by the man’s determination to persevere. Gentleness and affability on the part of the divine being are met with respect and gratitude on the part of the human being. The expression of gratitude deserves a closer look. “Gentle to me and affable hath been / Thy condescension,” says Adam at Raphael’s parting, “and shall be honour’d ever / With grateful Memorie” (PL 8.648–50). In terms of the poem’s fiction, this is a promise. In terms of the poet’s autobiography, this is a statement of fact. At every reading of Paradise Lost, the honoring of Raphael—and hence the reviving of Diodati’s fame—is repeated. We remember the solemn vow made in Epitaphium Damonis: “Constabitque tuus tibi honos, longumque ´ vigebit / Inter pastores” [“Your reputation will outlive you, in the words of shepherds, for many years to come”]. To the qualities comprising the poet’s self-portrait in Adam, we need to add one more: faithfulness to his promise. Resurrexit sicut dixit.

NOTES 1. Richard Bentley, ed., Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: A New Edition (London, 1732), PL 5.269.n. 2. This body of scholarship is concerned with three distinct but related areas: the rise of natural philosophy, with the emphasis upon philosophy; developments in natural history; and changing perspectives on humanity’s stewardship of the earth, i.e., ecocriticism. For the first area, see Stephen Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in SeventeenthCentury England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Harinder S. Marjara, Contemplation of Created Things: Science in “Paradise Lost” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); and John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). For the second area, see Bruce Boehrer, “Milton and the Reasoning of Animals,” Milton Studies 39 (2000): 50–73; Karen L. Edwards, Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (Leicester: University of Leicester Press, 1992), especially the essay by Timothy Raylor, “Samuel Hartlib and the Commonwealth of Bees,” 91–129. For the third area, see Ken Hiltner, “Place, Body, and Spirit Joined: The Earth-Human Wound in Paradise Lost,” Milton Quarterly 35 (2001): 113–17; Diane McColley, “Milton and Ecology,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 157–73, and “Milton and Nature: Greener Readings,” Huntingdon Library Quarterly 62, nos. 3– 4 (2001): 423– 44; and Alan Rudrum, “ ‘For the Earth shall be all Paradise’: Milton, Vaughan, and the Neo-Calvinists on the Ecology of the Hereafter,” Scintilla 4 (2000): 39–52.

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3. See Edwards, Natural World, 85–114. 4. George Hakewill, An Apologie or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World (London, 1630), d1r. 5. Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 1:202. 6. Simon Wilkin, ed., Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, 4 vols. (London, 1826– 35), 2:445n.6. Dean Wren’s copy of Pseudodoxia Epidemica is now at the Bodleian Library; his annotations are supplied in footnotes to Wilkin’s edition. 7. Thomas Greene, The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 386. The problem has also been described as a blurring of “tenor” and “vehicle,” terms taken from I. A. Richards’s The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, 96). Paul Ricoeur, most notably, has called the adequacy of Richards’s terminology into question. See Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. R. Czerney et al. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 76–83. 8. Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 14 vols. (1857–74; Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Friedrich Frommann, 1963), 3:331. 9. Greene, Descent, 386. 10. For considerations of what constitutes such uniqueness (or indeed, whether the friendship is unique), see Donald Dorian, The English Diodatis (1950; New York: Ams, 1969); William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 49–50, 203– 4; and John T. Shawcross, John Milton: The Self and the World (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 33–60. 11. John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998). All quotations from and translations of Milton’s poetry, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text, are from this edition. 12. The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969). 13. Philemon Holland, trans., The History of the World, by Pliny [Plinius Secundus], 2 vols. (London, 1601), 1:271. 14. John Bostock and H. T. Riley, eds. and trans., The Natural History, by Pliny, 6 vols. (London, 1855–57), 2:479n.10. 15. The editors of the Loeb edition note, for instance: “This description tallies fairly closely with the golden pheasant of the Far East” (Pliny, Natural History, Loeb Classical Library, 10 vols., 1938–57, 3:292n.). 16. Pierre Belon, Portraits d’oyseaux, animaux, serpens, herbes, arbres, homes et femmes d’Arabie & Egypte (Paris, 1557), 24. 17. Johannes Sambucus, Emblemata, cum aliquot nummis antiqui operis (Antwerp, 1564), 132. See Wolfgang Harms, “On Natural History and Emblematics in the Sixteenth Century” in The Natural Sciences and the Arts: Aspects of Interaction from the Renaissance to the 20th Century, ed. Allan Ellenius, Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Figura Nova, no. 22 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1985), 68n.5 and 70 (for the reproduced emblem). 18. John Ray, The Ornithology of Francis Willughby (London, 1678), 90. The work was first published in Latin as Ornithologiae libri tres in 1676 and translated by Ray two years later. 19. Ray, Ornithology, 90.

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20. Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 1:203. 21. Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), 20. 22. Wood, Magician’s Doubts, 20. 23. Wood, Magician’s Doubts, 27. 24. Wood, Magician’s Doubts, 27. 25. Gordon Campbell, “Imitation in Epitaphium Damonis,” Milton Studies 19 (1984): 166. 26. Campbell, “Imitation,” 166. 27. See sonnet 2, “Donna leggiadra il cui bel nome honora,” and the analysis in John Smart, ed., The Sonnets of Milton (Glasgow, 1921), 137– 44, cited in John Carey, ed., John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, 2nd ed. (London: Pearson-Longman, 1997), 1-2n. 28. Raphael’s flight to earth also seems a fulfillment of the wish Milton expresses in his 1637 letter to Diodati: “Quare quod sine tuo incommodo fiat, advola ocyus & aliquo in loco te siste, qui locus mitiorem spem præbeat, posse quoquo modo fieri ut aliquoties inter nos saltem visamus, quod utinam nobis non aliter esses vicinus” (The Complete Works of John Milton, ed. F. A. Patterson, 18 vols. [New York: Columbia University Press, 1931–38], 12:20, hereafter cited as CW). The letter is translated as follows in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al, 8 vols. in 10 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82, hereafter cited as CPW): “if you conveniently can, fly hither with all speed and settle in some place which may offer brighter hope that somehow we may visit each other at least sometimes” (1:324). 29. A. S. P. Woodhouse comments, “The Epitaphium Damonis is, in effect, the last of the epistles to Diodati” (“Milton’s Pastoral Monodies,” in Studies in Honour of Gilbert Norwood, ed. Mary E. White [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952], 265). 30. An explicit rejection of Milton’s youthful plans for an Arthurian epic occurs, of course, at the beginning of PL, book 9. It is important to note that this rejection of martial epic follows Raphael and Adam’s discussion of the complexities of the marital relationship in book 8. Compared to the genuine challenge of knowing “That which before us lies in daily life” (PL 8.193), the battles of Arthurian epic are “feigned” indeed, for they are both staged (as jousts and tilts) and falsely regarded as significant contests. 31. Campbell, “Imitation,” 171. 32. The phrase is from the title of W. B. Ashworth, Jr., “Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nicholas Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17–37. 33. See John Carey, “The Date of Milton’s Italian Poems,” Review of English Studies, n.s., 14 (1963): 383–86. 34. See John Carey and Alastair Fowler, eds., The Poems of John Milton (London: Longman, 1968), PL 8.618–20n. The claim is tempered in the second edition: “more likely the blush is from joy or ardour” (Alastair Fowler, ed., John Milton: “Paradise Lost” [London: Longman, 1998], PL 8.618–20n). 35. CPW 1.327. This is designated letter 8 in CPW, and familiar letter 7 in CW 12:22–29, which includes the Latin text. 36. CPW 1.327. The blush that seems to be a recurring feature of Milton’s imagined conversations with Diodati appears here in potentia. Preceding the

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quoted passage is this plea: “Listen, Diodati, but in secret, lest I blush; and let me talk to you grandiloquently for a while” (CPW 1.327). 37. Fowler, who analyzes the pattern of invocations, observes that “the positions of the invocations were originally determined by” the first edition of Paradise Lost (Carey and Fowler, PL 9.1– 47n). In his 1998 edition of Paradise Lost, Fowler, renaming the invocations at Books 1, 3, 7, and 9 “personal prologues,” identifies “a structural pattern of thematic 1:2 ratio” (PL 9.1– 47n). The possibility I am suggesting—that Raphael and Michael ought also to be regarded as muses—also creates an intelligible pattern in the ten-book structure: i2i4i||6ii9i. The juxtaposition of two invocations in the poem’s second half (like the juxtaposition of two stressed syllables in a line of verse) slows down the narrative flow, thus emphasizing the importance of and heightening the contrast between the books’ subjects, Creation and Fall. The descent of God-given muses in the concluding book of each half signals the Creator’s providential control both of angelic and human history and of poetic inspiration.

Wilderness Exercises: Adversity, Temptation, and Trial in Paradise Regained N. H. Keeble

I. “STEP

BY STEP LED ON”

I who erstwhile the happy garden sung . . .1

THE FIRST LINE OF PARADISE REGAINED MAKES EXPLICIT THE IMplication of its title: this is Miltonic work. The poem begins in recollection of Paradise Lost, and in metonymic allusion to humanity’s original innocence and bliss. Thereafter, Paradise Lost shadows its successor as the movement between Hell and Heaven of its first three books is reproduced in miniature in the opening two hundred lines of Paradise Regained. The demonic council summoned by Satan “in mid air,” “Within thick clouds and dark tenfold involved, / A gloomy consistory” (l.39,41– 42), at which the infernal powers commit to “their great dictator” Satan the “main enterprise” of subverting the “attested Son of God” (1.112, 113, 122, 124), is succeeded by the rejoicing of the “full frequence bright / Of angels” in heaven upon hearing that the Father is to fulfill his “purposed counsel pre-ordained” by frustrating the “stratagems of hell” through “This perfect man, by merit called my Son” (1.127, 128–29, 166, 180). Heaven and Hell are once again preoccupied with distant and apparently inconsequential human beings, the “puny habitants” of earth, this time a man “obscure, / Unmarked, unknown” (1.24 –25), the Father’s “new favourite.”2 And it is with explicit reference to his previous “dismal expedition” that Satan sets out for this second stage of his “exploit” to “ruin Adam” (1.101, 102). His destination, though, is this time very different. While the opening of Paradise Regained announces continuity with Paradise Lost, it also registers a stark contrast between the “happy garden” context of Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian life and the 142

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fallen world in which the Son must fulfill his mission. Shortly after his baptism by John, the Son One day forth walked alone, the spirit leading And his deep thoughts, the better to converse With solitude, till far from track of men, Thought following thought, and step by step led on, He entered now the bordering desert wild. (1.189–93)

In his reverie the Son does not watch where he is going, and later, a little surprised to find just how far he has wandered, he has no idea where he is, or why he is there; but, though careless of himself, and mystified, he is confident that he has walked with divine purpose. No less than Milton’s Samson led by the “guiding hand” of Providence is the Son “step by step led on”; he is “by some strong motion . . . led / Into this wilderness” (1.290–92) as Samson is inspired by “rousing motions” (SA, ll.1, 1382). However, if the Son does not (yet) understand “to what intent” an unknown “guide” has brought him to this place (1.291,336), the reader, privy to divine intentions, knows very well: the Father means “To exercise him in the wilderness” (1.156). In this Milton is of course following his sources in which “Jesus [was] led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil” (Matt. 4:1; cf. Luke 4:1 AV). Mark is more forceful—“the Spirit driveth him into the wilderness” (Mark 1:12)—but none of the synoptic gospels has much more to say on the matter. Mark mentions that Jesus “was there in the wilderness . . . with the wild beasts” (Mark 1:13) and Matthew and Luke both have him there for forty days, fasting, after which he is “an hungred” (when in Matthew he is tempted, though throughout the forty days in Luke) (Matt. 4:2–3; Luke 4:2). Beyond this, the evangelists show no interest in the material circumstances of the temptation. In Milton’s much expanded narrative, however, that “desert wild” is insistently present.3 It is again a “desert wild” at 2.109, but also a “pathless desert” (1.296) and a “woody maze” (2.246), akin— rather unexpectedly in view of Milton’s denigration of the “fabled knights” of romance in Paradise Lost (PL, 9.30)—to the “Forest wide” in which were tested “Knights of Logres, or of Lyones” (2.359–60). The Son, in a “wild solitude . . . / Of all things destitute” (2.304), is “Lost in a desert here and hunger-bit” (2.416). Indeed, after only ten lines it is the “desert” that the poem explicitly identifies as his “victorious field / Against the spiritual foe” (1.9–10). The wilderness, it seems, is not incidental but es-

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sential to the divine plan. No other locus is adequate to the action: the Father will have his Son prove himself there, and nowhere else. The wilderness, then, matters. Within this barren place lies something of the meaning of the poem. The purpose of this essay is to explore why (and how) in Milton’s amplification of the biblical narratives the desert develops from a circumstantial detail to a resonantly significant part of the poem’s design. Milton uses traditional assumptions and hermeneutical strategies but he deploys them to serve his own very particular and pointed cultural ends. His desert is shaped by the cultural landscape of the 1660s. The Miltonic wasteland, this essay will argue, both issues a challenge to, and offers a refuge from, the political and religious configuration of the Restoration regime.

II. LOCATING

THE

WILDERNESS

We may begin by asking the question: where, in fact, does Satan confront the Son? Initially, as we might expect, this “desert wild” borders “Bethabara, where John baptized” and where the Son “some days / Lodged” before taking his meditative stroll (1.183– 84). He walks a good way, for later the disciples, searching “nigh to Bethabara” (2.20), fail to find him, and when the Son himself looks around he on every side beheld A pathless desert, dusk with horrid shades; The way he came not having marked, return Was difficult, by human steps untrod; (1.295–98)

His isolation is becoming ominous, as though removed from the realm of the human. Here, lost, he wanders for forty days. By the time he meets Satan, disguised as an “aged man in rural weeds” (1.314), his predicament has grown dire: he is “far from path or road of men, who pass / In troop or caravan, for single none / Durst ever, who returned, and dropped not here / His carcase” (1.322–25). Its distance from human habitation is so emphasized (the “nighest” town or village “is far” [1.332]) that this desert is hardly any longer local and specific, though it still has a foothold in topographical fact and contemporary human experience: it is at least traversed by caravans. Shortly afterward, however, when

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the Son replies to Satan’s first temptation, it becomes altogether vaster and vaguer: Is it not written . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Man lives not by bread only, but each word Proceeding from the mouth of God; who fed Our fathers here with manna; in the mount Moses was forty days, nor eat nor drank, And forty days Elijah without food Wandered this barren waste, the same I now: (1.347–54)

The Son, it seems, has wandered far into Biblical story. “Here” is no longer near Bethabara; it is rather the locus of a series of significant moments in Israelite history: Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai; the forty years’ desert wanderings of the Israelites; the fasting of Elijah. Indeed, for the alert reader this desert had already begun to slip its geographical and temporal moorings when the disguised Satan warned the Son that none wandered in it solitary “and dropped not here / His carcase” (1.324 –25): that “your carcase . . . shall fall in the wilderness” was the punishment pronounced by Jehovah on those rebellious Israelites who, following the Exodus, desired to return to Egypt and “murmured against Moses and against Aaron” in the wilderness of Paran (Num. 12:16, 14:2, 4, 29). The Son walks where Israel had walked to the promised land, in the footsteps of the prophets: as Satan later observes, “Others of some note, / As story tells, have trod this wilderness” (2.306–7, italics added). The location of the temptation of Christ has become a conflation (or identification) of many wildernesses.4

III. TYPE

AND

SHADOWS

This is not because Milton’s grasp of geography was weak. In both the Old Testament’s history of Israel’s covenant relationship with Jehovah and in its records of the lives of patriarchs and prophets, religious dedication and desert journeys are so interconnected that wilderness landscapes, and journeys through them, become the context in which spiritual destinies are fulfilled. In the two traditions of Israel’s origins, in the Abraham legends and the Exodus saga, is repeated the same pattern of a

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decision to leave, a journey under divine guidance, testing in the wilderness, divine approval, and covenant. In Milton’s own summary account, Moses “had forsaken all the greatness of Egypt, and chose a troublesome journey in his old age through the wilderness.”5 Subsequent biblical narratives repeatedly contrive adverse circumstances to drive those favored of God into the desert to find divine favor and spiritual illumination. Again and again biblical story is peripatetic, nomadic, migratory, its protagonists outcasts, wanderers, exiles in barren and hostile lands. Moses fled after killing the Egyptian to live as “a stranger in the land of Madian,” “a stranger in a strange land” (Acts 7:29; Exod. 2:22); Elijah “fled / Into the desert” to escape Jezebel (2.270–71; 1 Kings 19:4 –8); and David sought refuge from Saul in a succession of wilderness places (e.g., 1 Sam. 23:14, 24, 29), where, in the words of the gloss of the old Geneva Bible on 1 Samuel 16:18, “God would exercise him in sundry sortes.”6 Epiphany awaits such desert wanderers: it is “in the church in the wilderness,” “in the wilderness of Mount Sinai,” that “an angel of the Lord” appeared to Moses (Acts 7:30, 38); Isaiah’s prophecy of one “that crieth in the wilderness” (Isa. 40:3) is realized in John’s proclamation of the Lord “in the wilderness of Judaea” (Matt. 3:1). An incentive (and authority) for the Christian tradition to seize on and develop, the figurative suggestiveness of this repeated patterning was to hand in the presentation of the Old Testament patriarchs as models of faith in the epistle to the Hebrews. Hebrews 11 turns Old Testament story to Christian purpose through an interpretative strategy that reads desert journeys as quests for salvation and wilderness habitation as exile from heaven. Its presentation of Noah, Abraham, Moses, and other Old Testament figures as Christian exemplars seizes on migrancy and exile as the condition of their faith: they are “strangers and pilgrims on the earth” who “seek a country,” “a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he hath prepared for them a city” (Heb. 11:13–16). On the authority of Paul (supposed the writer of Hebrews) and of Augustine (who developed this reading in The City of God),7 these narrative patterns and topoi came to control the shape of the Protestant—still more, Puritan—imagination, for here was a biblically authorized model for the representation of experience.8 Traditional patristic and medieval typological readings of the Old Testament survived the Reformation9 and were developed in such works as: Christ Revealed: or the Types and

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Shadows of Our Saviour in the Old Testament (1635) by the early seventeenth-century English Puritan divine Thomas Taylor; the massive Tropologia: a Key to Open Scripture Metaphors (1681) by Milton’s contemporary, the English Baptist Benjamin Keach; and The Figures or Types of the Old Testament (1683) by the ejected Congregational minister Samuel Mather. In the 1690s they engaged the imagination of the New England minister and poet Edward Taylor in a collection of thirty-six (then unpublished) sermons Upon the Types of the Old Testament.10 Such works read the details of Old Testament narratives as “some outward or sensible thing ordained of God under the Old Testament to represent and hold forth something of Christ in the New.”11 Just this approach is adopted by De doctrina christiana when it understands “the name of CHRIST” to include “Moses, and the prophets, who foretold his coming” and when it argues that the “Israelites were commanded to keep the Sabbath holy” “as a shadow or type of things to come.”12 In Paradise Lost it is the exegetical way of angels: Michael instructs Adam that the “imperfect” Mosaic law was given to prepare for “a better Covenant” that the Israelites might move “From shadowy types to truth”; through his dealing with the Israelites in history God is “informing them, by types / And shadows . . . / . . . by what means he shall achieve / Mankind’s deliverance” (PL, 12.300–33, 232– 35). The Bible thus becomes a series of iterations and reiterations, duplications, and repetitions: every wilderness story anticipates the Son’s, and his epitomizes all that have preceded his forty days in the desert. To situate them all in the one location is to enact this narratological interdependence by linking type with anti-type, Moses or Elijah with Christ.13 Wilderness narratives, however, resonated extratextually no less than intertextually. For Taylor, they offered “a notable guide through this pilgrimage of our life”; in them the reader could “see his owne case.”14 Old Testament events were read as symbolic anticipations of individual personal experience and of the general experiences of saints, sinners, and nations. Seventeenth-century circumstances contrived to make this “moral” construction15 of desert narratives peculiarly apt for English Protestants. In biographical fact, Abraham’s calling to “get thee out of thy country” Haran and to journey “unto a land that I will show thee,” and his exodus in obedient response from a center of civilization and from his family, who remained in Mesopotamia, to live as a nomadic tent dweller in the foreign and hostile land of Canaan (Gen. 12:1– 10, 14:4, 10) anticipated the demands their religious commitment

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placed upon many Protestant exiles and later Puritans, many of whom chose exile in the Great Migration of the 1630s. The earliest such group was John Robinson’s separatist church at Scrooby in Nottinghamshire which, in 1608, decided to emigrate to Amsterdam, “to go into a country they knew not . . . for their desires were set on the ways of God.” In 1620 that same resolution took them, as the colonists known to history as the Pilgrim Fathers, to New England: they were, Cotton Mather later wrote, “satisfy’d, they had as plain a command of Heaven to attempt a Removal, as ever their Father Abraham had for his leaving the Caldean Territories.” William Bradford, Plymouth colony’s historian and governor for most of its first thirty-five years, could reflect, in a poem published in New England’s Memorial (1669), Nathaniel Morton’s history of Plymouth based upon Bradford’s own journal: [God] call’d me from my native place For to enjoy the means of grace. In wilderness he did me guide, And in strange lands for me provide.16

That Jehovah had led his people home through the wilderness from their Egyptian captivity subsequently inspired the many “faithfull and freeborn Englishmen,” as Milton called them, who sought relief from “the fury of the Bishops” in “the savage deserts of America”17 by undertaking what Samuel Darnforth called their Errand into the Wilderness (1670).18 Given their Eurocentric assumptions, we could understand Puritan emigrants to America believing that they were embarked for a wilderness, but when, in her untitled poem “As weary pilgrim,” the New England poet Anne Bradstreet creates a wilderness as the context of her mortal life, beset by “dangers,” “travails,” “burning sun,” “briars and thorns,” “hungry wolves,” “erring paths” and “parching thirst,” it is not Massachusetts she is describing.19 Bunyan, after all, found precisely the same topography in Bedfordshire, England: the narrator of The Pilgrim’s Progress walks “through the wilderness of this world” until he lights “upon a certain place, where was a Denn,” and it was “from the Lions Dens,” from the prison where “I stick between the Teeth of the Lions in the Wilderness” that he addressed the reader of his autobiographical Grace Abounding.20 In seventeenthcentury texts, England no less than New England can appear an uncultivated wasteland of scrub and brambles, scorched by a relentless sun, prowled by wild beasts; signposting is poor and

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travelers are prone to lose themselves in featureless deserts. These details do not derive from observation. They recall a far distant land and time in order to trace in their authors’ and readers’ experience the patterns of significance that Hebrews taught them to read in Old Testament story. Bunyan’s representation of his experience reproduces a recognized type: like the exemplars of faith in Hebrews 11, “of whom the world was not worthy,” Bunyan suffers “bonds and imprisonment”; he wanders “in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth” (11:36, 38). Just so, his nonconformist contemporary Oliver Heywood lamented “woe is me that I am forced to dwel in meshech [Ps. 120:5], and sojourne in this weary wildernes, when shal my soul be set at liberty out of the mouldy cage.”21 To walk by faith is to perceive oneself a pilgrim providentially led like the Israelites through the desert. Consequently, one could as readily discern the wilderness in old as in New England. In the Pentateuch narratives the Israelites, of course, are seeking a homeland. However, in the passage in Hebrews that inspired Richard Baxter’s The Saints Everlasting Rest (1650), the “rest” denied to the erring Israelites is identified as eternal bliss (3:7– 4:16). Abraham’s preference for exile over return to Mesopotamia is similarly rendered as the hope for “a better country, that is, an heavenly” (11:8–16). Just so, De doctrina remarks of Moses, “who was the type of the law,” that he “could not lead the children of Israel into the land of Canaan, that is, into eternal rest”; this was reserved for Joshua, “that is, Jesus.”22 With eternal salvation replacing Canaan as the journey’s destination, allegorical and narrative logic demands that the wilderness topography of the desert wanderings signifies the mortal experience that leads to that destiny. The work in which the Presbyterian nonconformist Thomas Gouge, addressing London apprentices, wrote that we are to live “as a citizen of heaven, and a pilgrim on the earth” is entitled The Young Man’s Guide through the Wilderness of this World to the Heavenly Canaan (1670). As Bunyan put it at the conclusion of his preface to Grace Abounding, “The Milk and Honey is beyond this Wilderness.”23 As journeys not for temporal possession but for an eternal kingdom the Israelites’ forty years of desert wandering thus provide a figurative model for the representation of Christian experience. The Geneva Bible supplied Numbers 33 with a map showing “the way, which the Israelites went for the space of fourtie yeres from Egypt though the wilderness of Arabia, vntil they entred into the land of Canaan.” Clearly marked is the wilder-

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ness of Sin (Exod. 17:1). When, in 1655, Faithful Teate published A Scripture-Map of the Wildernesse of Sin, and the Way to Canaan. Or the Sinners Way to the Saints Rest he explained that the wilderness he described was “the WILDERNESSE OF SIN spiritually so called.” He did not “deny in the least the Historicall respect some Scriptures have,” but, reading them “mystically,” he understands “by the Antitype, by the Wildernesse” the state of unregeneracy: “my work is Topographical to draw out the Map of the wilderness . . . of unconversion.”24 The “waste howling wilderness” (Deut. 32:10) has become the mortal experience of sin, of postlapsarian exile, where, like the Israelites in the wilderness of Sin, God will “humble thee, and . . . prove thee” (Deut. 8:2), words Milton uses of the Son’s wilderness trial in Paradise Regained (1.11, 3.189). These are the very terms in which Michael offers Adam a typological reading of Joshua’s/Jesus’ future victories in, and occupation of, Canaan. He shall quell The adversary serpent and bring back Through the world’s wilderness long wandered man Safe to eternal paradise of rest.25 (PL, 12.311–14)

This, then, is the wilderness into which the Son in Paradise Regained has wandered, the wilderness of sin, of temptation, of challenge, God’s preferred arena for spiritual exercises ever since Adam and Eve first became exiles. By bringing to mind the first Adam, the poem’s opening allusion to Eden incidentally identifies the Son as the Second Adam.26 In that office, he inhabits the fallen world: he is “Our second Adam in the wilderness,” as Michael styles him when preparing the first Adam for expulsion from Paradise (PL, 11.383).

IV. DAVID

THE

KING

In the circumstances of the 1660s, however, this became a politically charged wilderness. In the midcentury, it had been particularized in the experience of civil war, as it was by Milton himself when, in Eikonoklastes, he compared the desolation of war to “wandring over that horrid Wilderness” and Parliament’s victory to “the strong and miraculous hand of God assisting us” as it had the Israelites in their need.27 After the Restoration, nonconformists, subject to material distraints, to imprisonment, to social and

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political exclusion and, through the Five Mile Act, to a kind of internal exile, understandably found the wilderness figuration particularly serviceable, but their political opponents were hardly less fond of it in their moment of triumph. The comfortable and reassuring Royalist and episcopalian notion that at the Restoration the divine plan was restoring right order led to representations of Charles II as a man of exemplary patience who had been tested by trial. Concentration upon Charles’s deprivations during the 1650s became a way of according to him the victory that had eluded him militarily. Writing in late March 1660 in reply to Milton’s Readie and Easie Way, the author of The Dignity of Kingship dedicated his apologia for monarchy to “Charles the Good” since he is “the most Illustrious for Vertue, Constancy in Religion, and Heroick Patience, under the most sharp Tryals, and extraordinary Afflictions, wherein (in imitation of his trule Magnanimous Royall Father) he hath appeared more then Conqueror.”28 This construction of Charles inflated his sufferings through references to Israel’s wilderness wanderings and to the Babylonian exile. In his speech at the close of the Convention Clarendon observed that God would not have led Charles “through so many Wildernesses of Afflictions of all Kinds” and preserved him against all enemies “but for a Servant whom He will always preserve as the Apple of His own Eye.” Old Testament history furnished other parallels: like Moses, in the eyes of Royalist interpreters Israel’s first king, Charles had taken refuge in flight to be providentially returned from a foreign land to save his people; like David, he was delivered from his enemies.29 In Richard Allestree’s Sermon Preached at HamptonCourt on the anniversary of the Restoration in 1662 the defeat at Worcester and subsequent exile is turned into a wilderness training ground and Charles into the elect king David: We cannot look upon his life but as the issue of prodigious bounty, snatch’d by immediate Providence out of the gaping jaws of tyrannous, usurping, murtherous malice, merely to keep him for our needs, and for this day: One whom God had train’d up and manag’d for us, just as he did prepare David their King, at thirty years of age to take possession of that Crown which God had given him by Samuel about twelve years before; and in those years to prepare him for Canaan by a Wilderness, to harden him with discipline, that so the luxuries and the effeminacies of a Court might not emasculate and melt him; by constant Watches, cares and business, to make him equal for, habituated to, careful of, and affected with the business of a Kingdome; and by constraining him to dwell in Mesech, with Aliens to his Religion, to

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teach him to be constant to his own, and to love Sion. And hath he not prepared our David so for us?30

Hailing the Happy Restoration of . . . His Sacred Majesty in Astraea Redux (1660), Dryden made the point more succinctly: “Thus banished David spent abroad his time, / When to be God’s anointed was his crime.”31 The wilderness, then, is a contested site: proof of Charles’s entitlement to the throne (and so of the justness of the Restoration) or divinely appointed trial of faith for the persecuted (and so of the injustice of the restored regime and its Satanic agents working through God’s permissive will). Paradise Regained intervenes in this contestation. While Milton’s presentation of the bearing of the Son is in a general way applicable to all believers, it is also in a number of particulars directed to discrediting the Royalists’ appropriation of the wilderness topos for Charles’s escapades and to encouraging dissenting Protestants in the right way to survive their disempowerment.

V. THE WILDERNESS WAY The Son’s encounter with the wilderness begins in submission to the divine will. Just so commentators read those earlier types of the Messiah, notably Abraham. The observation in Hebrews that “by faith” Abraham “went out, not knowing whither he went” (Heb. 11:8) was picked up in the gloss in the Genevan version of the Bible on Genesis 12:1: “In appointing him no certeine place, he [God] proueth so muche more his faith & obedience.” The point was to be a standard one in Protestant commentaries: for the Presbyterian biblical commentator Matthew Henry, for example, Abraham’s removal “was designed to try his Faith and Obedience, and also to separate him, and set him apart, for God.” Abraham was “tried whether he loved God better than he loved his native Soil and dearest Friends,” and, as he was told nothing about the promised land, he “had no particular Securities given him, that he should be no loser by leaving his Country to follow God. Note, Those that deal with God must deal upon trust.”32 In Paradise Lost Michael draws the same inference: Abraham “straight obeys, / Not knowing to what land, yet firm believes” (PL, 12.126–27). Just so, the Son submits unquestioningly to the “strong motion” that leads him into the wilderness even though he does not know “to what intent” he is led to this inhospitable place nor what the outcome may be (1.290–91). When Satan tries

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to persuade him that survival there is impossible, he responds with an affirmation of trust in divine favor: “Who brought me hither / Will bring me hence, no other guide I seek” (1.335–36). Milton follows Calvin and the Reformed tradition33 in interpreting Satan’s first assault as a temptation not to gluttony but to distrust: God could sustain the Israelites, Moses, and Elijah in the wilderness, “Why dost thou then suggest to me distrust” (1.355). It is a point of this trust to accept without repining or complaint that the wilderness experience is essential to growth in grace. The point of spiritual exercises is to strengthen the sinews of faith as it is of physical exercises to tone the body’s muscles. To Adam Michael explains that the Israelites, making their way to Canaan “Through the wild desert, not the readiest way” (PL, 12.216),34 “gain by their delay / In the wide wilderness,” for there they receive the Law and establish their government and “rule by laws ordained” (PL, 12.223–26). And individuals, no less than nations, are refined and ordered by adversity. This, of course, had been a favorite Miltonic theme ever since Areopagitica: “our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion”; “that which purifies us is triall.”35 By 1662, however, the theme had a pointed application in the exhortations of the ejected ministers to their people not to turn aside from the experience of deprivation and (it was already foreseen) persecution that awaited them. As the Son is to be by “firm obedience fully tried” (1.4) in the desert, so, the Quaker Thomas Ellwood wrote of the imprisonments of Isaac Penington the younger in the 1660s, “The Lord had led him through many a strait and difficulty, through many temptations, tryals and exercises (by which he had tryed and proved him).” The linguistic cluster here—led, strait, difficulty, trial, exercise, prove—is the lexicon of the wilderness, explicitly evoked when Ellwood salutes Penington for preferring “the reproach of Christ” to “the Treasures of Egypt” and the “Preferments and Honours of the world.”36 To refuse Satan’s recommendation that he provide food for himself shows in the Son a disregard for material provision, an unworldliness, essential to the wilderness way. The gloss of the old Geneva Bible on Hebrews 11:13 was: “And therefore put not their confidence in thi[n]gs of this worlde.” This unworldiness and otherworldliness are the true distinguishing marks of such a Puritan saint as John Janeway, a “Pilgrim that looked for a better Country, a City that had foundations, whose builder and maker was God. His habit, his language, his deportment, all

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spoke him one of another world.”37 It was to this image that the Quaker William Penn turned when, rejecting the hedonistic culture of the Restoration, he urged mortification and self-denial: “The true self-denying man is a pilgrim; but the selfish man is an inhabitant of the world: the one uses it, as men do ships, to transport themselves or tackle in a journey, that is, to get home; the other looks no further, whatever he prates, than to be fixed in fulness and ease here, and likes it so well, that if he could, he would not exchange.”38 True faith transforms the believer to the status of a migrant, an exile, an outcast. As George Fox put it, “it is the great love of God to make a wilderness of that which is pleasant to the outward eye and fleshly mind.”39 For this reason Christian and Faithful are derided at Vanity Fair as “Outlandish-men,” that is, as foreigners; they do not belong.40 This unworldliness is writ large in Milton’s much expanded version of the second temptation during which Satan offers in succession every means to worldly power and success. The Son’s worldly impoverishment and inconsequence, his apparent unpreparedness to meet his trial, are much stressed. He is a man “obscure, / Unmarked, unknown” (1.24 –25) who has led a “life / private, unactive” (2.80–81; cf. 3.232), “unknown, unfriended, low of birth . . . / Bred up in poverty and straits at home” in Nazareth (2.413, 415). He is “Of all things destitute” (2.305), the companion of “Plain fishermen” (2.27).41 It is this obscurity, the Son’s lack of every advantage of station, accomplishment or power, which, as he thinks, gives Satan his opportunity. “All thy heart is set on high designs, / High actions; but wherewith to be achieved?” (2.410–11) is the question to which he seeks an answer, and the question to which the body of the poem is devoted. The Son rejects as appropriate “means of enterprise” every one of Satan’s proposals. Contrary to Satan’s supposition that “prediction still / In all things, and all men, supposes means, / Without means used, what it predicts revokes” (3.354 –56), the “ostentation vain of fleshly arm,” though “Plausible to the World,” is to the Son “worth naught,” merely an “argument / Of human weakness rather than of strength” (3.387, 393, 401–2). He adheres to another model of renown: to be “singularly good” (3.57) is to be singular, that is, alone, impoverished, marginal, neglected, “Outlandish,” without the insignia of earthly success, fame, or glory. Popular acclaim is derided as the ill-informed prejudice of the “miscellaneous rabble” that bestows glory on “men not worthy of fame” (3.43–56), such (we may conjecture) as Charles II.42 “True glory and renown” is the Father’s “di-

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vine approbation” and the “true applause” of heaven (3.60–64). Against Satan’s heroes—Herod the Great, Herod Antipas, Philip of Macedon, Scipio Africanus, Pompey, Caesar—the Son sets men who “in lowest poverty” have attained “to highest deeds” (2.437): Gideon, whose family was “poor in Manasseh” (Judg. 6:15); Jephthah, the illegitimate “son of an harlot” who, disinherited by his father, “fled from his brethren, and dwelt in the land of Tob” (Judg. 11:1–3); the shepherd David; and a list of exemplary Romans (taken largely from Augustine).43 These all were “men so poor / Who could do mighty things, and could contemn / Riches though offered by the hand of kings” (2.447– 49). Hence, the private and secluded action of Paradise Regained, “in secret done” after which the Son “unobserved / Home to his mother’s house private returned” (1.15, 4.638–39). It is as if nothing has happened, and, of course, from the point of view of public affairs, of the world of which in the poem Satan is the spokesman, nothing has: “Of . . . these forty days none hath regard” (2.315). As Laura Lunger Knoppers has argued,44 this apparent inconsequentiality is one of the ways in which Paradise Regained retorts to the assertive and triumphalist pageantry through which the restored regime insisted that something momentous and of public concern had recently occurred. It is part of Milton’s poetic enterprise in the 1660s to deprive this claim of its authority, as he does implicitly in the very opening of Paradise Lost when the poem anticipates the restoration to be effected by “one greater man”: greater than whom, we may ask?45 Charles may have had his wilderness years, but when he returned, the world was “all agape” (PL, 5.357). Pepys, watching Charles’s magnificent pre-coronation progress through London in April 1661 was quite overcome by its splendor: “So glorious was the show with gold and silver that we were not able to look at it—our eyes at last being so much overcome with it” that it is “impossible to relate the glory of . . . this day.”46 Milton’s disdain for such “tedious pomp” (PL, 5.354) is a measure of how far the Son’s way with wildernesses is to be preferred to that of the man whose more enthusiastic panegyrists—such as Dryden in Astraea Redux—were not above detecting in this second King David the very image of the Son of God; after all, did not David typologically foreshadow Christ?47 A signal aspect of this repudiation of the public world, here as in Paradise Lost, is its rejection of martial heroism and of military force. As Michael had insisted to Adam that those heralded as “Patrons of mankind, gods, and sons of gods” for their military

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conquests were “Destroyers rightlier called and plagues of men” (PL, 11.696–97), so the Son is in no doubt “They err who count it glorious to subdue / By conquest far and wide”: those “titled gods, / Great benefactors of mankind” spread only desolation, “Nothing but ruin whereso’er they rove” (3.71–87). True glory may “be attained / Without ambition, war, or violence; / By deeds of peace” (3.89–91). This pacifism brings Paradise Regained close to the bias of Restoration Quakerism. “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36) becomes something of a refrain in Quaker publications after 1660, coupled with an insistence that “carnal weapons” are to be repudiated in pursuing the Lamb’s War (Isa. 53:7).48 “All Friends, everywhere,” wrote Fox, should “ keep out of plots and bustling and the arm of the flesh . . . Ye are called to peace, therefore follow it . . . all that pretend to fight for Christ they are deceived, for his kingdom is not of this world”; and again, “Christ . . . said his kingdom was not of this world; if it was, his servants should fight, but it was not and therefore his servants do not fight.” A Declaration of 1661, prompted by outrage at the uprising of Thomas Venner, of which Fox was one of twelve signatories, affirmed that “All bloody principle and practices, we . . . do utterly deny, with all outward wars and strife and fightings with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretence whatsoever. This is our testimony to the whole world.”49 “Who fights for God must not Man’s Weapons use”: this moral Milton’s Quaker friend Thomas Ellwood drew from the defenselessness of David before Goliath. Whether or not it was Ellwood who, as he claimed, gave Milton the idea for Paradise Regained, the poem articulates his view of aggression.50 Milton is there no more “sedulous by nature to indite / Wars, hitherto the only argument / Heroic deemed” than he had been in Paradise Lost, nor any less committed to “the better fortitude / Of patience,” the victory not of retaliation but of “suffering for truth’s sake” (PL, 9.27–29, 31–32, 12.569). The static, passive action of Paradise Regained constitutes, he claims, a tale “of deeds / Above heroic” (1.14 –15). The Son is to be “proved” by a “great duel” but “not of arms,” not by aspiring to the “victorious deeds” and “heroic acts” which had inspired his youth (1.11, 174, 215–16). He is to Be tried in humble state, and things adverse, By tribulations, injuries, insults, Contempts, and scorns, and snares, and violence, Suffering, abstaining, quietly expecting

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Without distrust or doubt, that he may know What I can suffer, how obey? Who best Can suffer, best can do; best reign, who first Well hath obeyed;51 (3.189–96)

“Quietly expecting”: Paradise Regained shares with Quakers— and, indeed, with the politically disempowered nonconformists generally—a quietist emphasis.52 Christians, wrote the Presbyterian nonconformist John Howe, should “with a proportionable unconcernedness . . . look on, and behold the various alternations of political affairs.” “A Christian,” wrote Bunyan in 1684, “must be a harmless Man”; we should “with quietness submit ourselves under what God shall do to us,” enduring with our “own will and consent,” “patient under this mighty hand of God” in meeting trial “not with carnal weapons, but with the graces of the Spirit of God,” studying “to be quiet . . . to be at peace with all men.”53 “All things are best fulfilled in their due time” says the Son (3.182), that is, in the Restoration context, without rebellious or revolutionary military intervention.54 That is a permissible inference since the wilderness of “Contempts, and scorns, and snares and violence” (3.191) foreseen by the Son, like Milton’s own “evil days” in Paradise Lost (7.25) and the “unjust tribunals” under which faithful Israelites suffer in Samson Agonistes (l.695), is recognizably the persecutory Restoration regime experienced by nonconformists. These are inescapably deictic references, no less than Bunyan’s marginal gloss on his wilderness “Denn”: “The gaol.”55 When in Paradise Regained Satan, now “Quite at a loss,” foresees for the Son “Sorrows, and labours, opposition, hate, / . . . scorns, reproaches, injuries, / Violence and stripes” (4.386–88), he fails to make the connexion between his own bafflement as tempter and these trials. What he takes to be signs of the Son’s inadequacy are rather the marks of his election: God’s chosen suffer.56 Hence, when Satan offers the Son a way to escape this oppression, the Son, rejecting these “politic maxims” and “cumbersome / luggage of war” (3.400– 401), prefers what Milton elsewhere calls “the unresistable might of Weaknesse.”57 The allusion is to I Corinthians 1:27: “God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty”; still more relevant is II Corinthians 12:9, “my strength is made perfect in weakness,” Milton’s own personal motto.58 The lesson that in Paradise Lost Adam had learned from Michael’s vision of human history, that “Subverting worldly

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strong” is the work of “things deemed weak” (PL, 12.567–68), is echoed in Paradise Regained in the Father’s assertion that the Son will “conquer Sin and Death, the two grand foes, / By humiliation and strong sufferance: / His weakness shall o’ercome Satanic strength” (1.159–61). Refusing, then, all incentives to act, the Son will “endure the time” (4.174). For De doctrina, the exemplification of such Christian patience is the very point of spiritual trial: God tempts “even righteous men, in order to prove them. He does this . . . to exercise or demonstrate their faith or patience, as in the case of Abraham and Job.”59 “Patient Job” (3.95), the type of “constant perseverance” (1.148) shadows his anti-type, the Son, throughout Paradise Regained.60 The Son’s “strong sufferance” (1.160) follows what Barbara Lewalski has called the “Jobean heroic pattern” of patient endurance.61 His constancy and steadfastness, are, as Laura Lunger Knoppers has noted, adjectivally, adverbially and figuratively reiterated throughout the poem: he bears himself “temperately” (2.378), “patiently” (2.432), “calmly” (3.43); he is “unmoved” (3.386), “patient” (4.420), “Unshaken” (4.421); he is “as a rock / Of adamant” (4.533–34). This rhetorical commitment to stasis is realized, finally, in the Son’s miraculous immobility upon the pinnacle of the temple (4.561).62 Quietist and pacifist though the emphasis of Paradise Regained might be, such Christian patience is no passive thing. The point was commonly made in early modern Protestant writing through the Pauline image of the race for the prize or crown of salvation (1 Cor. 9:24; Gal. 5:7; Phil. 2:16; Heb. 12:1), invoked by Milton himself in his famous assertion that “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that slinks . . . out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”63 Though movement in Paradise Regained is ambulatory rather than expeditious, imagery of energetic engagement, of exertion and of contest, is recurrently present in the poem’s figures of the duel and of combat, an image cluster that appeals to the figure of Hercules (e.g., 1.9–10, 155–59, 174, 4. 563–71).64 In this, Milton was following the bias of contemporary representations of the temptation of Christ: Perkins and Taylor both spoke of Christ’s “combat” with the Devil, Matthew Henry of his “famous duel” and of him being “dieted for combat, as wrestlers use to be.”65 The poem insists, too, on the need for stamina and endurance. In his The Heavenly Foot-man (1698), a sermon treatise on 1

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Corinthians 9:24, Bunyan admonishes his readers: “It is an easy matter for a Man to Run hard for a spurt, for a Furlong, for a Mile or two: O but to hold out for a Hundred, for a Thousand, for Ten Thousand Miles; that a Man that doth this, he must look to meet with Cross, Pain, and Wearisomness to the Flesh.”66 In The Pilgrim’s Progress, Honest, “an old man” who has “bin a Traveller in this Rode many a day,” has seen pilgrims “set out as if they would drive all the World afore them. Who yet have in a few days, dyed as they in the Wilderness, and so never gat sight of the promised Land.”67 Herein lies the significance of Satan’s warning to the Son that those who find themselves in this wilderness leave their carcasses there: “many Thousands of the Children of Israel in their Generation, fell short of Perseverance, when they walk’d from Egypt towards the Land of Canaan. Indeed, they went to the work at first pretty willingly, but they were very short-winded, they were quickly out of Breath, and in their Hearts they turned back again into Egypt.”68 This had been the charge Milton leveled against the English in The Readie and Easie Way: they were “chusing them a captain back for Egypt.”69 No wonder, for “the way is long, (I speak Metaphorically) and there is many a dirty step, many a high Hill, much Work to do, a wicked Heart, World and Devil to overcome. I say, there are many steps to be taken by those that intend to be Saved, by running or walking in the steps of that Faith of our Father Abraham. Out of Egypt, thou must go, thorow the Red Sea; thou must run a long and tedious Journey, thorow the wast howling Wilderness, before thou come to the Land of Promise.”70 In his capacity to endure in the wilderness, to resist the temptation to return to Egypt, the Son exemplifies the spiritually athletic Protestant hero; but he also demonstrates a bearing incompatible with the emphases of Restoration Royalist culture and one which, in its repudiation of political power and military force, offers consolation to those exiled by that regime. Ironically, Satan’s dismissive exclamation that “The wilderness / For thee is fittest place” (4.372–73) is quite true, though not in Satan’s derisive sense. Only there can the Son construct through patient endurance the inner kingdom of fortitude (“he who reigns within himself, and rules / Passions, desires, and fears, is more a king” [2.466–67]) which will raise Eden “in the waste wilderness” (1.7), so fulfilling another of Isaiah’s prophecies:71 “The Lord shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord” (Isa. 51:3).

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NOTES 1. Paradise Regained, 1.1, in John Carey, ed., Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1997). All citations from Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (hereafter referred to as SA) are from this edition. 2. Paradise Lost, 2.367, 9.175, in Alastair Fowler, ed., Milton: Paradise Lost, 2nd ed. (Harlow: Longman, 1998). All citations from Paradise Lost (hereafter referred to as PL) are from this edition. 3. Both desert and wilderness occur far more frequently in Paradise Regained than in the remaining body of Milton’s poetry (including Paradise Lost) and more frequently in this single poem than in the entire corpus of his English prose. William Ingram and Kathleen Swaim, A Concordance to Milton’s English Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) and Laurence Sterne and Harold H. Kollmeier, A Concordance to the English Prose of John Milton (Binghampton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1985), s.vv. 4. Noted by Elizabeth Marie Pope, “Paradise Regained”: the Tradition and the Poem (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 110–12, and by Barbara Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: the Genre, Meaning and Art of “Paradise Regained” (Providence: Brown University Press, 1966), 195–96, both quoting the passage from Paradise Regained, 1.347 ff. 5. Apology against a Pamphlet, in Don M. Wolfe et al., ed., Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 1:950. 6. Lloyd E. Berry, ed., The Geneva Bible: a facsimile of the 1560 edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969), gloss on 1 Samuel 16:18. 7. St. Augustine, City of God, in Philip Schaff, ed., A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, 14 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978–79), 2:287 (book 15, chap. 6; see also books 15–17 generally). 8. For fuller discussion, see N. H. Keeble, “ ‘To be a pilgrim’: Constructing the Protestant Life in Early Modern England,” in Colin Morris and Peter Roberts, ed., Pilgrimage: the English Experience from Becket to Bunyan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 238–56. 9. For discussion of the apparent paradox of this survival despite the Reformation’s hermeneutical literalism see Thomas H. Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995). 10. Edited by Charles W. Mignon, 2 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989). 11. Samuel Mather, The Figures or Types of the Old Testament (London, 1705), 52. For discussion of the literary consequences of typology in the early modern period, see: Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Typology and Early American Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972); Joseph A. Galdon, Typology and Seventeenth-Century Literature (The Hague: Mouton, 1975); Paul J. Korshin, Typologies in England, 1650–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Mason I. Lowance, The Language of Canaan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); Earl Miner, ed., Literary Uses of Typology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 12. De doctrina christiana, 1.1 (cited in Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 172) and 2.7, in Wolfe, ed., Complete Prose of Milton, 6:126, 705, 707. For discussion of typology in Milton, see Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 164 –82; Jason

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Philip Rosenblatt, Torah and Law in “Paradise Lost” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 220–34, which calls Michael “the typologising angel” and points to the “radically typological Epistle to the Hebrews” as “the principal thematic source” for books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost (160, 218). 13. While, as the Elizabethan Puritan William Perkins observed, there were “diuers opinions” about the location of Christ’s temptation (The Combat betweene Christ and the Diuell Displayed [1606], 6), Milton was following the generality of seventeenth-century commentators in setting his poem where Moses and Elijah had been tried. For examples, see Pope, Tradition and the Poem, 111; Lewalski, Brief Epic, 195–204. 14. Thomas Taylor, David’s Learning, or The Way to True Happiness (London, 1617), 183, 190–91 (quoted by W. R. Owens in Roger Sharrock, gen. ed., Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, 13 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976–94), 12: xxxix. 15. This interpretative strategy represents a continuation of what the old fourfold medieval exegetical system recognized as the “moral” or “tropological” sense (succinctly stated in St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 3 vols. (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), 1:7 (part 1, question 1, article 10). 16. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Samuel Eliot Morrison (New York: Knopf, 1952), 11; Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana: or the Ecclesiastical History of New England (London, 1702), 1.6, §3; Nathaniel Morton, New England’s Memorial, in Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers, [ed. Alexander Young], Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1910), 173. 17. Areopagitica, in Wolfe, ed., Complete Prose of Milton, 1:585. 18. Taken, of course, as the title of Perry Miller’s classic study Errand into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956). See also G. H. Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought (New York: Harper, 1962); Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 126–53. 19. Anne Bradstreet, The Works, ed. Jeannine Hensley (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 283 20. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. James Blanton Wharey, rev. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), 9; John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 1. 21. Oliver Heywood, His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. Horsfall Turner, 4 vols. (Brighouse and Bingley: A. B. Bayes, 1882–85), 1:150 22. De doctrina, 1.26, in Wolfe, ed., Complete Prose of Milton, 6:519. Cf. PL, 12.310. 23. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 4. 24. Faithful Teate, A Scripture-Map of the Wildernesse of Sin, and the Way to Canaan (London, 1655), pref. ep. sigs. A4v, aa1, 2. 25. Cf. Rosenblatt, Torah and Law, 219–20. 26. As noted by Lewalski, Brief Epic, 164 (which discusses the Son as the Second Adam on 222–27). 27. Wolfe, ed., Complete Prose of Milton, 3:580. 28. G. S., The Dignity of Kingship Asserted in Answer to Mr. Milton’s Ready and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (London, 1660), sig. A1. Probably not by Gilbert Sheldon (to whom it is often attributed), but rather, as

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William R. Parker argues in the introduction to his facsimile edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), x–xxi, the physician George Starkey. 29. Journals of the House of Lords, 11:239. See e.g., J[ames] R[amsey], Moses Returned from Midian: or, Gods Kindnesse to a Banished King (Edinburgh, 1660); Gilbert Sheldon, Davids Deliverance and Thanksgiving (London, 1660). 30. Richard Allestree, Sermon Preached at Hampton-Court on . . . the Anniversary of His Sacred Majesty’s Most Happy Return (London, 1662), 34 –35. 31. John Dryden, Astraea Redux, ll. 79–80, in Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, ed., The Poems of John Dryden, 4 vols. (Harlow: Longman, 1995– 2001), 1:42. 32. Matthew Henry, An Exposition of the Five Books of Moses, 2nd ed. (London, 1710), glosses on Genesis 12:1–3. 33. As noted by Pope, Tradition and the Poem, 56–64. 34. David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 122–23, persuasively detects here an echo of the title The Readie and Easie Way, in which Milton admonished the English not to choose “a captain back for Egypt” (Wolfe, ed., Complete Prose of Milton, 7:463); so here, the Israelites are to endure in the desert rather than return “back to Egypt” (PL, 12.219). 35. Wolfe, ed., Complete Prose of Milton, 2:515, 543. 36. Isaac Penington, The Works (London, 1681), sig. C2, quoted by David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 245, 247. 37. James Janeway, Invisibles Realities, Demonstrated in the Holy Life and Triumphant Death of Mr. John Janeway (London, 1671), 91. 38. William Penn, No Cross, No Crown, ed. Norman Penney (York: Sessions, 1981), 40. 39. John L. Nickalls, ed., The Journal of George Fox (London: Religious Society of Friends, 1975), 13. 40. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 90. 41. Noted by Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 251–52, remarking that “these lowly pastoral figures contribute to the poem’s georgic themes” discussed in Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 322–52. 42. This point is made in Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 40. 43. Augustine, City of God, in Schaff, ed., Select Library, 2:98–101 (book 5, chapter 18); noted by John Carey in his note to PR, 2.446. 44. Knoppers, Historicizing Milton, 40– 41. 45. This point is developed in N. H. Keeble, “ ‘Till one greater man / Restore us . . .’: Restoration Images in Bunyan and Milton,” in David Gay, James G. Randall, and Arlette Zinck, ed., Awakening Words; John Bunyan and the Language of Community (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 44 – 45. 46. Robert Latham and William Matthews, ed., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols. (London: Bell, 1970–83), 2:82, 83 (22 April 1661). 47. Steven Zwicker, Dryden’s Political Poetry: the Typology of King and Nation (Providence: Brown University Press, 1972), 61–77.

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48. On this and other Quaker parallels, see Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 242–8. 49. Nickalls, ed., Journal of Fox, 357, 399, 420. 50. Thomas Ellwood, Davideis, ed. Walter Fischer (Heidelberg: n.p., 1936), 23 (l. 252); Thomas Ellwood, The History of Thomas Ellwood, ed. Henry Morley (London: Routledge, 1885), 199–200. 51. See on this theme John M. Steadman, “The ‘Suffering Servant’ and Milton’s Heroic Norm,” Harvard Theological Review 54 (1961): 29– 43; John R. Knott, Jr., Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 168–70; N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987), 229–35. 52. For this quietist bias in nonconformist writing, see Keeble, Literary Culture, 191–204, which is drawn on in this and the preceding paragraph. In Deliver Us from Evil: the Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–1663 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) and Enemies Under His Feet: Radicals and Nonconformists in Britain, 1664 –1667 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), Richard L. Greaves documents plotting and suspected plotting to argue that nonconformity was far more subversively active than has been appreciated. 53. John Howe, The Blessedness of the Righteous (London, 1673), 4; John Bunyan, Seasonable Counsel: or Advice to Sufferers (1684), in Miscellaneous Works, 10:5, 35, 42, 72, 96, 99. 54. For discussion of the quietism of Paradise Regained see Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 242–68; Michael Fixler, Milton and the Kingdoms of God (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 221–71; Andrew Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution (London: Macmillan, 1981), 167– 79; Michael Wilding, Dragon’s Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 249–53. The view that Milton was quietist but not pacifist after 1660 is argued by John Coffey, “Pacifist, Quietist or Patient? John Milton and the Restoration,” Milton Studies 42 (2003): 149–74. 55. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 8. Bunyan and Milton are compared in this respect in Keeble, “ ‘Till one greater man / Restore us . . .,’ ” 27–50. The likenesses are contested by Thomas N. Corns, “Bunyan, Milton, and the Diversity of Radical Protestant Writing,” in N. H. Keeble, ed., John Bunyan: Reading Dissenting Writing (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002), 21–38. 56. This point is made with illustrative citations in Keeble, Literary Culture, 187–91. For the argument that “In Christ’s temptation in the wilderness . . . Milton’s readers would also have seen . . . the persecution of the true church by Antichrist in the Roman or English churches” see the discussion of the wilderness of Revelation 12:6 in Ken Simpson, “The Apocalypse in Paradise Regained,” in Juliet Cummins, ed., Milton and the Ends of Time (Cambridge, forthcoming). I am grateful to Dr. Simpson for allowing me sight of his unpublished paper. 57. Of Reformation, in Wolfe, ed., Complete Prose of Milton, 1:523, quoted by Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 169. This point is further discussed in Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 252–54. 58. William Riley Parker, Milton: a Biography, ed. Gordon Campbell, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 1:479. I am grateful to David Loewenstein for bringing this to my attention.

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59. De doctrina. 1.8, in Wolfe, ed., Complete Prose of Milton, 6:33, cited by Carey, Complete Shorter Poems, n. to 1:156. 60. Job is more frequently mentioned in the poem than any other figure: see, in addition to 1:146, 1:369, 425; 3:64 –67, 95. 61. Lewalski, Brief Epic, 108. Milton had, of course, identified the Book of Job as a “brief model” for epic over twenty years before (Wolfe, ed., Complete Prose of Milton, 1:813), the starting point for Lewalski’s study. 62. Knoppers, Historicizing Milton, 38–39, citing these and other cases. Cf. Knott, Discourse of Martyrdom, 170; Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 260–62. 63. Areopagitica, in Wolfe, ed., Complete Prose of Milton, 2:515. 64. Discussed in Pope, Tradition and the Poem, 115–20; Lewalski, Brief Epic, 227– 41. 65. Perkins, Combat betweene Christ and the Diuell; Thomas Taylor, An Exposition of Christ’s Temptations. Or Christs Combate and Conquest (London, 1659); Matthew Henry, An Exposition of the New Testament, 7th ed., 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1769), 1:13, 14 (glosses on Matt. 4). 66. Bunyan, Miscellaneous Works, 5:161. 67. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 257. 68. Bunyan, Miscellaneous Works, 5:160–61. As Margaret Kean, “Paradise Regained,” in Thomas N. Corns, ed., A Companion to Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 436, well remarks, in this wilderness “It is not the unknown that proves perilous but rather the temptation to return to the old ways.” 69. Wolfe, ed., Complete Prose of Milton, 7:463. 70. Bunyan, Miscellaneous Works, 5:150. 71. On Satan’s multiplication of false Edens in this wilderness, see Kean, “Paradise Regained,” 440– 41. “Wilderness Exercises: Adversity, Temptation and Trial in Paradise Regained” by N. H. Keeble from Milton Studies XLII: Paradise Regained in Context: Genre, Politics, Religion. Albert C. Labriola and David Loewenstein, eds.,  2003 by University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Biblical Structures in Silex Scintillans: The Poetics and Politics of Intertextuality Holly Faith Nelson

I

IN THE CRITICAL DEBATE OVER THE NATURE OF LYRIC COLLECtions, Mary Thomas Crane argues that the structure of many Renaissance poetic collections “undermines attention to narrative sequence” and forestalls a “narrative history of personal experience.”1 Such collections present a series of lyric subjects; they do not fashion a coherent narrative of self. G´erard Genette reaches a similar conclusion about the structure of lyric collections in general: “In a collection of short poems, the autonomy of each piece is generally much greater than the autonomy of the constituent parts of an epic, a novel, or a historical or philosophical work. And even though the thematic unity of the collection may be more or less strong, the effect of sequence or progression is usually very weak, and the order of the constituent parts is most often arbitrary. Each poem is in itself a closed work that may legitimately claim its own title.”2 Earl Miner, however, claims that poetic collections are not necessarily generically distinct from narrative. He identifies “integrated collections,” defined as “minimal” or “plotless narratives,” among which he numbers George Herbert’s The Temple. These plotless narratives afford one who reads sequentially “a pleasure and significance not available to one who reads the lyrics separately.”3 Such integrated collections are governed by principles of “sequential continuousness . . . progression, recurrence and varying relation between the units of a collection.”4 Annabel Patterson adopts a less radical view when she suggests that there are categories and thematic groupings in, for example, the miscellanies of Jonson and Marvell and that such groupings in sequence produce order and coherence in texts previously thought an assortment of unrelated or loosely related verse.5 Miner and 165

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Patterson, then, resist the notion that volumes of poetry are little more than collections of moments, fragments, and segments. Vaughan scholars have entered the debate on the coherence of lyric collections to discuss the relative merit of structuralist readings of Silex Scintillans. Thomas Calhoun reads Silex Scintillans as a work in which Vaughan casts “separate lyrics, detached, hostile to expansive movement” into a “continuously mobile yet enduring design.”6 He finds in Silex Scintillans a “serial operation,” a “dramatic narrative” rooted in both multiplicity and unity: “The sequence then, represents an action that moves from one kind of unity—limited, alien, and defiant of change—through a separation of parts, multiplicity, then back to unity,” bearing a theme of “return, recovery, reform.”7 Initially reluctant to use the words narrative or plot to describe the relationship between or across lyrics in Silex Scintillans, Calhoun is soon at ease with these terms, arguing that the collection conforms to a basic structure or “formula,” describes any lyrics that do not conform to the narrative progression as “punctuations” in the lyric continuum, and finally provides a paraphrase of the “plots” of both parts.8 This “narrative/dramatic sequence,” he claims, is driven by the tumultuous spiritual experiences of a single journeying pilgrim, the “main actor” of the work.9 Though Barbara Lewalski finds that the two parts of Silex Scintillans “are composed of discrete poems” she too insists “that the volume as a whole has impressive unity”: part 1 presents “the earlier stages of the speaker’s experiences as a Christian pilgrim” and part 2 records the “advance in the speaker’s spiritual life” toward assurance.10 Both Calhoun and Lewalski, then, find a linear structure in Silex Scintillans; the volume is viewed as a dramatic narrative in which a pilgrim undertakes an arduous quest for spiritual fulfillment. At the other end of the critical spectrum, Sharon Cadman Seelig finds no structural pattern, controlling metaphor, or “overall scheme” in Silex Scintillans but discovers recurrent themes: “It is even more difficult to find a consistent movement or development in Silex Scintillans than in The Temple, but easier to see Vaughan’s concentration on three main themes or topics”: the book of creatures, meditations on biblical passages or incidents, and poems about divine revelation and the poet’s relationship with God.11 Seelig reminds us, however, that “these three designations are of course emphases, not hard-and-fast categories.”12 Alan Rudrum has also made note of frequent themes or motifs in the collection—potentiality, transfiguration, penitence, mourning, hiddenness, divine immanence in nature—without suggest-

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ing these themes are explored by a single, evolving lyric subject in a narrative work.13 Scholars who discover structural unity in Silex Scintillans often intimate that such structure is based on the “narrative” of Scripture. Some time ago, Jonathan Post claimed that “viewed in its entirety, Silex, like the Bible, moves from Genesis to Revelation, beginning to end, light to darkness.”14 Though Noel Thomas makes no explicit claim in this regard, he discusses Silex Scintillans sequentially in terms of the themes of “infant innocence,” “the old white prophets,” and “a door opened in heaven,” appealing to the biblical pattern of beginnings, foreshadowing, and endings.15 Thomas argues that Vaughan’s is a teleological poetics of revelation concerned with moving the reader toward Apocalypse. So too does Lewalski ground the unity of Silex Scintillans in two external biblical schemes: the macro-archetypal structure from creation to apocalypse and the micro-Pauline structure from election to salvation.16 In light of these claims, we should not dismiss out of hand the possibility that Silex Scintillans is an intertext upon which Scripture’s unity is written. After all, Northrop Frye’s assertion that the wholly concordant mythic structure of the Bible formed the structures of Western literature is, at times, convincing.17 Vaughan and his contemporaries certainly perceived Scripture, a foundational cultural text, as a coherent metanarrative that defined and ordered their lived experience. Rather than interpret Scripture as a loosely related body of texts, Reformers engaged in figural exegesis to render the sixty-six biblical books a singular linear narrative: The emphasis in figural interpretation of the Bible is on the whole putatively temporal sequence narrated, and on the fact that inclusion in it shapes into one story the whole set of independent biblical stories covering its chronological sequences . . . In the service of the one temporally sequential reality the stories become figures of one another, without losing their independent or self-contained status . . . All of them together form one literal narrative.18

Typological exegesis, a form of figural interpretation, was a means to acknowledge the literal historical value of each text while establishing connections between biblical objects, people, and events not transparently related. Old Testament persons, objects, or events foreshadowed Christ or a feature of the Christian dispensation, an association that depended on the interpretation of Scripture as a: “record of the long development by which

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God, with a redemptive purpose always in mind, called Israel into being out of Egypt, led her through the wilderness, made a covenant with her, brought her into Canaan, guided and admonished her through her troubled history . . . and consummated his relationship by sending his Son in Jesus Christ—thereby effecting an eternal salvation by establishing a people of God whose membership is open to all.”19 Given the dominant perception of Scripture as a structured “story” as established internally in the epistles of St. Paul and externally through Reformation and Post-Reformation figural exegesis, it is no surprise that Vaughan, on occasion, inscribes the biblical “narrative” into his devotional verse. This is not unexpected in a Christian poet taught to perceive himself and the world within a providential view of history. This paper reveals that Vaughan, at times, employs typological exegesis in Silex Scintillans to locate several lyrics and lyric clusters within such a biblical frame. However, this paper also hopes to demonstrate that Vaughan’s politics repeatedly undermine his re-creation of a coherent biblical narrative in his devotional verse. A disenfranchised Royalist writing shortly after the execution of Charles I, Vaughan recoils at the present state of affairs. His nostalgic sensibility frequently undermines the sequential, progressive structure of the biblical “narrative” in individual poems and across the entire collection. Vaughan’s sense of temporal dislocation marks his collection with a sense of disorder and discontinuity antithetical to linear progression or narrative coherence. Rather than read Silex Scintillans as a narrative that progresses from creation to apocalypse or from the speaker’s election to his redemption, I shall propose that Vaughan’s lyric collection is indebted to the structure of the Psalter. The Psalms, for Vaughan and his contemporaries, were viewed as a flexible form that permitted the Psalmist to record the vicissitudes of the human spirit.20 Like that of the Psalms, the structure of Silex Scintillans is based on the notion of varietas or variety, “a simple yet flexible structural concept” that permits the exhibition of a variety of psychological states.21 Given his richly associative mind and his sensitivity to the political and religious instability of Interregnum Britain, Vaughan is drawn to this loose, fluid structure of the Psalter as it permits him to examine the instability of subjectivity in a fractured society. Vaughan will be seen, therefore, to rely on an external biblical structure in shaping his lyric collection as a whole, but not on the biblical metanarrative.

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II In several poems in Silex Scintillans, Vaughan weaves into his verse the biblical narrative as “a definitive myth, a single archetypal structure extending from creation to apocalypse” through which the lyric subjects organize their spiritual reality.22 Such structural allusion is most common in those lyrics influenced by the Pauline typology of Corinthians, Romans, and Galatians. In I Corinthians 15, Christ is presented as the anti-type of Adam: “For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. . . . And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. . . . The first man is of the earth, earthly; the second man is the Lord from heaven” (15:45, 47 AV).23 Vaughan incorporates this biblical passage into his verse on more than one occasion to wed Genesis and the Gospels, Adam and Christ. This is perhaps most effective in “Easter-Hymn,” a poem that celebrates the remedial role of Christ after the defilement of paradise. The speaker compresses in the first few lines of the poem the consequences of fall and redemption: Death, and darkness get you packing, Nothing now to man is lacking, All your triumphs now are ended, And what Adam marred, is mended;24 (ll.1– 4)

Though the crucifixion of Christ is not mentioned in the first few lines of the poem, a typological relationship is soon established between the old and new covenants, for the speaker advances in “Easter-Hymn” from the sin of the first Adam, the type (l.4), to the sacrifice of the second Adam, the anti-type: And by his blood did us advance Unto his own inheritance, To him be glory, power, praise, From this, unto the last of days. (ll.15–18)

It is the passion, signified here by “his blood,” that effects the transformation of the landscape of death and darkness, described at length at the poem’s centre. The passion reinvests death with a positive signification. Death is now no more than “a nap” (l.6), a vehicle through which the aged and weak acquire “new strength”

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(ll.9–10), a view of death originating in Romans 6:9: “Knowing that Christ being raised from the death dieth no more; death has no more dominion over him.” In overcoming death, the second Adam projects the speaker to the end of salvation history, “the last of days” (l.18), just as Paul in 1 Corinthians 14 progresses from the resurrection of Christ to the resurrection of the dead. The speaker’s references to biblical events and figures immerse us in the Pauline typological exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15, itself an economical account of salvation history. So too in “Faith” we discover a similar movement of thought. In this lyric Vaughan alludes to Hebrews 9 through 11, one of the most typological passages of the Pauline epistles.25 In Hebrews, the Old Testament high priest is presented as type and Christ as priestly anti-type, the blood sacrifice of “goats and calves” as type, the blood of Christ as New Testament anti-type, culminating in Paul’s conclusion: “For the law having a shadow of good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with those sacrifices which they offered year by year continually make the comers thereunto perfect. . . . Then said he [Jesus Christ], Lo, I come to do thy will, O God. He taketh away the first [sacrifice], that he may establish the second. By the which will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:1,9–10). In “Faith,” the speaker echoes Paul’s conception of the biblical past by describing the law in the language of ostentatious display and mere shell; the “Law, and ceremonies” are no more than “A glorious night” (ll.13–14) immersed in “mists” (l.19) and are as nothing compared to the “Sun of righteousness” (Mal. 4:2) who reinvests the landscape with “Light, motion, heat” and “Faith, Hope, Charity” (ll.34 –35): So when the Sun of righteousness Did once appear, That scene was changed, and a new dress Left for us here; Veils became useless, altars fell, Fires smoking die; And all that sacred pomp, and shell Of things did fly; Then did he shine forth, whose sad fall, And bitter fights Were figured in those mystical, And cloudy rites; (ll.21–32)

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In using the word “Faith” as the title of this lyric, Vaughan thrusts the reader into the “mighty roll call of the Old Testament champions of the faith” that permits the speaker to align himself with Old Testament “heroic” types.26 And yet, the speaker shows no interest in his Old Testament forefathers; he is concerned only with the Old Testament as “shell” (l.28), echoing the language of Puritan typologist Samuel Mather: “The Type is the Shell, this the Kernel; the Type is the Letter, this the Spirit and Mystery of the Type.”27 In “Faith” veils and shadows are the trappings of the past, removed with the first coming of Christ. The faith of the Old Testament type is elided and the speaker’s personal faith, complete in the anti-type Christ, is his only concern, and such faith is duly rewarded at the poem’s conclusion: So that I need no more, but say I do believe, And my most loving Lord straightway Doth answer, Live. (ll.41– 44)

We do indeed find a compressed, economical biblical narrative within the borders of Vaughan’s typological lyrics. In these poems, Vaughan never permits us to imagine absence, loss, and the law without divine presence and grace. The present is defined in terms of substance, grounded in a New Testament superiority, and the past is conceived in terms of shadows, figures, and the hidden; and yet, through typology the two resemble each other, though they differ in degree. Paul J. Korshin has argued that such typological exegesis of resemblance “answers to the fundamental human need to establish predictive patterns between past and present and between present and future,” which generates an overwhelming sense of order.28 Vaughan no doubt desires to embrace the order that typology offers, but it cannot be sustained in his verse, for the violence and disorder of his age fracture his poetic landscape.

III Though Vaughan at times rewrites the biblical “narrative” into his verse to generate order and assurance in a tumultuous world, in many poems he undermines the vision of a linear scriptural

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narrative of progression and fulfillment. In fact, he frequently inverts the typological structure of Scripture through the idealization of the world of the Old Testament, especially that of Genesis. This inversion has been noted by both Lewalski and Ira Clark, Clark describing those poems in which inversion occurs as antipodal neotypological lyrics, though neither identify the political nature of Vaughan’s resistance to typological exegesis.29 Vaughan values the Old Testament type because of his conservative political agenda which associates the past with the utopian and the present with social fragmentation, chaos, and noise. Gerald M. MacLean remarks that when seventeenth-century poets refer to the past, in Vaughan’s case through references to Genesis, “they increasingly constructed an idealized version that exemplified the proper workings of whichever political system suited their purpose.”30 Historical allusions, exemplary history, and a more general appeal to the past became vehicles through which poets could “represent the past for current political purposes.”31 Genesis is associated in Vaughan’s discourse with Royalist origins or with the Royalist discourse of the Caroline state. Vaughan often fashions the Old Testament as the pastoral ideal. Many of his lyrics voice a conventional pastoral sensibility; they afford “us an easily and instantly apprehended image of perfection and beauty” in a rustic biblical setting.32 In these poems Vaughan creates a past far superior to the present. Pierre Bourdieu has argued that those previously in power who are “unable to restore the silence of the doxa, strive to produce, through a purely reactionary discourse, a substitute for everything that is threatened by the very existence of heretical discourse.”33 Confronted with the ideological and repressive state apparatus of an emerging Parliamentarian culture, which he conceives of as “heretical,” Vaughan borrows the language of nature in order to “restore the doxa to its original state of innocence.”34 A psychological exile in a newly emerging world, Vaughan becomes, as Joseph Brodsky says of all writers in exile, “a retrospective and retroactive being,” retrospection playing “an excessive role . . . in his existence, overshadowing his reality.”35 His is a world of pining for that which is past, the retrospective machinery “delaying the arrival of the present.”36 As an exile Vaughan must, as Edward Said has theorized, “overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement . . . a condition of terminal loss,” which he accomplishes by entertaining a nostalgic pastoral tone.37 Allusions to Genesis become a

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means to construct an Arcadian vision of the biblical, and by extension, his political past. In many lyrics, Vaughan saturates his verse with historical allusions from the book of Genesis. In alluding to Abraham’s angelic visitors in “Religion,” Vaughan’s becomes a poetics of nostalgia: “O how familiar then was heaven!” (l.14), a sentiment echoed in “Isaac’s Marriage”: O sad, and wild excess! and happy those White days, that durst no impious mirth expose! When Conscience by lewd use had not lost sense, Nor bold-faced custom banished Innocence; (ll.17–20)

Vaughan defines Genesis in terms of divine presence. In the “blessed days of old” (“Begging [II]” l.11), “Angels did wind / And rove about” (“Isaac’s Marriage” ll.25–26), Abraham discoursed with a “winged guest,” God deigned to wrestle with and bless Jacob (“Religion” ll.8–13). The past is translated into a pastoral epoch in which shepherds water their flocks and entertain angels (“The Shepherds”). The patriarchs of Genesis, divorced from the sordid moments of their histories, are rendered incorrupt. Abraham and Moses, like the shepherds of Bethlehem, are construed as “Sweet, harmless livers! (on whose holy leisure / Waits innocence and pleasure)” (“The Shepherds” ll.1–2) and Rebekah is all “plain, modest truth,” the embodiment of “sweet, divine simplicity” (“Isaac’s Marriage” ll.33,37). The past, as constituted through the book of Genesis, is nostalgically configured in these lyrics as a time of theophany, a visible or auditory manifestation of God.38 Here Genesis signifies not things yet to come, but that which is lost or absent in the present. In the first five stanzas of “Religion” Vaughan finds in Genesis divine presence in the natural landscape, angels hidden in shades, divinity meeting with humanity in the “cool myrtle’s canopy,” beneath an “oak’s green boughs,” or at some “fountain’s bubbling eye” (ll.5–8). Vaughan borrows the language of nature here to naturalize the past, rendering the present unnatural, mechanical, and exploitative. As MacLean has argued of many Royalist poems, this version of the past does indeed lend “credibility to partisan versions of the present,” in particular to Vaughan’s view in “Religion” of the present as a time of absence, falsity, poison, and disease (ll.38– 48).39 The present, marked in

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other lyrics as a time of Christ’s incarnation is defined in negative terms in “Religion,” by lack: “We have no conference in these days” (l.20). The present is also described in the language of death, through marked biblical allusion, to “that Samaritan’s dead well” (l.46). Religion in the present is tainted because of its journey into an almost classical netherworld, as it passes “through the earth’s dark veins,” seizing “on veins of sulphur under ground,” reminding the reader of the Stygian river (ll.34, 40). An exemplary past becomes the tool to comment on ecclesiastical developments during the Interregnum, and Vaughan engages in such commentary by immersing Genesis in the Caroline “arcadian rhetoric of natural, rural simplicity” and then contrasting it with the rhetoric of disease and depravity of present days.40 Though Christ is referred to in passing in “Religion”—“Is the truce broke? or ’cause we have / A mediator now with thee, / Dost thou therefore old treaties waive / And by appeals from him decree?” (ll.21–24)—he is not at the center of the poem as he is in “Easter-Hymn.” It is the Old Testament characters that are placed at the poem’s matrix, the ideal against which the present must be compared. Allusions to Genesis in “Isaac’s Marriage” also serve to elevate the historical past. In this poetic meditation on Genesis 24:63, the natural, pastoral world of Isaac is repeatedly contrasted with the studied and artful modern world in which the speaker lives; the language of nature (past) and art (present) are repeatedly invoked and opposed. Isaac is innocence and Rebekah chastity, both true icons of divine simplicity; those in the present are marred by compliment, custom, oaths, studied looks and “painted face!” (l.38). Vaughan suggests “the corruption of society” is “synonymous with its departure from nature, its concern with artifice.”41 In marking such discrepancies, Vaughan clearly echoes the “pastoral myth of halcyon days,” a myth “designed to ratify the behaviour and circumstances of the ruling classes.”42 Though many early modern authors presented the men and women of Genesis as exemplars worthy of imitation, most did not ignore their lapses in judgment as is evident from the subtitle of William Whatley’s work: Prototypes, or, The Primary Precedent Presidents out of the Booke of Genesis. Showing the Good and Bad things They did and Had (London, 1647). Vaughan’s political mandate, however, does not permit him to address those features of Isaac, Rebekah, Rachel, and the other inhabitants of Genesis that render them less than ideal.

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In retreating backward in time, in lyrics like “The Retreat,” the speakers find themselves stripped of the “black art” and “sinfulness” that accompany the progress of time: Some men a forward motion love, But I by backwards steps would move, And when this dust falls to the urn In that state I came return. (ll.29–32)

Leah Marcus’s remark on Vaughan’s view of childhood might be aptly applied to his vision of Genesis: “with no confidence in the future, he was locked into nostalgia for the past, into a need to recapture somehow—through death if not in life—the steady white light which shines upon childhood.”43 Achsah Guibbory echoes this sentiment when she describes this regressive impulse in Vaughan as “a desire to reverse the pattern of history.” She finds in Vaughan’s elegies “a desire to remedy the degenerative course of history by returning to the purer time in the past.”44 Vaughan, she writes, feels “trapped in time.”45 We do not find in these anti-typological poems the same assurance voiced at the conclusion of “Jacob’s Pillow, and Pillar”: “Thy pillow was but type and shade at best, / But we the substance have, and on him rest” (ll.53–54). In both “Religion” and “Isaac’s Marriage,” the present ecclesiastical landscape, unlike the pastoral idyll of the past, is infiltrated by “false echoes” and “bold-faced custom” necessitating temporary withdrawal and enclosure (“Religion” l. 38, “Isaac’s Marriage” l.20). This denigration of the present and elevation of the past in the antitypological lyrics clearly opposes the temporal vision in the typological lyrics. The temporal order is reversed: the past is associated with transparency and clarity and the present with veils and secrecy. A “biblical narrative” based on typological exegesis of shadow and substance is not sustained in these lyrics as the speakers, like all members of the political rearguard, avert their eyes backward. Vaughan’s allusions to Genesis, therefore, frequently mark the radical disjunction of time rather than its progressive evolution. We find a similar sense of temporal discontinuity in many of Vaughan’s allusions to Revelation. Revelation, no doubt, is often embraced by Vaughan as a time of restoration and renewal; many of his lyric subjects anxiously await such universal recreation with “sighs and groans.”46 However, though Revelation

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is often incorporated in an evolving narrative as the final term, the forma perfectissima, in many lyrics Vaughan alludes to Revelation to lament contemporary moral decay and political policy not to meditate on the gradual unfolding of time. Post hints at this feature of Vaughan’s allusions to Revelation when he posits that many of Vaughan’s apocalyptic poems are “not meditations on the impending End but dramatized fictions whose purpose is either to help inaugurate the religious life or to sustain it on its correct course.”47 At first, Vaughan’s frequent allusions to Revelation in Silex Scintillans perplex the reader. References to Revelation in Royalist poetry of the mid-seventeenth century were infrequent. Parliamentarians, however, saturated their texts with an apocalyptic vocabulary, for the language of Revelation was the language of social revolution. The Leveller Gerrard Winstanley could not imagine Revelation outside the context of large-scale social reform. Expounding the mysteries of the last things, Winstanley wrote: “Then will come plentiful manifestations of God in his Saints, and the great will be filled with anger at seeing inferior people raised up to speak the deep things of God. Tradesmen will speak by experience the things they have seen in God and the clergy will be slighted.”48 Though Winstanley describes the last days in the future tense, it is far more common to find in sectarian usage of Revelation a sense of the present, the “now”; the eschaton “is” rather than “will be” as Jade Fleck’s study of the grammar of eschatology in early modern prose and poetry documents.49 Unlike his political opponents Vaughan rarely reads the future into the present. However, neither does he consistently envision the future as an extension of the present. The allusion to Revelation 14:18 at the conclusion of “Corruption,” “But hark! what trumpet’s that? What Angel cries / Arise! Thrust in thy sickle” (ll.39– 40), is a call for the destruction of a present defined by madness and darkness. The speaker of “Corruption” begins his lament reminiscing on the postlapsarian landscape of Genesis that permitted visits with angels and access to Paradise that still “lay / In some green shade, or fountain” (ll.21–25). The idealization of the past is followed by an account of the present as a time of divine absence: Almighty Love! where art thou now? mad man Sits down, and freezeth on, He raves, and swears to stir nor fire, nor fan,

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But bids the thread be spun. I see, thy curtains are close-drawn; thy bow Looks dim too in the cloud, Sin triumphs still, and man is sunk below The centre, and his shroud; All’s in deep sleep, and night; thick darkness lies And hatcheth o’er thy people; (ll. 29–38)

While the past is a time when man “shined a little,” the present is a time of “thick darkness” rather than luminescence in Christ. While the speakers of the typological lyrics see “gleams and fractions” of God through the semitransparent veil of Christ’s flesh, the speaker of “Corruption” faces “close-drawn” curtains through which he sees only darkness. Though the apocalypse is the third phase of divine self-revelation in the typological scheme, in “Corruption” the apocalypse returns light to a world of complete darkness undermining any sense of historical continuity and progression. Allusions to Revelation do not only expose the present world as a place of darkness and deception; they also attack what Vaughan perceives as a Parliamentary politics of violence and bloodshed. Relying on the very biblical book that Parliamentary forces employ to justify their use of violence as the self-proclaimed “saints” of the millennium, the speaker of “The Men of War” collocates Revelation 12:11, 13:10 and 3:21 in order to generate a proof text for Royalist pacifism in the face of Parliamentary destruction: If any have an ear Saith holy John, then let him hear. He that into captivity Leads others, shall a captive be. Who with the sword doth others kill, A sword shall his blood likewise spill. Here is the patience of the saints, And the true faith that never faints. . . . . . . . . . . . . . Give me, my God! a heart as mild And plain, as when I was a child; That when thy Throne is set, and all These conquerors before it fall, I may be found (preserved by thee) Amongst that chosen company, Who by no blood (here) overcame But the blood of the blessed Lamb. (ll.1–8,45–52)

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In these lines, Revelation 13:10, “He that leadeth into captivity shall go into captivity: he that killeth with the sword must be killed with the sword” is merged with Revelation 12:11, “And they overcome him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony. . . .” These intersecting verses reveal that to “overcome” is to resist the sword. Allusions to Revelation are significant here not as reflections on the end times but as commentary on current political policy and ethical practice. They promote a Royalist policy of passive resistance. Vaughan’s interpretation of Revelation in these lyrics as a text that endorses the Royalist ethics of peace complements his attempt to interpret Genesis in terms of an idyllic past, as both exegetical practices evaluate the present in terms of loss, sin and darkness. Such a construction of the “now” effectively diminishes the power of his political opponents who are imagined in his lyrics as propagators of present violence rather than of the gospel; they are men of “sorcery / And smooth seducements” (“The Proffer” ll.34 –35) who would “dare divide, and stain” “that seamless coat” of Christ once again (“The British Church” ll.8–10). The future and past as represented by Genesis and Revelation are not so much conceived as part of “a unilinear movement in time distinguished by three interlocked acts—creation, redemption, and judgment— alike presided over by Christ,” but rather are seen as time periods through which to lament current political and ecclesiastical affairs.50 Therefore, though Vaughan’s typological lyrics envision the present as the time of redemption, as the period in which veils and shadows are removed, in many other poems the present, by virtue of its relation to the past and future, is exposed as a world in which God is absent or shrouded in “thick darkness.” In some lyrics, the speaker finds a sense of anti-typical fulfillment in the body of Christ, and celebrates his present state. In others, the speaker finds substance rather than shadow in the biblical past, a substance defined in the language of nature, childhood, and innocence. Yet in others, Vaughan’s flagging hope generates speakers who rely on the eschatological or ultimate anti-type, which often expresses itself in the language of death rather than the language of hopeful expectation.

IV Though Post and Lewalski recognize this unstable vision of temporality in many of Vaughan’s lyrics, they maintain that the col-

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lection as a whole moves from origins to endings based in a biblical chronology. However, a reading of Vaughan’s volume of poetry as a sequence embedded in a biblical narrative is difficult to sustain. This is not to argue that Vaughan never employs intertextual strategies to reinscribe a “biblical narrative” in lyric clusters. One wonders, in fact, given the order of the early lyrics “Death. A Dialogue,” “Resurrection and Immortality,” and “Day of Judgement [I],” whether Vaughan initially intended to work within such a pattern for these three lyrics situated early in the first edition are linked sequentially by introductory or terminal epigraphs which contain biblical quotations. These biblical quotations work to create a dialogue between lyrics, a dialogue of promise and fulfillment or loss and restoration. “Death. A Dialogue” concludes with a quotation from Job 10:21–22 that draws the reader’s attention to the forma inferior, Job: “Before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness, and the shadow of death; A land of darkness, as darkness it self, and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness.” The subsequent lyric “Resurrection and Immortality” offers hope through Christ, the forma perfectior in the introductory quotation: “Hebrews x 20 By that new, and living way, which he hath prepared for us, through the veil, which is his flesh.” “Resurrection and Immortality,” in turn, ends with a quotation from the apocalyptic Daniel 12:13—“But go thou thy way until the end be, for thou shalt rest, and stand up in thy lot, at the end of the days”—pointing toward the forma perfectissima of the eschaton. This is a suitable conclusion given that the following lyric “Day of Judgment [I],” requires the speaker to recapitulate Christ’s suffering, thereby internalizing the anti-type: Give me, O give me crosses here, Still more afflictions lend, That pill, though bitter is most dear That brings health in the end. (ll.33–36)

The “Day of Judgment [I]” concludes with a quotation from I Peter—“Now the end of all things is at hand, be you therefore sober, and watching in prayer” (4:7)—directing the reader once more to the forma perfectissima who will appear, according to the speaker, in the not too distant future. In this lyric cluster, Vaughan connects three moments in time through typological exegesis by invoking the Old Testament type (Job), the New Testament anti-type (the risen Christ), and the eschatological antitype (the reigning Christ).

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Though Vaughan transparently incorporates biblical quotation in this lyric cluster to participate in a “biblical narrative” of shadow and fulfillment, this intertextual technique occurs in no other sequence of lyrics in either edition of Silex Scintillans. The question remains, however, whether “viewed in its entirety, Silex, like the Bible, moves from Genesis to Revelation, beginning to end, light to darkness” despite the absence of such movement in particular lyric clusters.51 This question is compelling because of Vaughan’s pronounced preference for the biblical books of Genesis and Revelation. He cites Genesis more often than any other biblical book while Revelation is the third most cited biblical book in his devotional verse.52 Such frequency of citations to the first and final biblical books has understandably led to the presumption that Vaughan incorporates the biblical narrative sequentially into Silex Scintillans. In quantitative terms, however, references in Silex Scintillans do not appear to encode a progression from Genesis to Revelation. There are twenty-seven allusions to Genesis and sixteen to Revelation in Silex Scintillans (I) compared to twenty-six to Genesis and twenty-three to Revelation in Silex Scintillans (II). There are seven more references to Revelation in part 2 than in part 1, indicating Vaughan’s preference for this biblical book in the 1655 edition and perhaps revealing a teleological impulse. We cannot wholly reject, therefore, Lewalski’s impression of part 2 of Silex Scintillans as more apocalyptic.53 However, this difference in the number of allusions is not substantial enough to prove that the collection as a whole reinscribes the biblical structure of Creation to Apocalypse. Neither does Vaughan allude to the apocalyptic visions or parables of the prophets, gospels, or Pauline epistles with greater frequency in part 2. On the theme of final judgment, for example, Rudrum notes, “it should be stressed that reference to the Day of Judgement is pervasive in both parts of Silex Scintillans.”54 There is no narrative, “plotless” or otherwise, in the collection embedded in the biblical narrative as understood by Reformation exegetes. Instead, we find in the collection, as in individual lyrics, a tension, a pulling back and forth, between past and future, memory and anticipation, given Vaughan’s conspicuous dissatisfaction with the present. The references to Genesis and Revelation are on the whole scattered throughout both volumes, thereby undermining any narrative structure grounded in an “archetypal myth.” Rather than assuming their assigned space in an evolving Christian history, the past and future, as represented by Genesis

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and Revelation, acquire to some extent a “sameness” as both are imagined as landscapes of purity (white) and nature (greenness), just as both endorse the politics of swordless innocence. Such a vision of these two uncorrupted landscapes compel the reader to reinterpret the present not as the time of redemption but rather as a time of divine absence, human violence, social discord, and epistemological fragmentation.

V I have attempted to show that the “biblical narrative” as understood by early modern theologians is inscribed within and across a selection of lyrics and lyric clusters in Silex Scintillans. I have concluded, however, that such structural allusion to an overarching biblical narrative is not consistent enough to produce a narrative sequence in the collection as a unit. Lewalski, however, also suggests that Vaughan may have alluded to a lesser biblical structure to permit narrative development in his poetic collection. She reminds us that from the Pauline epistles “the Protestant extrapolated a paradigm against which to plot the spiritual drama of his own life.”55 This paradigm consisted of the sequential stages of election, calling, justification, adoption, sanctification, and glorification, from which Protestants constructed the spiritual narrative of their own lives. Though Frye does not address the Pauline epistles, he too finds in Scripture not only a “gigantic cycle from creation to apocalypse” but also the lesser cycle of individual development from birth to salvation.56 Lewalski finds this microbiblical structure in Silex Scintillans, for she discovers in Vaughan’s many poems a single speaker who advances in his spiritual life with each subsequent lyric.57 To Lewalski, there is one speaker in Silex Scintillans, a pilgrim who traverses a spiritual landscape, much as Bunyan’s Christian navigates the terrain of Vanity Fair and the Delectable Mountains on his journey toward the Celestial City. Donald R. Dickson, like Lewalski, reads into Silex Scintillans a story or plot in which a character moves toward sanctification. However, he quite rightly senses a greater complexity in the “dynamics of the speaker’s progress toward sanctification, which is still as much a struggle in Part II as it is in Part I.”58 He therefore rejects Lewalski’s simple structure of promise and fulfillment and instead emphasizes the speaker’s unpredictable movement between “elation and despair” on his journey to redemption.

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A close examination of the order of the poems in Silex Scintillans reveals no spiritual or emotional evolution of a single speaker. “Thematic groupings,” to use Patterson’s term, are indeed present, for we observe at times a series of speakers reflecting on similar subject matter. There are, for example, in the 1650 edition of Silex Scintillans sequentially arranged poems which treat sacramental or liturgical themes: “The Morning-Watch,” “The Evening Watch,” “Church-Service,” and “Burial.” So too do we find a sequence of lyrics concerned with doctrinal or ethical matters: “The Relapse,” “The Resolve,” “The Match,” and “Rules and Lessons.” In the second edition, there are a trinity of poems on gender and politics, or the politics of gender: “The Knot,” “The Ornament,” and “St. Mary Magdalene.” Though a recurrence of themes is present in Silex Scintillans, there is no monoglossia in the collection based in a Protestant or “Anglican” identity. Vaughan’s lyric subjects cannot be reduced to a single figure of spiritual introspection. Some of his speakers are fashioned to voice the values of a residual culture; some are identified in relation to an absent loved one; some define themselves as sacred poets in opposition to vain speakers; some promote themselves as instructors of ethics; while others define themselves in relation to nature. In his four body-soul dialogues, we do not even find a “speaker” but rather a dramatic dialogue in which a theological debate is generated by dividing the self. Further, Vaughan’s theology is too complex simply to label his poetic voice(s) “Anglican” or “Calvinist.”59 We should beware of designating the more than one hundred voices that speak to us across the centuries as a single “Anglican” voice as argued by Wall and Summers or a consistently Calvinist voice as suggested by Lewalski.60 What we find in Silex Scintillans are multiple voices created by a poet who himself is a product of intertextuality, whose identity is embedded in certain familial, ecclesiastical, political, economic, and sexual formations.61 I find myself agreeing, therefore, with Seelig who discovers no structural pattern or overall theme in Silex Scintillans but rather identifies recurring motifs. The absence of a governing structure in Silex Scintillans suggests that the lyric collection should not be read as a narrative. Narratologists have argued that a narrative is the “recounting . . . of one or more real or fictitious events” that “should make up a whole, a sequence.” The narrative should be distinguished from “the mere recounting of a random series of changes of state.”62 However, the lyric tradition within which Vaughan writes is far

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closer to the “recounting of a random series of changes of state.” Gary Waller has argued that the lyric collection is “discontinuous, open to a multiplicity of juxtapositions and combinations and so insisting upon a self that is fragmented, dislocated, selfquestioning. Linkages may be suggested by the poet . . . but such hints of a plot are invited rather than imposed.”63 Based on the principle of varietas, the lyric collection, like the biblical Psalter, creates and re-creates the “self ” or “selves” and is often more concerned with the (in)stability of subjectivity than the recounting of a particular event or events. While it is certainly possible to create a lyric sequence with a narrative structure as Lady Mary Wroth and John Donne have done in their versions of the Italian Corona, for the most part, varietas as a structural principle undermines the sense of continuity, sequence, and progression associated with narrative. Silex Scintillans is less a unified and autonomous unit than an exploration of identity or subjectivity; like the Book of Psalms, Vaughan’s poetic collection is an anatomy of the human soul, a compendium of diverse voices inscribed within a variety of genres—lyrics of praise, lament, didacticism, worship, thanksgiving, and prophecy. George Abbot argued in 1651 that the Psalms record for the reader a “change of states . . . inward as well as outward,” revealing the constant “ebbings and flowings” of the soul.64 Some years earlier, Henry Peacham praised St. Hillary’s comparison of the Psalms of David “to a bunch of keys, in regard of the several doors, whereby they give the soul entrance either to prayer, rejoicing, repentance, thanksgiving etc.”65 It is with this structural model of the Psalter in mind that we should approach Vaughan’s collection of devotional verse. In his poem “To Mr. M.L. Upon his Reduction of the Psalms into Method” (Thalia Rediviva), Vaughan recognizes the absence of form in the Psalms, viewing them as “a medley” without method grounded in “confusion” and governed by the instability of David’s “crosses” (ll.3–8). James D. Simmonds refers to this poem (in which the speaker praises Mr. M.L. for giving form and method to David’s matter) in order to argue that Vaughan endorses a poetics of order and form in the vein of Ben Jonson.66 However, Silex Scintillans shares the formal or structural instability of the Psalter in its propensity to move between subjects “By no safe rule,” to use Vaughan’s term (“To Mr. M.L.” l.9). There is no obvious narrative purpose in Vaughan’s placement of a poem on the marriage of Isaac (“Isaac’s Marriage”) after a poem that explores the efficacy of Ignatian meditation as a means to

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unite with Christ (“The Search”). We cannot explain by recourse to a single speaker’s spiritual evolution Vaughan’s choice to locate a didactic, emblematic poem on preparation for Christ’s return (“The Lamp”) between a lyric on a divided church (“British Church”) and one on the fall and recovery of humanity (“Man’s Fall, and Recovery”).67 How does Vaughan’s placement of an elegy between “Ascension Hymn” and “White Sunday” relate to the spiritual development of a solitary pilgrim? Silex Scintillans is influenced structurally not by the Protestant paradigm of salvation, but by what Chana Bloch describes as the unpredictable movement from hymn to complaint to thanksgiving in the Psalter. Though “the haphazard arrangement of the Psalms is given a kind of authority . . . by the liturgical practice of the Church of England,” Bloch argues correctly that the Psalter remains “a sequence without a predictable pattern.”68 The structure of Silex Scintillans, like the Psalms, inscribes a series of subjective states while existing as a sequence without a predictable pattern. Though there are clearly thematic groupings in the collection, Silex Scintillans is structured like the Psalter, an “Apothecaries shop, full of boxes, and . . . full of all manner of store for men in all tempers and distempers,” and in its unpredictability and variation lies its overwhelming comprehensiveness.69 It is the structure of varietas freed from the constrictions of sequence, continuation, progression, and evolution that permit the Psalter and Silex Scintillans the freedom to explore the unstable spectrum of human subjectivity in a period of political crisis. There have, of course, been attempts to discover unity in the Psalms, just as there has been a drive to uncover a purposeful structure in early modern lyric collections. And yet such lyric collections seem to resist schemes to organize them into a coherent structure, or to fit them “into one or another Procrustean bed.”70 While I sympathize with the desire to define the intertextual relations between lyrics in a collection, I wonder whether such “plotless narratives” exist or whether they are the wish fulfillment of a pattern-seeking animal who forges unity and progression out of discontinuousness and fragmentation. One need not forget Michel Foucault’s maxim that scholars frequently desire to find “a principle of cohesion that organizes the discourse and restores it to its hidden unity,” thereby resolving “the greatest possible number of contradictions . . . by the simplest means.”71 A poststructuralist reading of Silex Scintillans does not de-

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mand that we employ such a totalizing interpretive strategy. As Debora Kuller Shuger remarks in a reading of George Herbert’s The Temple: “Since modern critical practice no longer forces one to discover unity anyway, I would like to approach the problem from the other end and ask if the disunity of The Temple can be shown to be meaningful.”72 Disunity is indeed a feature of Silex Scintillans, a work greatly indebted to and modeled on The Temple, and such disunity is grounded in both aesthetic and political realities—the aesthetic principle of varietas characteristic of the Psalms and the political experience of a defeated Royalist. At the same time, Vaughan uses biblical typology, theme, and other literary devices to create “unities” within his collection. These devices create a degree of unity within and between lyrics. The poetic collection, as a result, fluctuates between unification and disunification, centralization and decentralization. Silex Scintillans, therefore, is governed by competing centripetal and centrifugal forces that render it a vital, dynamic work capable of capturing the reality of a psychological exile in Interregnum Britain.

NOTES 1. Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 162–63. 2. G´erard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 312. 3. Earl Miner, “Some Issues for the Study of Integrated Collections,” Poems in their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections, ed. Neil Fraistat (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 21. 4. Miner, “Some Issues,” 40. It is surprising that Miner wishes to identify the lyric collection with narrative as, generically speaking, lyrics share more features with drama than narrative, particularly when the words of the lyric (while written) appear to be spoken. W. R. Johnson finds that 46 percent of Vaughan’s lyrics are I-You, 51 percent meditative and the remainder a miscellaneous assortment. W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 6. The I-You poems are closer to a scene of dialogue, while the “oral” meditative poem might suitably be categorized a dramatic monologue or an overheard interior monologue. 5. Annabel Patterson, “Jonson, Marvell, and Miscellaneity?” Poems in their Place, 95–118. 6. Thomas Calhoun, Henry Vaughan: The Achievement of Silex Scintillans (Newark: University of Delaware Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1981), 18–19. 7. Calhoun, Henry Vaughan, 135.

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8. Calhoun, Henry Vaughan, 136, 157, 185–87. Calhoun’s interpretation evolved over time. In his doctoral dissertation, Calhoun discussed the collection in terms of “groups” and “sequences” determined by “place,” “subject,” “dominant image” and “voice” rather than as a narrative though his description of the work as a “superstructure” and his revelation of the “master-plan of the book” suggest his propensity to read Silex Scintillans as narrative. He writes: “Vaughan expands his thoughts beyond single poems to create tightly integrated sequences of poems. The sequences in turn fall into more general thematic groups, and the groups, in their own sequence, create the large pattern and form of Silex Scintillans.” He concludes that Vaughan conceived of his poems “as a unified book rather than a mere collection of miscellany.” The Poetics, Unity and Continuity of Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1970), 76–78. 9. Calhoun, Henry Vaughan, 135–36. 10. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 318–19, 322. 11. Sharon Cadman Seelig, The Shadow of Eternity: Belief and Structure in Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981), 44, 55. Though The Temple has also often been seen as an ecclesiastical “narrative” by many, Rosalie Colie argues that “as a whole [it] resists schemes to organize it into a consistent structure, although scholars have tried to fit it into one or another Procrustean bed.” The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 51–52. The same might be said of Silex Scintillans. Nevertheless, as I hope to demonstrate later in this paper, it would be unwise to ignore or dismiss wholly the thematic linkages in lyric clusters in Silex Scintillans. 12. Seelig, The Shadow of Eternity, 55. 13. Alan Rudrum, Henry Vaughan (University of Wales Press on behalf of the Welsh Arts Council, 1981), 32–119. In earlier criticism, R. A. Durr also identifies recurrent metaphors (growth, dark journey, spiritual espousal). On the Mystical Poetry of Henry Vaughan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). 14. Jonathan Post, Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 190. Post draws the reader’s attention to two poems in Silex Scintillans in this regard: “Regeneration (a morning poem) stands in clear opposition to The Night (an evening poem), and as Vaughan’s two finest poetic achievements, they help both to map the ‘progress’ of the collection and to indicate the temporal poles in the two parts around which the devotional imagination gathers” (191). 15. Noel Kennedy Thomas, Henry Vaughan: Poet of Revelation (Worthing: Churchman, 1986). 16. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 13–27. 17. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1981; San Diego: Harcourt, 1982) and Words with Power: Being a Second Study of “The Bible and Literature” (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). H. B. Bernard Combrink notes that structuralist readings of Scripture generally overlook the generic, thematic, and stylistic incongruity of the biblical canon. However, he indicates that many biblical scholars who practice structural exegesis do not argue for an overarching structure that relates Scripture as a totality. Most concern themselves with particular biblical books, rhetorical patterns or lesser narrative structures, analyzing a very limited section of Scripture. Combrink,

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“Structuralism,” The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 715–18. 18. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 8. 19. Anthony Tyrrell Hanson, “Typology,” The Oxford Companion to the Bible, 783–84. Typological interpretation as an intertextual strategy of cohesion is an intrinsic feature of Scripture. Though typological exegesis is not a feature of the Hebrew Bible, there is in the Old Testament a “sense of absolute historical continuity and recurrence, or an assumption that earlier events and figures are timeless ideological models by which all that follows can be measured,” for many biblical writers “saw history as a pattern of cyclical repetition of events.” Robert Alter, The World of Biblical Literature (New York: Basic, A Division of Harper, 1992), 117. In the New Testament typological exegesis was most commonly used by Paul who, as Calvin demonstrates in Institutes of the Christian Religion, used intertextual strategies to demonstrate the continuity between Hebrew texts and Christian doctrine. As Herbert Marks argues, “Paul, having appropriated the [Hebraic] scriptural figure, incorporates it as part of a dramatic sequence in which he and his contemporaries are the ultimate term.” “Pauline Typology and Revisionary Criticism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52, no. 1 (1984): 79. 20. George Abbot, “To the Reader,” Brief Notes Upon the whole Book of Psalms (London, 1651), n.p. Though, as Henry Hammond remarks, the Psalms can be divided into some categories, “Penitential, and Eucharistical” for example, “all will not be comprised under this or the like divisions.” A Paraphrase, and Annotations upon the Book of Psalms (London, 1659), 4. 21. Germaine Warkentin, “ ‘Love’s sweetest part, variety’: Petrarch and the Curious Frame of the Renaissance Sonnet Sequence,” Renaissance and Reformation 11, no. 1 (1975): 18. 22. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 315. 23. This typological relationship is more simply stated in Romans, where Paul writes that Adam “is the figure of him that was to come” (5:14). 24. All references to Vaughan’s poetry are taken from Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (1976; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). 25. During Vaughan’s lifetime, Paul’s authorship of Hebrews was in question. In his annotations to the New Testament, Henry Hammond writes, “Whether this Epistle were written by Saint Paul hath not only of late, but anciently been doubted.” A Paraphrase, and Annotations Upon all the Books of the New Testament (London, 1653), 765. However, as Paul was generally referred to as its author, I shall include it in the Pauline epistles for the purposes of this paper. 26. Gabriel Josipovici, “The Epistle to the Hebrews and the Catholic Epistles,” The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 509. 27. Samuel Mather, The Figures or Types of the Old Testament by which Christ and the Heavenly Things of the Gospel were Preached and Shadowed to the People of God of Old (Dublin, 1683), 52. 28. Paul J. Korshin, Typologies in England 1650–1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 99. We might relate Vaughan’s employment of typological exegesis to the more secular hermeneutics of resemblance that dominated

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Renaissance and early modern philosophy. As Foucault explains: “Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, and made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; rpt., New York: Vintage Books. A Division of Random, 1994), 17. Just as Old Testament types are signs of New Testament fullfilment, the English landscape was for Vaughan filled with signs, sympathies and correspondences which, though often hidden, ensured connectedness. Knowledge of the world is possible if one deciphers the buried similitudes. In his writings on Vaughan and hermeticism, Rudrum has consistently demonstrated Vaughan’s reliance on what Foucault has labelled the episteme of similitude, revealing in Silex Scintillans Vaughan’s dependence on “a complex of kinships, resemblances, and affinitities.” Foucault, The Order of Things, 54. 29. Ira Clark, Christ Revealed: The History of the Neotypological Lyric in the English Renaissance (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1982), 119. 30. Gerald M. MacLean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603–1660 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 140. 31. MacLean, Time’s Witness, 141. 32. Robin Sowerby, The Classical Legacy in Renaissance Poetry (London: Longman, 1994), 198. 33. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, ed. John B. Thompson (1991; rpt., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 131. 34. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 131. 35. Joseph Brodsky, “The Condition we Call Exile: An Address,” Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, ed. Marc Robinson (San Diego: Harcourt, 1994), 6. 36. Brodsky, “The Condition we Call Exile,” 8. 37. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” Altogether Elsewhere, 137. 38. Such theophany includes the appearance of an Angel of the Lord, regarded from the time of Justin as the pre-incarnate Logos. T. E. McComiskey, “Angel of the Lord,” Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, ed. Walter A. Elwell (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1984), 48. 39. MacLean, Time’s Witness, 141. 40. MacLean, Time’s Witness, 79. 41. Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (1987; rpt., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 269. Vaughan repeatedly contrasts nature and art in his lyrics, particularly in those that portray female subjects. See, for example, “The Daughter of Herodias” and “St. Mary Magdalene.” 42. Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Val´ery (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 151. 43. Leah Sinanoglou Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), 175. 44. Achsah Guibbory, The Map of Time: Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 263. 45. Guibbory, The Map of Time, 263.

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46. See, for example, the exclamations in “Resurrection and Immortality”: “Would it were Day! / One everlasting Sabbath there shall run / Without Succession, and without a sun” (ll.68–70); “Burial”: “O come Lord Jesus quickly!” (l.40); “Corruption”: “Arise! Thrust in thy sickle.” (l.40); “Ascension-day”: “Come then thou faithful witness! come dear Lord / Upon the clouds again to judge this world!” (ll.61–62); “Day of Judgement [II]”: “Descend, descend! / Make all things new! and without end!” (ll.45– 46). Note that these lyrics which conclude with a call for the end of time should be distinguished from those in which the speaker calls out for the end of his days, a sentiment expressed in many of Vaughan’s elegies. 47. Post, Henry Vaughan, 192. Post believes that allusions to Revelation only function in this manner in Part I of Silex Scintillans; my readings of poems from both parts suggest that this is a feature common to lyrics across the collection. 48. Gerrard Winstanley, The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. George H. Sabine (1941; New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 90. 49. Fleck reveals the “revolutionary millenarianism of countless Protestant sects that saw the ‘now’ as the moment in which they, supposedly the elect, were to usher in the eschatological kingdom and to judge their religious and political opponents.” Fleck, “A Grammar of Eschatology in Seventeenth-Century Theological Prose and Poetry,” Reform and Counterreform: Dialectics of the Word in Western Christianity Since Luther, ed. John C. Hawley (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), 60–61. To read the revelatory visions of the Quaker Katherine Evans is to sense the immediacy of the “bewildering kaleidoscope of scenes punctuated by voices and bursts of heavenly hymnody” envisioned by John. John Sweet, “Revelation, The Book of,” The Oxford Companion to the Bible, 651. A prisoner of the Inquisition in Malta, Evans writes herself into the landscape of Revelation: “and in the time of our great trial, the Sun and Earth did mourn visibly three dayes, and the horror of death and pains of Hell was upon me: the Sun was darkned, the Moon was turned into Blood, and the Stars did fall from heaven, and there was great tribulation ten dayes, such as never was from the beginning of the world; and then did I see the Son of Man coming in the Clouds, with power and great glory, triumphing over his enemies.” Katharine Evans and Sarah Chevers, This is a Short Relation of Some of the Cruel Sufferings (For the Truths sake) of Katharine Evans & Sarah Chevers, In the Inquisition in the Isle of Malta (London, 1662), 11–12. 50. C. A. Patrides, “ ‘Something like Prophetic Strain’: Apocalyptic Configurations in Milton,” English Language Notes 19, no. 3 (1982): 204. 51. Post, Henry Vaughan, 190. 52. Only Genesis and Matthew are cited with more frequency than Revelation. In calculating biblical allusions, I am indebted to Rudrum, whose annotations to Vaughan’s poetry provide a comprehensive account of Vaughan’s scriptural allusions. 53. Lewalski’s impression is supported, in part, by the cluster of poems on the eschata near the end of part 2 of Silex Scintillans. On the other hand, Madeleine Forey argues that part 1 is more truly visionary and apocalyptic than part 2. However, her argument is complex as she finds a different type of apocalyptic in each part. In part 1 she finds that the apocalyptic images are inscribed into the poet’s body, thereby empowering the poet, while in part 2, “the moment of general recreation lies at a distance untouched by the poet’s language.” Forey, “Poetry as Apocalypse: Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans,” The Seventeenth Century 11, no. 2 (1996): 178. I am not entirely persuaded by Forey’s argument

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as she uses the concepts of personal spiritual renewal and cosmic re-creation interchangeably, describing both as apocalyptic, justifying such usage because some early moderns anticipated a spiritual millennium (transformation of the heart) while others anticipated a political apocalypse. Nevertheless, her claim that Vaughan finds “an apocalyptic role for his poetry as the expectant groans of one awaiting the redemption of the body” is convincing. 54. Rudrum, Henry Vaughan, 100. 55. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 15. 56. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 316. 57. In Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), John Wall, like Lewalski, identifies a spiritual evolution of the speaker in Silex Scintillans. He suggests that across the two parts of the collection, the speaker is able to move from lament to celebration by developing an eschatological perspective that permits him to reinterpret present suffering as a prelude to future joy. No one has suggested that there is either a single speaker or a sequential, narrative structure in Vaughan’s other lyric collections, Poems with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646) or Thalia Rediviva. This is presumably because Silex Scintillans is a collection of devotional poems, inclining the reader to associate it with Protestant narrative forms like the spiritual autobiography. 58. Donald R. Dickson, The Fountain of Living Waters: The Typology of the Waters of Life in Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 136. 59. The term “Anglican” was not in use when Vaughan composed his devotional poems. He considered himself a member of the British Church, divided by schism. In terms of Vaughan’s theology, Vaughan is more Arminian than Calvinist, and “Protestant” is too vague a label to capture the complexity of the theological and philosophical underpinnings of Silex Scintillans. 60. Wall, Transformations of the Word; Claude J. Summers, “Herrick, Vaughan, and the Poetry of Anglican Survivalism,” New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century English Religious Lyric, ed. John R. Roberts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994). 61. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 49. 62. Gerald Prince, “Narrative,” Dictionary of Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 58–59. There is of course a dispute over the definition of the term narrative. G´erard Genette discusses the controversy in the introduction to Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (1982; rpt., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). 63. Gary Waller, English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, 1993), 78. 64. George Abbot, “To the Reader,” Brief Notes Upon the whole Book of Psalms, n.p. We should keep in mind that modern readers also attempt to find a narrative structure or at least a sequential structure within the Psalter. C. Westerman, for example, argues that the Psalter moves from lament toward praise, while W. Brueggemann envisions unity based on “its movement from the Torah-Psalms which affirm a relationship with God through obedience to the law (Ps. I), to the Hymns, which live in that relationship, expressing it in terms of praise of God (Psalm 150).” Quoted in S. E. Gillingham, The Poems and Psalms of the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 275.

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65. Henry Peacham, “From The Compleat Gentleman,” Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn, 2 vols. (Blomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 1:117. 66. James D. Simmonds, Masques of God: Form and Theme in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972). 67. Here I cite only a few examples of a phenomenon frequent in Silex Scintillans. However, even though we do find thematic clusters in the collection, these do not always reflect the spiritual development of a single speaker. 68. Chana Bloch, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 239. 69. Abbot, “To the Reader,” n.p. 70. Colie, The Resources of Kind, 52. 71. Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (1972; rpt., London: Routledge, 1994), 149. 72. Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 92.

Boethius and Henry Vaughan: The Consolatio Translations of Olor Iscanus Jonathan Nauman

HENRY VAUGHAN’S VERSE TRANSLATIONS FROM BOETHIUS HAVE received only passing commentary from his biographers and critics, and the tenor of such notice has usually been dismissive. Stevie Davies’s recent study can stand for general opinion: it mentions the Boethius renderings only once, in the context of detecting “an absence of direction and a want of stable identity” in Vaughan’s early verse. Vaughan “plagiarizes and flatters,” Davies says, filling out “his slender inspiration by translating chunks of Boethius, Casimer, Ovid, and Juvenal.”1 It could reasonably be argued that judgments of this sort miss Vaughan’s remarkable facility for relaying the force of Boethius’s arguments in rhyme, alliteration, and meter. I have not read a concluding couplet in English for the first metrum of the Consolatio that surpasses Why then, my friends, judged you my state so good? He that may fall once, never firmly stood. (21–22)

Nor have I seen in English verse or prose a more spirited rendering of the first book’s fourth metrum than the lyric found in Olor Iscanus: Whose calm soul in a settled state Kicks under foot the frowns of fate, And in his fortunes bad or good Keeps the same temper in his blood, Not him the flaming Clouds above, Nor Aetna’s fiery tempests move, No fretting seas from shore to shore Boiling with indignation o’re

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Nor burning thunderbolt that can A mountain shake, can stir this man. Dull Cowards then! Why should we start To see these tyrants act their part? Nor hope, nor fear what may befall, And you disarm their malice all. But who doth faintly fear, or wish And sets no law to what is his, Hath lost the buckler, and (poor elf!) Makes up a chain to bind himself. (1–18)

None of Vaughan’s translations, either from Boethius or from any other classical, scientific, or devotional source, rises to the achievement of the greater lyrics of Silex Scintillans; but I do not think that what we see through Vaughan of the Consolatio indicates an unstable, directionless, or merely derivative sensibility. Louise Imogen Guiney’s late romantic appraisal, written early in the last century, is more accurate and penetrating: Whenever [Vaughan] falls to translating, it is time for the sympathetic reader to prick up his ears. Allusive, analytic, vehemently opinionative, and loving to speak his opinion, yet averse from practicing any recognized attitude and emphasis in so doing, he seeks often this oblique outlet for his inmost thought.2

Vaughan was a classicist—wary of Puritan and sectarian claims to inspired innovation—and he preferred his own timely intentions to emerge in the context of established literary authority. Two sets of Boethian metra were published by Vaughan, one in 1651 and another in 1678. The first set comprises books 1 and 2 of the Consolatio, presenting the poems sequentially with only two omissions. The second set selects and reorders five of the nineteen metra of books 3 and 4. Per unit length, the 1678 translations show more amplification and addition; but despite their interest for demonstrating Vaughan’s classical, medical, and astrological priorities, they lack the tight unity and motivation of the 1651 collection, on which I intend to focus here. The thirteen Boethian metra of Olor Iscanus provide a classicistRoyalist response to the English Civil Wars, and articulate an important stage in Vaughan’s progress from the ethos of the London coteries to the rigorist Christian aesthetic of his sacred verse. Vaughan probably knew and valued the lapidary and impassioned Neoplatonic arguments of the Consolatio long before he

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published translations from them. His feeling for Boethian philosophy, indeed, seems to have gone well beyond the contemporary status of the Consolatio as standard intellectual equipment. The atemporal vision, and the possibility of communicating it through inspired art, galvanized Vaughan’s literary powers: human desires pointed beyond themselves to a divine consciousness unlimited by temporal linearity or particularity, and participation in this unified consciousness granted in entirety the happiness hinted at by limited goods. Even Vaughan’s early work shows an unsophisticated literary fascination with transcending time in verse. The first words of his first published poem are “When we are dead”—which phrase functions, not as the clever preliminary to seduction of his original from Donne3, but as an atemporal intensifier introducing an enthusiastic account of “harmles mirth” as a student. The final lyric of the same early collection confers apotheosis and timelessness on Vaughan’s first loving encounter with Catherine Wise in the green enclosure of Brecon’s Priory Grove: And when at last the winds, and tears Of Heaven, with the consuming years, Shall these green curls bring to decay, And clothe thee in an aged grey: (If ought a lover can foresee; Or if we poets, prophets be) From hence transplanted, thou shalt stand A fresh grove in the Elysian Land; Where (most blessed pair!) as here on earth Thou first didst eye our growth, and birth; So there again, thou’lt see us move In our first innocence, and love: And in thy shades, as now, so then, We’ll kiss, and smile, and walk again. (23–36)

Vaughan’s actual translations from Boethius, however, show more than appreciation for Neoplatonic thought. The renderings presented in Olor Iscanus tacitly modulate Boethius’s crisp, straightforward meditations in order to pass judgment on the defeat of Charles and the Royalist cause. In the metrum quoted above, for instance, the generic Latin reference to “saevos tyrannos”4 takes an indicative cast: “why should we start/To see these tyrants act their part?” In Vaughan’s translation of the fifth metrum of book 1, he takes Boethius’s collective judgment that the innocent are suffering in place of the guilty—

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Premit insontes Debita sceleri noxia poena, At perversi resident celso5 (29–31)

—and makes the victim pointedly royal and singular: Hence the innocent endures that thrall Due to the wicked, whilst alone They sit possessors of his throne. (32–34)

Later in the same passage, Vaughan makes what I take to be the most open censure in all of his printed poetry of the parliamentary faction’s triumph: No perjuries, nor damned pretence Coloured with holy, lying sense Can them annoy, but when they mind To try their force, which most men find,6 They from the highest sway of things Can pull down great, and pious kings. (39– 44)

All of this is in Boethius—except for the adjectives “holy” and “pious,” which transform a general observation about demagoguery into an implicit upholding of Charles’s religious integrity at the expense of the Puritans.7 Vaughan’s translation of the following metrum (1.6) brings a Boethian description of natural constancy to bear upon the attempt to overthrow the king. The original Latin focuses on the frustration of usual activities when attempted out of season: Sic quod praecipiti via Certum deserit ordinem Laetos non habet exitus.8 (20–22)

Vaughan shifts the emphasis from actions to actors in order to sharpen implications for Royalist protest: Then whose wild actions out of season Cross to nature, and her reason, Would by new ways old orders rend, Shall never find a happy end. (19–22)

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The first metrum of the second book of the Consolatio delivers Boethius’s short and enormously influential characterization of the cruelty and fickleness of Fortune. In the Latin we find detached, evenhanded description of Fortune’s demotions and promotions: Dudum tremendos saeva proterit reges Humilemque victi sublevat fallax vultum.9 (3– 4)

Vaughan’s Fortune, on the other hand, beats quite down With headlong force the highest monarch’s crown And in his place unto the throne doth fetch The despised looks of some mechanic wretch. (3–6)

Vaughan reinforces the marked difference in feeling here between his falling king and his ascending commoner with a concluding gesture toward the carelessness of Fortune’s favors to the baseborn: Nor is’t a favour of inferior strain, If once kicked down, she lets him rise again.10 (11–12)

Vaughan’s adaptation here shows his Royalist partisanship in its least attractive aspect: one wishes that (at a later stage) he could have read Dante’s remarkable version of the same topos, Virgil’s discourse from the Inferno that freed Fortune both of cruel intentions and of human detraction: ma ella s’`e beata e ci`o non ode: con l’altre prime creature lieta volve sua spera e beata si gode.11 (7.94 –96)

But this image of Beata Fortuna, portraying the goddess herself as a participant in the eternal vision, is not likely to have been available to Vaughan;12 and Silex Scintillans would depend more on testimonial hints and suggestions than on unifying images when juxtaposing worldly abuses against the “ring of endless light.”

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If the first metrum of book 2 gives a paradigmatic portrayal of Fortune, the third metrum of the same book epitomizes classical arguments for universal mutability. Boethius enumerates the constant changes that prevail in natural phenomena—starlight giving way to sunlight, west winds shifting to south or north—in order to convince prudent individuals that depending on transitory good fortune should especially be avoided, Rara si constat sua forma mundo Si tantas varias vices.13 (13–14)

Again, Vaughan interpolates with the Civil Wars in view, warning not so much against trusting good fortune as against complaint in the face of bad fortune: why lose one’s peace over the defeat of the royal cause in England, over lost “frail honours” and “goods”? If then this world, which holds all nations, Suffers it self such alterations, That not this mighty, massy frame, Nor any part of it can claim One certain course, why should man prate, Or censure the designs of fate? (17–22)

This shift might lead one to consider a general problem created by the defensive slant of Vaughan’s Olor Iscanus metra. The argument of the Consolatio does succeed in detaching the Prisoner (Boethius’s persona) from preoccupation with his own misfortune, but it does so by convincing him instead to examine the nature of the misfortune more carefully. Vaughan’s interpolations show that he is attempting to use Boethian detachment as a refuge for the cavalier defeated; but the spirit of the innuendo makes one question whether the translator has subjected the Royalist defeat to rigorous Boethian examination. In the fourth book of the Consolatio, Lady Philosophy demonstrates that when vicious or unjust men attain their goals, they are in actuality less happy than if their goals had been frustrated or their deeds punished. Vaughan, however, shows little sign of successful movement toward this point of view; indeed, his topical innuendoes and taunts rather imply a state of mind similar to the Prisoner’s unimproved protests at the beginning of the Consolatio. While Vaughan did eventually attain enough detachment from Royal-

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ism to take his own side to task for literary immorality, he never seems to have gone so far as to say that victory for the king’s faction could have been an unhappy event. The fifth metrum of book 2, “Felix nimium prior aetas,” touched a resonant chord in Vaughan’s imagination, both with its longing for a high former state and with its pastoral appreciation for living close to nature. Here we find a variety of characteristic interpolations. In one place, Vaughan enlarges Boethius’s golden age to include family life: And by the parents’ care laid up Cheap berries did the children sup. (7–8)

In another, he provides amplified praise for old pine forest: For then ’twas not cut down, but stood The youth and glory of the wood.14 (15–16)

Royalism, naturally, makes an appearance as well. The metrum, arguing that riches have no absolute value, draws a contrast between ancient peace and postprimitive belligerence: Quid enim furor hosticus ulla Vellet prior arma movere, Cum vulnera saeva viderent Nec praemia sanguinis ulla?15 (19–22)

But in Vaughan’s translation, Boethius’s parabolic and hypothetical absence of strife shifts toward elegiac remembrance of an acquiescent Commons under the rule of Charles: For how could hostile madness arm An age of love to public harm? When common justice none withstood, Nor sought rewards for spilling blood. (25–28)

At this point, Vaughan’s sequence omits a metrum and proceeds with translations of the seventh and eighth metra of book 2, numbering them “6” and “7,” as if no omission had taken place. Both of these final poems borrow considerably from—and improve—fragmentary Consolatio translations in Owen Felltham’s Resolves (1634). Such unacknowledged borrowings (implicitly a

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private exercise since Olor Iscanus was first presented to the public as a pirated collection) can now be seen as a sort of middle term in the meditative, transformative, and very extensive verbal adoptions that Vaughan practiced toward Donne, Habington, and Randolph in his early verse, and toward Herbert and the Scriptures in Silex Scintillans.16 Vaughan concludes his Olor Iscanus adaptation of the Consolatio with the eighth and final metrum of book 2, Boethius’s description of love as the animating principle of the world. The first fifteen lines of the translation depict along with Boethius (and Felltham) the ordering of rival forces that love performs in the astronomical and geophysical worlds; but when Boethius offers the political ordering of human society as one more instance of this dynamic— Hic sancto populos quoque Iunctos foedere continet17 (22–23)

—Vaughan changes the solid generalization into an implicit critique: This in a holy league of peace Keeps King and People with increase. (22–23)

Readers of Olor Iscanus in 1651 would recognize that recent events had denied them the possibility of any cosmic harmony that included the presence of a king in London, a point Vaughan certainly implied by adding the royal figure to Boethius’s text even if the translation was written (as I suspect it was) before the execution of Charles in 1649. Where Boethius advises the disordered individual soul to emulate the ordered harmonies of the observed universe, Vaughan’s interpolations, slight as they are, transform the end of the lyric into a plea for political order, a plea not incompatible with Boethius’s philosophical advice, but independent of the cogent force of Boethius’s argument: O happy Nation then were you If love which doth all things subdue, That rules the spacious heaven, and brings Plenty and Peace upon his wings, Might rule you too! and without guile Settle once more this floating Isle! (29–33)

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NOTES 1. Henry Vaughan, Border Lines Series (Bridgend, Mid-Glamorgan: Seren, 1995), 73–74. 2. “A Commentary on the Poems of Henry Vaughan,” 6. (This “Commentary” was never published, and remains in typescript at the Bodleian and the National Library of Wales; see Martin, iii.) 3. “The Dampe”; see C. A. Patrides, ed., The Complete English Poems of John Donne, Everyman’s Library (London: Dent, 1985), 113. 4. H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand, trs., Boethius: The Theological Tractates; The Consolation of Philosophy, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 142 (I. Metr. 4. 11). Latin quotations below from the Consolatio are cited by line from this edition. Prose translations of Latin sources below (whether from Boethius or from others) are my own. 5. “Harsh punishment owed for wicked deeds oppresses innocent men, while depraved men sit on high.” 6. I.e., which most men recognize and fear (“quos innumeri metuunt populi”). 7. This interpolation also garners notice from Alan Rudrum, Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 517; and from Louise Guiney and Gwenllian Morgan, “Commentary,” 51. The present study is generally indebted to the textual notes on Vaughan’s translations in Martin (Works, 712), Rudrum (Complete Poems, 514 –21), and Guiney and Morgan (“Commentary,” 50–52). 8. “Thus a headlong course of action that abandons due order will not have a happy conclusion.” 9. “Now she savagely tramples dreadful kings, now she deceitfully promotes the lowly features of the conquered.” 10. Boethius’s Latin has Fortune proving her strength when “someone is seen abased and prosperous in a single hour” (“si quis Visatur una stratus ac felix hora,” 8–9). 11. “But she is blest and does not hear it. Happy with the other primal creatures she turns her sphere and rejoices in her bliss”; text and translation from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, translated with a commentary by Charles S. Singleton; Bollingen Series 80 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), Inferno 1:74 –75. 12. There is no evidence that Vaughan read Italian, and apparently no English translation would have been available to him; see Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), 57. 13. “if the world so infrequently keeps the same appearance, is overcome by such vast inconstancy.” 14. Though certainly revealing Vaughan’s own priorities, this innovation is in part a recourse to one of Boethius’s sources: “montibus in liquidas pinus descenderat undas / nullaque mortales praeter sua litora norant”; “the pine had not yet gone down into the flowing waves, nor had mortal men sailed beyond their shores.” See Ovid, Metamorphoses with an English translation by Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols. (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 1:8.

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15. “What alien fury, then, could provoke one to be the first to take arms when cruel wounds were foreseen to be the only rewards for bloodshed?” 16. Vaughan later borrowed from and amplified a prose essay from Resolves, “On Idle Books,” to provide a basis for repudiating his early Poems and Olor Iscanus. 17. “By this sacred obligation, the people also are bound together in league.”

The Mount of Olives: Vaughan’s Book of Private Prayer Donald R. Dickson

THOSE

FEW READERS WHO HAVE COMMENTED UPON HENRY Vaughan’s The Mount of Olives: or, Solitary Devotions (1652) have usually reckoned it simply as a version of the outlawed Book of Common Prayer.1 While Vaughan no doubt had the Prayer Book in mind as he wrote Mount of Olives, we ought not to consider it a simple replacement, especially in view of the fact that nearly two-thirds of the whole is given to two treatises that scarcely resemble the Prayer Book, Man in Darknesse, or, a Discourse of Death and Man in Glory: or, a Discourse of the Blessed State of the Saints in the New Jerusalem. A closer examination of the first section of Mount of Olives, the Solitary Devotions, will show that it provided a private book of prayers resembling a Primer, using the example of Jesus’ suffering and later exaltation on the Mount of Olives to bolster the British church in a hostile and unfamiliar world that was without its traditional supports. The Puritan regime had radically altered the spiritual lives of the people by banning Prayer Book worship in public or private, by ejecting Anglican ministers from their livings, and by allowing churches to fall into decay. Even while concerned with devotional matters, Vaughan turned his pen against the Puritan occupiers of his homeland in an act of political and spiritual resistance. This is clear from his explicitly Royalist sympathies in the dedication “To The Truly Noble and Religious Sr. Charles Egerton Knight,” a kinsman of Vaughan’s wife whose name is invoked “like the royall stamp” as a surrogate of the dead king.2 Egerton is further reminded (perhaps with a nod to the late king who had had his own mount to ascend on a cold January morning) that “The Sonne of God himselfe (when he was here,) had no place to put his head in; And his Servants must not think the present measure too hard, seeing their Master himself took up his nightslodging in the cold Mount of Olives” (M 138). Without a house to

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worship in, his servants must likewise endure all manner of persecution by ascending their own Mount of Olives and enduring their own Golgotha with an eye toward their transcendence on this same mountain. As he remarked, “Think not that thou art alone upon this Hill, there is an innumerable company both before and behinde thee. Those with their Palms in their hands, and these expecting them” (M 141). Precisely how he intended to help his readers in such manifestly bad times by preserving the wellordered forms of worship of the British church will be the subject of this essay. The conditions in Wales that led Vaughan to craft and publish the Mount of Olives were certainly grave, precipitating crises for him personally, for his friends in Breconshire, and for the British church (as Vaughan liked to style it). No sooner had the king fled London than the Long Parliament declared (on 8 April 1642) that the Lords and Commons “intend a due and necessary reformation of the government and liturgy of the Church.”3 As soon as the fighting ceased, a victorious Parliament acted swiftly. Exactly a week after the Book of Common Prayer was declared illegal on 3 January 1645 and the Directory of Public Worship was established in its place, the archbishop of Canterbury was executed on Tower Hill in a show of force. A number of prominent clergymen defended the Prayer Book and the historical validity of its liturgical forms by arguing that it was not derived from Roman Catholic service books. Notable were Henry Hammond’s The View of the New Directory and a Vindication of the Antient Liturgy of the Church of England (1645) and Jeremy Taylor’s An Apology for Authorised and Set Forms of Liturgies against the Presence of the Spirit (1649). Liturgies, Taylor pointed out, are the ligament of the church society, and he warned about the dire consequences of the new Directory on the spiritual lives of the people: He that considers the universall difformity of Publick Worship, and the no means of Union, no symbol of Publick Communion being publickly consigned; that all Heresies may, with the same authority, be brought into our Prayers, and offered to God in behalf of the people, with the same authority, that any truth may, all the particular manner of our Prayers being left to the choice of all men, of all perswasions, and then observes that actually, there are in many places, Heresie, and Blasphemy, and Impertinency, and illiterate Rudenesses, put into the Devotion of the most solemne Dayes, and the most Publick Meetings; and then lastly, that there are diverse parts of Lyturgie, for which no provision at all is made in the Directory; and the very administration of the Sacraments let so loosely, that if there

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be anything essentiall in the Formes of the Sacraments, the Sacrament may become ineffectual for want of due Words, and due Administration; I say, he that considers all these things . . . will finde that particular men are not fit to be intrusted to offer in Publick with their private Spirit, to God, for the people, in such Solemnities, in matters of so great concernment, where the Honour of God, the benefit of the People, the interest of Kingdomes, the being of a Church, the unity of Mindes, the conformity of Practise, the truth of Perswasion, and the Salvation of Souls are so much concerned as they are in the Publick Prayers of a whole national Church.4

Though eloquent as always, Taylor’s arguments did not persuade the Commons to abrogate the law. Worship services according to the Book of Common Prayer had to be held clandestinely during the Interregnum and with increasing danger. Anglican priests who had been ejected from their livings could at first minister in private, either as tutors or domestic chaplains, as Jeremy Taylor did for Lord Carberry at Golden Grove in Carmarthenshire (1645–1658). Within a decade, however, Cromwell made preaching, teaching school, or administering the sacraments a crime punishable by imprisonment or exile for any Anglican clergy.5 The defeat of the Royalists not only altered the patterns and forms of worship but also its formerly sacred space. Those who had met in secret to worship now took control of the churches of the realm; as a result, it fell to the formerly established church to meet secretly to conduct services. Eventually, reading from the Prayer Book was banned even for private houses as well. Soon churches fell into disuse and disrepair, as Vaughan lamented: These reverend and sacred buildings (however now vilified and shut up) have ever been, and amongst true Christians still are the solemne and publike places of meeting for Divine Worship: There the flocks feed at noon-day, there the great Shepherd and Bishop of their souls is in the midst of them, and where he is, that Ground is holy; Put off thy shoes then, thy worldly and carnall affections, and when thou beginnest to enter in, say with Jacob, How dreadful is this place! sure this is none other then the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven! Such reverence and religious affection hath in all ages been shew’d towards these places, that the holy men of God detain’d either by Captivity, or other necessary occasions, when they could not remedy the distance, yet to testifie their desire and longing for the Courts of the Lord, Psal. 84. they would always worship towards them. (M 147)

After his brother Thomas was dispossessed of the parish of Llansantffraid, the church itself remained vacant for eight years.

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Thus with the traditional locus of the holy denied them, other means of making time and place sacred were needed. Even before the Act for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales was passed on 22 February 1650, the Brecon Sequestration Committee acted against a number of ministers, including Vaughan’s neighbors, Thomas Powell at Cantref and Thomas Lewes of Llanfigan.6 His former tutor, Matthew Herbert, was displaced at Llangattock in August 1646 and was later imprisoned for seventeen weeks (in April 1647) after he continued to act as rector. Twenty-five rectors were dispossessed from Brecon alone and altogether over three hundred from Wales. Along with the ejection of the ministers and the proscription of the Prayer Book came the prohibition of the communion service, which was the heart of worship in the British church. Faced with the threat of exile or imprisonment, communicants had to celebrate in secret. The diarist John Evelyn describes one of the rare occasions (3 August 1656) when he received the sacrament: to Lond, to receive the B: Sacrament, & was the first time that ever the Church of England was reduced to a Chamber & Conventicle, so sharp the Persecution; The Parish churches filld with sectaries of all sorts, Blasphemous & Ignorant Mechanics usurping the Pulpets every where. In a private House in Fleetstreete Dr. Wild preachd on 14. Luke. 23. See your notes of this day: The B: Communion succeeded & we had a greate meeting of zealous Christians who were generaly much more devout & religious, than in our greatest prosperity.7

Evelyn notes only four other opportunities to worship according to the old liturgy (on 3 December 1654, 18 March 1655, 14 December 1655, and Christmas 1658), but they were rare and sometimes fraught with danger. John Walker claimed in his Sufferings of the Clergy that since the Propagators had come to Wales, the people had “neither the Comfort of Preaching, nor Praying nor Sacraments, nor Visiting the Sick, nor of any Decency of Burial.”8 The religious, political, and social life of the county was indeed a world turned upside down.9 When the Propagators themselves arrived in Wales in 1650, the poet’s homeland suffered the further indignity of occupation by itinerant ministers hostile to the traditions he held dear. As M. Wynn Thomas has pointed out, “Welsh Puritanism tended to be crusadingly radical in character—fiercely proselytising, militantly intrusive, not infrequently millenarian in outlook.”10 Moreover this resentment was strengthened by the class differences. The “mechanic preachers” who came into Wales, as Alan

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Rudrum points out, were from the middling classes and threatened “to turn gentlemen into peasants.”11 The ejected Anglican clergy were mostly of the Welsh gentry. Especially galling was the self-righteousness and enthusiasm of those who were styled “saints,” as Vaughan archly noted: I envie not their frequent Extasties, and raptures to the third heaven; I onely wish them real, and that their actions did not tell the world, they are rapt into some other place. Nor should they, who assume to themselves the glorious stile of Saints, be uncharitably moved, if we that are yet in the body, and carry our treasure in earthen vessels, have need of these helps. (M 140)

In a pointed reference to the new propagators of the Gospel in his preface to Flores Solitudinis (1654), he avowed that he now lived in “a land of darknesse . . . where destruction passeth for propagation, and a thick black night for the glorious day-spring” (M 217).12 On a personal level, Vaughan was deeply affected by the Civil War and its aftermath. To what extent he was involved in the fighting is largely unknown, though critical opinion now leans toward the view that he rode with the king for a time. The case for his twin brother is much clearer, since the Propagators in 1650 evicted him for being “in armes personally against the Parliament.”13 Some evidence suggests that Thomas fought with Price’s Breconshire regiment of horse at Rowton Heath near Chester, 24 September 1645, where the Royalists suffered a great defeat. Among the list of captains from Price’s company taken prisoner is the name “Tho. Vaughan.” After the Restoration, his name also appears on a claim made for the relief of the king’s “truly loyal and indigent party” as captain of Price’s company.14 Both brothers in fact wrote poems about wartime experiences. It has even been suggested that the death of William Vaughan— seen by some as a major cause of the spiritual crisis that led to his conversion to religious poetry may also have been due to the Civil War. The Civil War also led to the separation of the twin brothers, and Stevie Davies has argued persuasively about how special this bond was.15 It seems likely that Thomas Vaughan was rector at Llansantffraid only from 1645 to 1648. Since he did not attain the canonical age required for ordination as a priest until 1645, and since the Jesus College records show that he was still resident in Oxford roughly half of 1645, he evidently divided his time between Wales and Oxford.16 A further dislocation that plagued the family concerned the substantial glebe of perhaps twenty-five acres attached to the rectory. We know from a 1649 Chancery suit

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brought by Thomas Vaughan junior against some trespassers on these arable lands that Thomas Vaughan senior was “fformer [i.e., farmer] of the said Rectorie of Llansantffread under the plaintiff his son” who would continue to farm the glebe until his death in 1658.17 Thus the poet’s father had a financial interest in the living at Llansantffraid now imperiled by his son’s absence. Despite the great turmoil in their native land, with the war, the monarchy, and the many friends lost, the twins at least had each other’s support until Thomas withdrew from the via activa and returned to Oxford some time in 1648, where he sought refuge in the “Acquisition of some naturall secrets, to which I had been disposed from my youth up.”18 As he never applied for reinstatement to St. Bridget’s after the Restoration, it seems likely that he had discovered his true life’s work in chemical research. For Henry the attack upon his way of life—spiritual and otherwise— was devastating: “Thou seest, O God, how furious and Implacable mine enemies are, they have not only rob’d me of that portion and provision which thou hadst graciously given me, but they have also washed their hands in the blood of my friends” (M 167). Thus Vaughan personally lost not only his church and his livelihood (his clerkship with Sir Marmaduke Lloyd) but many of his friends lost theirs as well. Jonathan Post and more recently M. Wynn Thomas have convincingly linked the Puritan occupation of Wales with Vaughan’s newfound identity as a Silurist. When Silex Scintillans was entered on the Stationers’ register just three days after the Propagation Act went into effect on 22 February 1650, he dropped the title (i.e., Gentleman) he had used with his earliest volume of poems to mark his class. Thereafter he published all his works as the Silurist, including Olor Iscanus in 1651 and Mount of Olives in 1652. Thomas argues that, By calling himself “Silurist,” Vaughan was therefore providing himself with a highly complex cultural identity, and “placing” himself in a fascinatingly ambiguous way. To begin with, he was reminding his English friends that his “classical” credentials were infinitely superior to theirs: his ancient Cambro-British ancestors had, after all, won the respect of Rome itself, been honourably mentioned in Roman despatches, and participated in Roman civilization, whereas the upstart English could at best claim to be heirs of Rome only by virtue of their recent classical education. . . . Vaughan’s claim to be a Silurist has behind it, then, the whole tangled, complex history of the conditional, privileged terms on which the Welsh vainly, and with frequently pathetic persistency, claimed to be “British.”19

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Thus we are beginning to see more clearly that his writings are far more politically nuanced than hitherto realized. Indeed both Mount of Olives and Silex Scintillans have been called “subversive counter-discourse” and may even be reckoned as companion pieces.20 Vaughan apparently regarded them as linked, for in defending his decision to exclude from his devotional manual “the ordinary Instructions for a regular life,” he wrote “thou hast them already as briefly delivered as possibly I could, in my Sacred Poems” (M 141). The anti-Puritan diatribes in Mount of Olives are indeed shrill and the many barbs bear eloquent witness to Vaughan’s bitterness over the rents in the fabric of his church. Absent the forms of public worship that constituted and reaffirmed the traditional church community, Vaughan offered Mount of Olives at this time to fortify the British church in its hour of trial with a regimen of private prayer and with both implicit and explicit exhortations to resist their oppressors. Comparisons between The Solitary Devotions section and the Book of Common Prayer have frequently been drawn. While both works have similar elements, their differences have not been sufficiently addressed. The Prayer Book, as the Anglican historian John Booty has pointed out, was “a fundamental and common instrument for the discipline of persons in community, and thus for the re-creation of the community, the commonwealth.”21 It accomplished this by requiring the public recitation of basic formularies, such as the Catechism, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Commandments, and by regularizing the forms of daily prayer and other church rites. Thomas Cranmer based the Book of Common Prayer of 1549 on the two public prayer services to which the people had been long accustomed, a morning and an evening service of prayer called matins and evensong, which were adapted and translated from the medieval daily office. In this he could also look to the Hebrew Scripture (Numbers 15:37– 41; Deuteronomy 6:4 –9; and Daniel 6:11): which refer to a pattern of daily prayer with the Shema being offered twice daily and prayers when morning and evening sacrifices were offered at the temple in Jerusalem.22 The mode of the Book of Common Prayer was, therefore, at heart public; on the other hand, the essential mode of The Solitary Devotions was private. All its prayers were intended for a soul secluded in worship and in this it most closely resembles a different kind of work, the Primer.

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The Primer or Book of Hours was a devotional supplement that modified the seven hours of the Divine Office used first by secular clergy. While the Primer, in Latin or English or both, could be used to follow some of the services in church, it had established itself, as Paul Stanwood points out, “as the prayer book of the English lay people in the Middle Ages, becoming the most widely known book among all classes of people.”23 Even after the Reformation and despite the institution of the Book of Common Prayer, Primers remained useful for private devotions and hence popular with more than 180 editions appearing between 1525 and 1560. The first Elizabethan Primer appeared in 1559 (and in the following year in a Latin version, the Orarium) that still provided for observance of the seven canonical hours (though without special obeisance to the “Blessed Virgin Mary”). In 1564 a second primer, Preces Privatae appeared, which omitted the midday hours (i.e., solemnizing only matins and vespers), while making extra devotional materials available for personal use. In Vaughan’s youth, John Cosin, under order from King Charles to produce a devotional work that corresponded to the Books of Hours that the queen’s French ladies had suddenly made popular, published his A Collection of Private Devotions (1627), which saw five editions before the Civil War.24 There were, of course, many other (and usually less traditional) types of prayer books, such as Thomas Becon’s The Flower of Godly Prayers (1551), John Day’s A Book of Christian Prayer (1578), or the perennially popular Lewis Bayly’s The Practice of Piety (1612), which saw eleven editions within its first seven years and fifty-eight by 1734. Indeed The Practice of Piety was the one book named specifically in Thomas Vaughan’s inventory of his wife’s possessions at her death: “One greate wodden Box of my deare wifes, in which is all her best apparell, and in that is her greate Bible, with her practice of pietie, and her other Bookes of Devotion.”25 While the essentially private mode of Vaughan’s Mount of Olives links it to the Primer, we need to observe two distinct characteristics that separate it from either the Primer or the Prayer Book. The first involved the scale of time. While Primers emphasized the canonical hours of prayer, they also added a good deal of other devotional materials to serve private needs along with tables for feast days; in this, Primers resembled the Book of Common Prayer, which ordered the church year by setting forth the rites for specific feasts and seasons. Certainly the rites for the communion service play a prominent role, but over half the contents of the Prayer Book are given to the Propers—i.e., the col-

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lects, epistles, and gospels appointed for each Sunday and holy day in the church year.26 By forbidding public worship on traditional feast days and by allowing the churches themselves to be desecrated and emptied, the new Puritan regime, in effect, altered the rhythm of daily life. Without holy days to mark the cycle of the Christian year and without traditional forms of worship on the Sabbath, the day itself became for Vaughan the fundamental unit of reckoning. As he tells us, he had become painfully aware of how precarious and precious each day was: A day, an hour, a minute (saith Causabone) is sufficient to over-turn and extirpate the most settled Governments, which seemed to have been founded and rooted in Adamant. (M 171)

He thus arranged his collection of prayers and meditations to order the course of a single day to compensate for the disruption to the traditional church year. Just as Vaughan reestablished a sacred time for his readers with a scale suited to the new political realities, so too does he reestablish a sacred place through his figurative use of the Mount of Olives. This is the second distinguishing characteristic. In Silex Scintillans, as several scholars have noted, Vaughan had previously sought the church in the “temple in nature to which the Established Church has fled in a time of persecution.”27 The enclosed garden of the Song of Songs, in particular, was allegorized as an ideal form of this new “temple”; similarly he turned to a related type, the Garden of Gethsemane, in this prose devotional. The historical or actual Mount of Olives was a hill east of Jerusalem (rising to a height of 2600 feet) that has been likened to a park for Jerusalem. It was a relatively good area for growing olives; according to Rabbinic tradition, the olive branch was brought to Noah from this mount. An area at its base was called the Garden of Gethsemane (Hebrew for “oil press”) where Christ often prayed (Matt. 26:36; Mark 14:32; and Luke 22:39– 46); he appeared here on Palm Sunday (Mark 11:1 and 11:7); and, according to the Acts of the Apostles, it was the site of Christ’s Ascension (1:2–12).28 The place where Jesus went alone at night to pray has special meaning for the British church in this time of trial, as Vaughan was at pains to make clear: The Sonne of God himself (when he was here,) had no place to put his head in; And his Servants must not think the present measure too hard, seeing their Master himself took up his nights-lodging in the cold Mount of Olives. (M 138)

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Likewise must the British church ascend its own place of trial, recapitulating typologically the suffering of Christ in the Garden. Not only will Christ’s example succor each solitary soul, Vaughan reassures his readers that they are not alone in their suffering: “there is an innumerable company both before and behinde thee” (M 141). While these Solitary Devotions make the day holy from morning to evening prayers, Vaughan’s ultimate focus is on the journey from the sacred mountain to the New Jerusalem, just as the Mount of Olives is both Christ’s place of torment and transcendence. A comparison with the “Order for Morning Prayer” from the Prayer Book shows how Vaughan’s “Admonitions for MorningPrayer” differ. The Prayer Book rite begins with a selection of prayers, followed by the General Confession and Absolution, the Invitatory (Psalm 95), the reading of prescribed psalms and lessons, the hymn “Te Deum,” the “Benedictus,” the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and finally three collects—a rather formal structure. To create a rite suitable for solitary worship in these troubled times, Vaughan returns to the ancient practice of the vigil. He commends spending the night in meditation, reminding us that “In the Primitive Church also the Saints of God used to rise at midnight to praise the Rock of their salvation with Hymns and Spiritual Songs” (M 143). The example he places before us is Christ on the Mount of Olives (as in Luke 21:36–37, the epigraph used on the title page). Such a vigilia (Latin for “wakefulness” or “watch”) was common in the Apostolic church (e.g., Acts 12:12, 16:25) and led to the widespread belief that the Second Coming would take place at midnight. For Vaughan it was an ideal way to begin the day and readers of Silex Scintillans can recall many poems that celebrate such vigils. At the very least Vaughan enjoins us to rise very early, for “we must prevent the Sunne to give God thanks” (Wisdom 16:28). When we wake, we should pay tribute to God the Father as creator of light, to the Son as light from light, and to the Holy Spirit as the fire that lights the world (M 144). After rising we ought to pray to be placed under God’s protection throughout the day, asking to be received “under the shadow of thy wings,” a verse from Psalm 63 that was used traditionally in vigils.29 The day that Vaughan orders for his readers thus begins with morning prayer, then passes rather quickly to evening prayers with little inbetween, save for admonitions before journeying into the wilderness of the world and before going to church. Included also is a short series of pious ejaculations or short prayers

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that resemble occasional meditations in the Puritan tradition— e.g., “When the Clock strikes” or “When thou art persecuted.” The main part of The Solitary Devotions section (over half ) is taken up with preparation for receiving communion. Since the church was now in exile, opportunities for the sacrament must have been rare under the Puritan regime in Brecon. To gain the fullest benefits from such extraordinary opportunities, Vaughan recommended a retreat from earthly concerns lasting three days, for, as he says, “they that come unto this glorious Sacrament, receive onely so much grace as their preparation and holines makes them capable of ” (M 155). Formerly the church used Lent as a “strict and holy season” of preparation, but now communicants must prepare alone, which should be done with meditations on the life of Christ, both his sufferings and his glory: When thou hast thus considered him in his acts of love and humility, consider him again in his glory, take thine Eyes off from Bethlehem and Golgotha, and look up to the mount of Olives, yea, to heaven where he sits now upon the right hand of his Father, Angels, principalities and powers being made subject unto him. Call to minde his Joyful resurrection, his most accomplished conquest, and triumph over the world, death and hell; his most gracious and familiar conversation with his Apostles before his Ascension, with his most loving and comfortable carriage towards them at his departure, leading them out as farre as Bethanie and lifting up his hands, and blessing them. Lastly, close up these thoughts with a serious and awful meditation of that great and joyful, though dreadful day of his second coming to judgement, promised by himself, and affirmed at the time of his Ascension by the two men in white apparel. (M 158)

These preparatory meditations (M 155–59) are followed by a prayer for repentance and a confession of sins (M 159–60), a meditation on Christ’s invitation to receive communion (M 160– 63), and prayers immediately before and after receiving communion (M 163–67). Since a member of the laity could not consecrate or administer the Eucharist, we should not expect Vaughan’s devotionals to resemble the Anglican “Prayer of Consecration,” which consisted of a memorial of the death of Christ, a prayer that receiving the sacrament will be a partaking of the body and blood of Christ, the recitation of the prayers of institution, and an Amen from the communicants in response. Throughout this work Vaughan does echo some phrases from the Prayer Book, which seems intended, as John Wall has argued, to remind his readers of the lost book and perpetuate its influence:

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Vaughan seeks to enable, in spite of the absence of public use of the Prayer Book, the continuation of a kind of Anglicanism, linking those who continued to use the Prayer Book in private and those who might have wished to through identification with each other in their common solitary circumstances.30

But this part of the Solitary Devotions is meant to enhance the preparations of the communicant before the service really begins, rather than substitute for a service book. If the focus of the work as a whole is sanctifying the day according to ancient traditions to give order to one’s life, the section on preparing for communion is for those special days that are most fully sanctified by Eucharistic presence. Vaughan turns not only to the Prayer Book for sources for his various prayers, but to contemporary sources, such as John Daye’s A Booke of Christian Prayers or Henry Bull’s Christian Prayers and Holy Meditations (1570), as Gunther ¨ Wiese has shown.31 Graeme Watson has suggested Joseph Hall’s Contemplations upon the Principal Passages of the Old Testament as a source.32 Oliver Johnson and Wiese both point out that Vaughan makes use of the Puritan Robert Bolton’s Last and Learned Worke of the Four Last Things (1632) for some of the quotations from Sir Walter Raleigh and Isaac Causabon. Bolton’s theme is the vanity of all things and was addressed to a Puritan audience enduring tough times; mutatis mutandis Vaughan was able to appropriate some of Bolton for the suffering Royalists.33 In sum, Vaughan has rather catholic tastes and uses comparatively traditional models for his admonitions, prayers, and meditations that give these Solitary Devotions a certain universality. As we have seen, Vaughan created a solitary devotional or private book of prayers for those who must ascend their mountains and face their own trials. It was clearly written for a still viable church, and the penultimate “Prayer in Time of Persecution and Heresie” is for the restoration of the British church: Most glorious and Immortal God, the Prince of peace, unity and order, which makest men to be of one mind in a house, heale I beseech thee these present sad breeches and distractions! Consider, O Lord, the teares of thy Spouse which are daily upon her cheeks, whose adversaries are grown mighty, and her enemies prosper. The wayes of Zion do mourne, our beautiful gates are shut up, and the Comforter that should relieve our souls is gone far from us. Thy Service and thy Sabbaths, thy own sacred Institutions and the pledges of thy love are denied unto us; Thy ministers are trodden down, and the basest of the people are set up in thy holy place. O Lord holy and just! behold

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and consider, and have mercy upon us, for thy own names sake, for thy promise sake suffer not the gates of hell to prevaile against us; but return and restore us, that joy and gladnesse may be heard in our dwellings, and the voyce of the Turtle in all our land. (M 166)

This same desire for restoration also resounds in his “L’Envoy” to Silex Scintillans (1655). Vaughan’s devotional work Mount of Olives is comprised of more than just the Solitary Devotions section I have been describing. Also included are an original meditation on death, Man in Darkness, and a discourse on the blessed state of the righteous, Man in Glory. When taken as a whole, Mount of Olives bears an emphatic political message. The middle section, Man in Darkness, treats the instability of church and state as symptomatic of universal mutability and degeneration. His diatribe against the Puritan regime here deepens, for Vaughan bases his title on the fact that Britain had been reduced to a veritable land of darkness by the Puritans. The burden of the work sounding through the whole is the great medieval theme of contemptus mundi, which helps guide readers through their present sufferings by reminding them of their final goal: The Contemplation of death is an obscure, melancholy walk[,] an Expatiation in shadows & solitude, but it leads unto life & he that sets forth at midnight, will sooner meet the Sunne, then he that sleeps it out betwixt his curtains. (M 169)

Scattered throughout are pointed references to the oppression and hypocrisy of these “Saints”: It was a blessed and a glorious age the Primitive Christians lived in, when the wildernesse and the solitary places were glad for them, and the desert rejoyced and blossom’d as the rose. When the blood of Christ was yet warme, and the memory of his miracles and love fresh and vigorous; what Zeale, what powerful faith, what perfect charity, hearty humility, and true holinesse was then to be found among the earth? If we compare the shining and fervent piety of those Saints with the painted and illuding appearance of it in these of our times, we shall have just cause to fear that our Candlestick (which hath been now of a long time under a Cloud) is at this very instant upon removing. (M 181)

Man in Darkness also prepares the way for the final section, the translation he called Man in Glory; or, a Discourse of the Blessed State of the Saints in the New Jerusalem, which was written by

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St. Anselm (1033–1109), of whom Vaughan wrote in his preface to the reader: “Anselmus Archbishop of Canterbury lived here in Britaine, in the reigne of Rufus, and striving to keep entire the Immunities of the Church, (which the spirit of Covetousnesse and Sacriledge did then begin to encroach upon,) he was twice banished” (M 192). In his banishment Anselm wrote Man in Glory, which is reminiscent of Richard Baxter’s The Saints’ Everlasting Rest (1650) or Richard Sibbes’s Divine Meditations and Holy Contemplations (1638). Vaughan took Anselm as a kindred spirit in that he was oppressed by political leaders and forced into retirement yet found solace in thoughts of heavenly life. Seemingly as important for Vaughan was the fact that Anselm was an early member of the British church (though born in Lombardy). The titles of these three sections thus suggest that a time of trial and future glory for Anglicanism was clearly at hand. Thus, Vaughan did not simply offer another version of the Prayer Book as he wrote Mount of Olives. Wanting to preserve the well-ordered forms of worship of the ancient church, he provided set prayers to help others keep the day sacred, especially those when communion might be celebrated. Using the example of Jesus’ suffering and later exaltation on the Mount of Olives, he bolstered the British church as it faced its own hour of trial. Throughout he made the Puritan Saints the objects of scorn and ridicule in what must be acknowledged a brave act of political resistance.

NOTES 1. See F. E. Hutchinson, Henry Vaughan: A Life and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), 136– 40; Thomas O. Calhoun, Henry Vaughan: The Achievement of Silex Scintillans (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1981), 45– 47; Jonathan F. S. Post, Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 125–28; and John N. Wall, Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 280–89. 2. All quotation from Mount of Olives will be from The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), which will be abbreviated M. The dedication is M 138. 3. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1906), 247. 4. Cited by Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England: From Andrewes to Baxter and Fox, 1603–1690 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 350. 5. See Davies, 352–62. 6. Hutchinson, 110.

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7. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 3:181. See also his account of being persecuted for attending a service on Christmas 1657 and using the Book of Common Prayer, 3:205. 8. John Walker, An Attempt towards Recovering an Account of the Numbers and Sufferings of the Clergy of the Church of England (London, 1714), 164. 9. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York: Viking, 1972). Hill adapts this phrase from Henry Denne’s Grace, Mercy and Peace (1645). 10. M. Wynn Thomas, “ ‘In Occidentem & tenebras’: Putting Henry Vaughan on the Map of Wales,” Scintilla 2 (1996): 10. See also M. Wynn Thomas, Morgan Llwyd (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1984). 11. Alan Rudrum, “Resistance, Collaboration, and Silence: Henry Vaughan and Breconshire Royalism” in The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 104. 12. A similar condemnation of the propagators appeared in Vaughan’s Life of Paulinus: “Some dispositions love to stand in raine, and affect wind and showers beyond Musick. Paulinus sure was of this temper; he preferred the indignation and hatred of the multitude to their love, he would not buy their friendship with the loss of Heaven, nor call those Saints and propagators, who were Devills and destroyers” (M 346). 13. Hutchinson, 93. 14. Hutchinson, 64 –65. 15. Stevie Davies, Henry Vaughan (Bridgend, Wales: Seren, 1995), 28–55. 16. Brigid Allen, “The Vaughans at Jesus College, Oxford, 1638– 48,” Scintilla 4 (2000): 1–10. 17. Hutchinson, 91. 18. The Works of Thomas Vaughan, Alan Rudrum, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 588. 19. M. Wynn Thomas, “ ‘No Englishman’: Wales’s Henry Vaughan,” Swansea Review 15 (1995): 3. 20. Thomas, “No Englishman,” 5. 21. John E. Booty, The Book of Common Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976), 378. 22. See Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1494. 23. John Cosin, A Collection of Private Devotions, ed. P.G. Stanwood (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), xxiv–xxv. 24. Stanwood, xxxiv–xxv and xxxviii. 25. Thomas and Rebecca Vaughan, Aqua Vitæ: Non Vitis: Or, The radical Humiditie of Nature: Mechanically, and Magically dissected By the Conduct of Fire, and Ferment, ed. and trans. Donald R. Dickson, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, vol. 217 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001), 244. 26. See Booty, 368–82. 27. Claude J. Summers, “Herrick, Vaughan, and the Poetry of Anglican Survivalism” in New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century English Religious Lyric, ed. John R. Roberts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 65. See the classic study by Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, “Vaughan’s Temple in Nature and the Context of ‘Regeneration,’ ” Journal of English & Germanic

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Philology 74 (1975): 351–60. See also Graeme J. Watson, “The Temple in ‘The Night’: Henry Vaughan and the Collapse of the Established Church,” Modern Philology 84 (1986): 144 –61. 28. See Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church,1182, and Harper’s Bible Dictionary, ed. Paul J. Achtemeier (San Francisco: Harper, 1985), 728–29. See also Vaughan’s poem “Mount of Olives” where he subscribes to the view that here Christ “Unto glorie / Was attended” (ll. 23–24). 29. The opening verse of Psalm 63, “Deus, Deus meus es tu; ad te de luce vigilo” was translated in the AV as “O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee.” See Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 1058. 30. Wall, 287. 31. E.g., to the morning prayers. See Gunther ¨ Wiese, Untersuchungen zu den Prosaschriften Henry Vaughans, Salzburg Studies in English Literature (Salzburg: Universitat ¨ Salzburg, 1978), 25–26. 32. Graeme J. Watson, “Two New Sources for Henry Vaughan’s The Mount of Olives,” Notes & Queries 230 (1985): 168–70. 33. Gunther ¨ Wiese, “A New Source for Henry Vaughan’s Man in Darkness,” Notes & Queries 212 (1967): 93– 44; and Oliver Johnson, “Robert Bolton and Henry Vaughan’s Man in Darkness,” Notes & Queries 229 (1984): 331–34.

Henry Vaughan, Orpheus, and The Empowerment of Poetry Peter Thomas “And this also . . . has been one of the dark corners of the earth.” —(Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness)

I. “TO

THE

RIVER ISCA”

AND

“THE CHARNEL-HOUSE”

PICTURE THE SCENE! A FERTILE CELTIC ARCADIA RISES BEFORE our eyes: . . . where swift Isca from our lofty hills With loud farewells descends, and foaming fills A wider channel, like some great port-vein, With large rich streams to feed the humble plain (“Daphnis,” ll. 43– 46)

Here, in “Daphnis” again, are the “vocal woods and valleys” of Henry Vaughan’s beloved and distinctly Georgic Breconshire. Here, in “To the River Isca” his “vocal groves.” Here “the bubbling springs and gliding streams, / And happy banks! whence such fair flowers have sprung.”1 This is the land to which he had come home from London, probably in 1642 at his father’s bidding for safety’s sake. And here (somewhere by the river below Newton Farm his home) the poet rapt, sits and sings as did, he recollects, Apollo, Daphne’s lover, beside Eurota; as beside Hebrus Orpheus did; or Petrarch “On Tiber’s banks,” weepingly while Laura slept; or Ausonius beside “Mosella”; or SIDNEY (emphatically capitalized) murmuring “Stella” to the Thames; or most lately Habington anonymously mingling “Castara’s smiles . . . with fair Sabrin’s tears” by the Severn. And here Vaughan, in the aftermath of Civil War, recollects and echoes their songs of love and longing. Erotic pastoral will find safe haven in his Usk Valley. Or so, at first sight, it seems. But it is not the name of Amoret, the 218

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beloved of his Poems of 1646, or any other nymph he breathes at the start of his second paragraph, but “Isca.” Nor are there any immortal lovers in the fleeting glimpse of the afterlife—just “Poets . . . all in white . . . walk, discourse, and sing,” “like Angels.” And even that tagged by Vaughan as something “the ancients say.” Not a whisper (which you might expect after the opening invocation of legendary amorists) of Orpheus and Eurydice reunited, as in Ovid, after death, to walk sideby-side in “the blessed fields” forever.2 Vaughan’s eye was by the later 1640s fixed on other aspects of the mighty myth. And where, in his more youthful fancies he had hedged his bets with “if what poets sing be true” and “if we poets prophets be,”3 he now pledges himself wholeheartedly to poetry, proclaiming its power to transform and endure. Moving with “But Isca” into vatic mode, he leaves fanciful fables behind: But Isca, whensoe’r those shades I see, And thy loved arbours must no more know me, When I am laid to rest hard by thy streams, And my sun sets where first it sprang in beams, I’ll leave behind me such a large, kind light, As shall redeem thee from oblivious night, And in these vows which (living yet) I pay Shed such a previous and enduring ray, As shall from age to age thy fair name lead ’Till rivers leave to run, and men to read. (“To the River Isca,” ll. 25–34)

Elysium sinks from sight. Vaughan, though dwelling still on dying and “those shades” in the hereafter, now imagines himself dead and buried—“When I am laid to rest hard by thy streams,” “When I am ashes.” What matters now is that he “will leave behind” that large redeeming light. Though Vaughan believed in the ultimate restitution of all things, the Usk Valley is not to be translated, like the Priory Grove, en bloc to the other world. The fate of place and poetry (and for Vaughan they are inseparable) in history, here and now in dangerous and disordered days, and through ensuing ages, calls for something more than youthful “fancies.” And in Olor it is a poet made of sterner stuff who vows to win his river Usk enduring fame, “ ’Till rivers leave to run, and men to read.” That Shakespearean ring comes as no surprise, given a frontispiece—among the richest and most ambitious of the time—that does not shrink from transposing Jonson’s “Swan-of-Avon” tag

Figure 3. Title page of Henry Vaughan’s Olor Iscanus (1651) This item is reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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visually from the Bard to Henry Vaughan. And Olor’s Motto (“O quis me gelidis in vallibus ISCAE / Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra!” / O who will set me down in the cool valleys of the Usk, and protect me with the ample shadows of his branches!) virtually verbatim from Virgil’s Georgics, no less boldly identifies with the most famous of Roman poets. That “quotation,” moreover, puts an ironic spin (if I may risk the phrase) on the seemingly modest frontispiece inscription—also Virgilian—“Flumina amo, Silvasq, inglorius” (I who am without fame love the waters and woods). Marilla suggests that “I who am without fame” signifies Vaughan’s resignation to or satisfaction with a quiet life in rural Wales; but one would hardly advertise one’s withdrawal in a Humphrey Moseley publication; and in any case by 1648 (when Olor was scheduled to appear) let alone 1651 when it eventually came out, life over the border had proved less than tranquil and Vaughan anything but resigned!4 That “inglorius” is (like Spenser’s “Immerito” and Milton’s “uncouth swain”) the word of the proud apprentice announcing his arrival, seeking recognition. Cynics would call it “backing into the limelight”! Before our very eyes Vaughan transmogrifies himself. Announcing himself to the world as “Silurist” (no longer ordinary “Henry Vaughan, Gentleman” as in 1646) is equally, arguably more, forward. Recollecting indomitable Celtic resistance to invading legions (and they had fought a fierce battle not far from his birthplace),5 it makes another kind of connection with Rome—not poetical but political this time, and by way of reproach to Parliamentarian conquest and oppression. The tongue-in-cheek war poem “Upon a Cloak Lent Him by Mr. J.Ridsley,” the eighth piece in Olor, even depicts him as a naked Celtic warrior, tattooed and painted. Sleeping “Adamite” in the cloak had left its mark, more ways than one, on young Henry, who woke next day looking like map-maker John Speed’s famous image6 of a fearsome head-hunter, undressed for battle: I’ll not forebear To tell thee all, his wild impress and tricks Like Speed’s old Britons made me look, or Picts; (“Upon a Cloak,” ll. 50–53)

The poem is a virtuoso display of fantastic shape-shifting;7 but it makes the same gesture of solidarity as the frontispiece. So, adopting the Latin tag and the tribal title, Vaughan contrives a paradoxical double identity as Roman poet and ancient British

Figure 4. Celtic Warrior from John Speed’s History of Great Britain (1611) This item is reproduced by permission of Cardiff University Library, Wales, UK

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warrior. Serene at first sight, that frontispiece (foreshadowing the poems within) is a provocative proclamation of the poet’s new, enlarged identity as the embodiment of cultural and “tribal” continuity against the grain of events. The poet challenges both the politicking “Chameleons of state” in the ascendancy, “Whose breath (like gunpowder) blows up a land” (“The Charnel-House,” ll. 9, 23–24) and, in his 1647 verses to John Fletcher, those sycophantic poetasters who stand “politicly big” (another Shakespearean echo there)8 amidst “that dearth of wit / Which starved the land since into schisms split.” The sentiment matches Milton’s prayer of the same year for an end to “this damnable civil war and its skirmishes” and that some “god or god-begotten man”—presumably he had, as so often, Orpheus on his mind—may “restore with his holy power our lifegiving pursuits, recall the homeless Muses—banished now from almost every corner of England.”9 Into that wilderness (as it seemed) or rather into the even darker hiatus of the Interregnum, Vaughan launched an enlarged vision of the public scope and healing power of his own art. Those ten lines of “To the River Isca” quoted earlier were a defiant “not from this corner” to set against fears such as Milton’s. And so, with that Shakespearean affirmation ringing in our ears, “To the River Isca” switches into incantatory octosyllabics and turns to the future—“First may all bards born after me.” The poem becomes a bidding prayer (that those bards—the term invoking, a la Sidney,10 Orphic and Celtic traditions—will “sing” of Isca), and ancient spell (“May the evet and the toad”) to ward off evil from this pristine place of “green banks and streams” and “vocal groves,” of “gentle swains . . . / And . . . beauteous nymphs,” of “Garlands, and Songs, and Roundelays.” A charmed Arcadian landscape, to be sure! And we seem magically to have stepped back through the mirror, into the pre-war pastoral dream world of a Thomas Carew who thought that such poetry should stick to “things . . . feigned” and not meddle in history.11 But Vaughan’s scene is not all courtly literary artifice: even the nymphs are really the thinly-disguised bucolic girls-aboutBrecon-town, the sparky, “waggish nymphs” who figure (alongside the self-professedly “Orpheus-like” poet) two poems on in “In Amicum Foeneratorum.” The river and woodlands, too, are recognizable enough even now in the ancient British landscape where he was born. It was a landscape Matthew Herbert, his boyhood tutor, had taught him to read; for much of the literary matter of Britain (“In dark records and numbers nobly high / . . . /

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From old Amphion’s mouth full often heard”)12 was inscribed around him in the cromlechs and hill forts, the Roman roads, the sacred druidic groves, the holy wells and waterfalls, mythic Llangorse Lake, and the river rich in Arthurian associations, running down to Camelot at legionary Caerleon. Hallowed by history and myth, embedded in his psyche, this little world was full of presences and voices. Well might Vaughan insist, wandering here in the kind of scene (in Milton’s phrase) “the Muses haunt,”13 that in the poetry inspired by such a prospect “men shall more fair truths see / Then fictions were of Thessaly” (“To the River Isca,” ll. 41– 42). And poetry’s twin-peaks, classical Helicon and the biblical “Hill” of Sion, sacred mountains both, seem to rise about him in the Usk Valley. If leaving London had seemed at first to dash his hopes of literary fame, home had become for him (as Sion was for Milton) a place of ceremonial song and oracular prophecy.14 He looks to Isca’s banks and streams, to its groves and shades to validate and fulfil his “vocal” and “prophetical” ambitions. Moving to his close Vaughan changes pace once more, rising to a loftier pitch with a different, more emphatic, and more stately tread: Honour, Beauty, Faith and Duty, Delight and Truth, With Love, and Youth Crown all about thee! And what ever Fate Impose elsewhere, whether the graver state Or some toy else, may those loud, anxious cares For dead and dying things (the common wares And shows of time) ne’er break thy peace, nor make Thy reposed arms to a new war awake! But freedom, safety, joy and bliss United in one loving kiss Surround thee quite, and style thy borders The land redeemed from all disorders. (“To the River Isca,” ll. 73–86)

Incantatory, chant-like, ceremonious, this final encircling benediction still has a flavor of courtliness, of Caroline masque about it. But it transfers their quasi-magical, sacerdotal, ritual mode (and their attachment to the Orphic power of song to hallow and transform) to Vaughan’s corner of the kingdom. And that loving kiss is the romantic-erotic transposed into a deeper key, an embrace securing the freedom of his land, and its safety from politi-

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cal (not amorous) “disorders.” Is it meant for Wales only? Or for his Usk Valley alone? Certainly the last line reads like a talismanic inscription sealing off the Iscan borders from dead and dying things and “new war.” Yet it harks back, too, to the earlier promise to redeem the river valley from oblivion, to put it on the map; and so to the indispensable validating poets and rivers, ancient and modern, of the opening flourish, most notably to the prepotent figure of “holy Orpheus” compiling his “deep hymns” by “headlong Hebrus.” Return to the Usk had widened Vaughan’s horizons after all. And when Olor, long delayed, appeared not ahead but on the heels of Silex those phrases (“holy Orpheus,” “deep hymns”) carried a redoubled resonance and conviction. The turn to the great founding bard (not a presence in the 1646 Poems) is a key moment: it marks Vaughan’s realization that loss and isolation had enlarged and deepened, not silenced his voice. For, as Elizabeth Sewell observes in The Orphic Voice,15 the myth proclaims the power of poetry over thoughts, over natural objects, and (to some extent) when joined to love, over life and death itself; and it teaches that that almost indestructible power may turn, even in its own disaster (for there is danger in the enterprise and a price to be paid) to something like prophecy. All that, Vaughan (though the full force of the storm had not broken about him when he wrote “To the River Isca”) urgently embraced, struggling mid-century with traumatic bereavement and sickness, with inner and outer darkness, and with defeat and destruction in all their forms. The bard at bay could hardly do without Orpheus. But where is Eurydice? Here are Daphne, Laura, Stella, and Castara; but no Eurydice! True, Renaissance poets generally made little or nothing of her;16 but not even to mention her name in this context is pointed. Elsewhere, after all, Vaughan devotes eighty-five lines to the legendary couple. Moreover, translating Boethius’ moral allegory of “Poor Orpheus almost in the light” who, succumbing to a moment’s temptation, “Lost his dear love for one short sight,” he softens the original, speaking meltingly of Eurydice “the beauteous saint” and of amorous passion: “Or who can such hard bondage brook / To be in love, and not to look?”17 Perhaps there was too much self-indulgence on Orpheus’ part, too much failure, despair even, in that aspect of the myth for the purposes of Olor. Certainly, given the thrust of much personal propaganda against the King, it must have seemed sensible not to foreground in 1651 the idea of an heroic lover/uxorious husband who lost his head! Perhaps Vaughan was mindful, too, of

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Milton’s “half-redeemed” Eurydice: she would hardly do in a poem proclaiming the redemptive power of poetry. So it is not the eroticized, romantic, bereaved Orpheus “full of tears of woe” we find in “To the River Isca” but a more innocent and holy figure, the “busy child” of Nature, compiling “deep hymns.” And if Vaughan’s “compiled” catches the bard in the act of composition, it seems also to gesture toward collections of Orphic Hymns, extant in his day, singing the mysteries of heaven and earth. It is Orpheus, the sacred thaumaturge that “To the River Isca” privileges. Nonetheless anxiety lurks. There could be no denying “dead and dying things” in mid-century Britain, no forgetting Orpheus’ terrible fate, torn to pieces by the rout of Thracian women, his head flung into Hebrus. Vaughan, still in one piece, does not dwell on that here; but a word is enough to stir the echoes. And where Milton in “Lycidas” accurately translates Virgil’s “volucrem . . . Hebrum” as “swift Hebrus,” Henry chooses “headlong,” which suggests not only the godlike bard’s impetuosity as a lover, and how he dies, but also his head floating down to Lesbos, singing as it goes! It contrives, moreover, a link beneath the surface with Eurydice after all—for “praeceps,” the Latin for “headlong,” is used by Virgil to describe not the river but her fleeing from Aristaeus to her death by snake-bite.18 Vaughan’s word, albeit covertly, glances simultaneously at her double-death (as Ovid calls it)19 and the power of Orpheus’ voice (even after dismemberment) to rise above the forces of destruction—transcending mortality awhile before his second “death,” silenced at Delphos by Apollo. As for what comes next, “headlong” is the only word! We are plunged unceremoniously into an underworld—a “CharnelHouse”—a place of damps, darkness, and the dismantled dead, “Fragments of men, rags of anatomy.” The sight of these “relics” (of a once “proud . . . head,” or an alluring “face”) is enough to stop even “headlong man” (that word again!) in his tracks. The poet, but now eager to immortalize the Usk, is stunned: Where are you [sic] shoreless thoughts, vast tentered hope, Ambitious dreams, aims of an endless scope, Whose stretched excess runs on a string too high And on the rack of self-extension die? (“The Charnel-House,” ll. 17–20)

This “Frontispiece o’ the grave” touches poetry and its aspirations to the quick. Vaughan’s “vocal art” is overcome by the “Elo-

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quent silence” of this “sad Library.” What price now his other place of study, the Bodleian? True, there are skulls in his (probably earlier) paean to the great Oxford library, and “empty skulls” at that; but only tongue-in-cheek, at the expense of dry-as-dust dons and to outface memento mori shows of “The ruins of mankind” by pointing to the place where dead “Rabbins still live . . . in their books.” And to the Ancients too, in a building the very stones of which “danced” into place “unto the strain of Orpheus” and “do lodge his muse again.”20 Alas, Henry emerging from his Charnel-House “library” is not dancing! Or singing deep hymns! He is not Eliot’s Lazarus rising from the grave to tell us all—“I am come to tell you all.” More Polonius, in fact, with his “notes” warning us, in “Neither-a-borrower-nor-a-lender-be” mode, to avoid extremes—“damn not mirth, nor think too much of it.” Not so much a revelation of the mysteries of life and death as a health-warning. Of course, as Marilla suggests,21 this advice has a political edge; but it reminds me of the old Erasmic shaving cream slogan—“Not too little, not too much.” All very well, but not enough to dispel the darkness as our discomforted seer steps out into “double night.” Those words—voicing key fascinations— hint at depths; and elsewhere Vaughan travels as deep and daringly into the dark (and back) as any poet of his generation. But this time he is just glad to get out in one piece—with a solemn promise that should “wild blood swell” in future “One check from thee shall channel it again.” Channel it—charnel it! The hardly hidden pun is jaunty enough, but he sounds shaken, unmanned, trying to laugh it off. Full of swaggering bravado at the start, he ends up (his poems never stand still and are not afraid to end in defeat) whistling in the dark. Not that his visit to “The Charnel-House” is a failure: on the contrary it sounds a counterpoint to the prophetic ambition of the Isca set-piece. The facts of mortality confront, perhaps outface immortalizing poetry. The polarities of Olor are set.

II. OLOR: OCCASIONAL POEMS What follows looks at first sight fitting monument to a tradition in disarray, disjointed by civil war—an agglomeration of fifteen occasional poems written over a period of at least six years between 1645 and 1651, presented in broadly chronological order (four to friends, two elegies, a kind of jocular war poem, a spousal

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piece, an epitaph, and six book reviews—864 lines in all); with twenty-five translations (four Ovids, one Ausonius, thirteen Boethius, and seven Casimirs, 1055 lines in all) tacked on to bulk out the volume. Not so much a monument, perhaps, as a heap of scattered remains, bits and pieces desperately shored against ruin. But there is a design.22 Through all Olor’s varying kinds, subjects and moods Vaughan (cornered by history) contrives to keep company with absent friends (dead and alive), and with writers past and present. Here love and literature are explored and tested by absence, enmity, and loss. The conundrum of mortality and immortalizing art shapes the shifting scene as it moves through time and the fog of war toward resolution and regeneration. No sooner are we out of “The Charnel-House” than the wonderworking Orpheus reappears—or rather, the poverty-pleading poet imagines himself “Orpheus-like” forcing money from “stocks and stones.” But four poems on (in a mood entirely changed from the tongue-in-cheek, and the defiant sociability of his first three to friends and the approving review of Gombauld’s Endimion following them) Vaughan looks death in the face on the battlefield. He relives the day in 1645 at Rowton Heath near Chester when he lost his dear friend R.W. For “A full year’s grief ” he has “denied” his tears, fearing him killed but hoping against hope that his comrade-in-arms, not yet twenty years old, might have survived the fighting. Now he faces the worst—“But thou art gone!” Painfully, in flashback, he loses sight of him in the heat of battle: “O that day / When . . . I missed thy face!”; “But here I lost him”; “I cannot tell”; “I have / Failed”; “thy loved ashes missed me”; “at the last farewell torn from thy sight.” There are no darker notes in Olor than these, none so bereft, such as Vaughan’s “Poor Orpheus” must have sung who “Lost his dear love for one short sight.” Nor can this poet’s art rescue the dead. No room here for glib talk of Elysian reunion (as in the earlier R.W. poem, possibly to the same friend); no contemplation (as in the later, more detached, oratorical elegy to “Mr R. Hall, Slain at Pontefract, 1648”) of “the spirit’s flight / . . . winged above us to eternity.”23 Nor anything, though R.W. is Vaughan’s Lycidas, to match the triumphant transfiguration Milton imagined prewar for his obliterated friend. Both poets confront the enigma of a death without a body; but Vaughan was implicated in ways Milton was not. The hurt of being there, of seeing his dear friend and fellow soldier disappear in the fray, of not knowing him dead for certain, of not knowing how he died or was buried, of not having been there to lay him to

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rest—all these distresses have gone too deep for that kind of consolation. That R.W. lies awaiting the resurrection, Vaughan does not doubt; but he is under no illusion that his elegy can add in any way to the “blessed soul.” It may serve to “redeem thee to a fairer date” on earth; “perhaps” (but only maybe) keep alive “some weak remembrance of thy name”—as it has done. But for the poet (and for us reading it over three and a half centuries on) it has a deeper function as a coming-to-terms. The rawness of Vaughan’s emotions, heartfelt in those stabbing phrases (of disbelief, blankness, grief, love, guilt, anger, bewilderment, and helplessness), and his thinking through trauma speak to us still with an unvarnished directness and honesty. This elegy faces what “The Charnel-House” flinched from—the inexplicable mystery of mortality. For this time, while recognizing the limitations of poetry’s power, Vaughan found something to say from the depths of his hurt. He gave his beleaguered contemporaries and left to future generations an image of personal bereavement, speaking out of the darkness, but not defeated. It has the courage to tell uncomfortable truths. Still, Vaughan, not for the first time, gives the last word to Virgil: Nomen & arma locum servant, te, amice, nequivi Conspicere [Thy name and arms guard the place; thee, my friend, I could not see.] (“An Elegy on the Death of Mr. R.W.,” ll. 99–100)

The heroic farewell dignifies the death; but being from Aeneas to the hideously mutilated shade of his comrade-in-arms Deiphobus, voices Vaughan’s terrible unspoken fear that just such a “fierce . . . fate” befell his friend; and might have been his lot too. The disfigurements of war, the imagery of the broken body (both politic and physical) haunt his imagination. Even when the mood swings to sardonic whimsy (as it does in the next poem, “Upon a Cloak Lent Him by Mr J. Ridsley” also from the Rowton Heath episode) he can’t help joshing—gallows humorously—about dying “by piecemeal” (that is, bit by bit, slowly, chopped up), “executed . . . / For some bold Irish spy, and cross a sledge / Had lain messed up for their four gates and bridge” in London. Whether in obsequy or black comedy the fate of Orpheus was never far from this poet’s mind.

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The roll-call (too long for recitation here) of dismemberments and decapitations, not all of them explicitly attached to Orpheus of course, is formidable. It begins in the Juvenal translation that fills the second half of Poems, 1646, with Sejanus-Strafford’s “once honoured head” trodden and spurned, his body torn to pieces by the Roman mob and flung into the Tiber—to which Vaughan adds his own barbed remarks about “States built on the people’s will” and “bought with so much shame and blood!” Pompey (also proxy for Strafford) follows, “sent . . . to lose / His head at Nile” (lines 441– 42). These are, of course, political executions, not yet worked into emblems of poetry at risk. But Vaughan, publishing his innocuous Platonic “fancies” in defiance of “the years, and what coarse entertainment they afford poetry,”24 clearly feels threatened. The Juvenal following, though he suavely passes it off as done for pastime, is a calculated counterattack in Roman mode. Nor does it shrink from violence; and to leaf four pages forward from the untroubled Arcadian charms of the Priory Grove to Sejanus’ being lynched is a shock to the system. The reader (the poet too) is in danger of falling into the gap between innocuous love lyric and satiric contempt. There is a dislocation, a mismatch between what the moment demands and what inherited fashion has equipped the poet to produce. Vaughan “solves” the problem by enlisting (and embellishing) Juvenal. But he understood that “fancies” would no longer do. Olor, the opening catalog of poet-lovers notwithstanding, excludes them; and in Silex, 1655 he would repent such languishing. Meanwhile, in Olor, having braved and survived the dangers of Rowton Heath, Vaughan on a rising curve addresses the survival of letters in the second of his six commendatory poems, “Upon Mr Fletcher’s Plays, Published, 1647” written like “To the River Isca” in the “breathing time” before the Second Civil War. His Fletcher’s posthumous reappearance (paired with Beaumont in Moseley’s famously Cavalier folio) frees writing “from that dearth of wit / Which starved the land since into schisms split.” A voice restored from before “these storms” gives grounds for hope. William Cartwright (another voice, though more recent, from the past) follows immediately in an astute and subtle piece of literary criticism written for the posthumous 1651 edition of his works. His are the best of “the old world’s writings, kept yet from the fire” and “force” (Vaughan’s choice of word ironically glances at the military regime in power) “these worst times to admire.” Certainly Vaughan admires and commends their qualities. Nonetheless, the world they inhabited— peaceful in Fletcher’s case, “courtly” in Cart-

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wright’s—is no more. He turns to the present and future literary scene in the shape of Thomas Powell, Katherine Phillips, and William Davenant. All (and admiring Vaughan consummately mimics each) have something new to offer in an altered climate. Powell’s translation of Malvezzi’s wisdom and statecraft puts a new model at the service of “our State,” to allay “the heat and burnings of a land” and show us “the marks to which”—Cromwell take note—“true statesmen tend.” Orinda’s “incantations” in gentle measure, smiling language, quick accents, her “raptures” “as innocent, and high / As Angels have, or Saints that die” rise unimpeachably above the fray. And so Vaughan’s own poems end in praise of Davenant clearing the air: Th’hast cleared the prospect to our harmless hill, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Th’hast cleared the prospect to our harmless hill, Of late years clouded with imputed ill. (“To Sir William Davenant, Upon His Gondibert,” ll. 1– 4)

Love and poetry are reformed and reconciled. Now Cartwright’s “amorous” youths and “beauteous readers whose looks can / . . . make any man a lover” give way to “youthful couples . . . chaste as stars . . . / Calm as rose-leaves, and cool as virgin-snow.” The springs of pastoral-erotic, chastened and refined, “wash and sing” once more. Heroic poetry, purged of “spirits, prodigies, . . . giants and enchantments,” meets the taste of a revolutionary decade already grown or growing impatient with such old-fashioned fantasies. In his Orinda tribute Vaughan described himself as “cross to fashion,” but he went out of his way, uninvited, to promote her work, which had not yet been published; and now was as ready as Hobbes to recognize the significance of Davenant’s Gondibert (1650/51), applauding the attempt at reformed epic on modern principles. Perhaps by “fashion” he meant the taste of those diehard Cavaliers who jeered Davenant’s efforts from a safe distance in exile at the court of Charles II in France. Frenchified airs were not to Henry’s liking. Nor was Silex, out by now, exactly a la mode. He had not even settled, like many a Royalist, for the consolations of conviviality, drowning defeat in drink and a revel “Midst noise and war.”25 He had sampled that and left it behind. But above all, his “cross to fashion” is a declaration of independence. He is his own man. His finger on the pulse of poetry and politics, he draws his own conclusions, full (as Jonathan Post demonstrates) of subtle and serious critical perceptions. He trusts—for what else can you do in a world divided

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against itself—his own judgment. He trusts poetry still. And he is bold on his own authority, as he draws to the close of his occasional poems in Olor, to place the laureate wreath on Orinda’s brow and proclaim Davenant “The prince of poets, and of lovers too.”

III. OLOR: TRANSLATIONS The translations that follow are remarkable acts of ventriloquism. Doubling his voice on others, sinking his identity in them (perhaps that came naturally to an identical twin who saw himself whenever he looked at his brother!), and inserting himself into their texts, Vaughan makes it difficult for us to be sure who is speaking at any given moment. And so he is able to release some of his deepest and most painful feelings through the mask. The personal resonances are palpable. Ovid in exile “At Ister” (substituted for the Roman poet’s “Euxinis acquis,” on the shores of the Black Sea, to secure the unspoken chime with Isca) lingers disillusioned, “Sick in the skirts of the lost world,” cut off from fellow poets in Rome, “No friend to comfort me,” “All tired alone,” imagining himself dying a “double” death, “Unpittied, and unmourned for,” penning his own epitaph, longing for fame, and looking to his books to be “More strong and lasting monuments of me,” is hardly to be distinguished from Henry forced from London back to the banks of Isca. All Vaughan’s frustrated hopes, self-pity, anger, and resentment are voiced here; even, Robert Wilcher has convincingly argued,26 an anguished feeling of being abandoned by his twin, Thomas, no longer there when he came home to the house where they had shared “the same infancy.” Nor are Orphic figurations missing. He lurks behind “Pentheus’ wandering ghost” (“Translation of Ovid’s Tristia V.viii,” l. 40) who was torn to pieces by the Theban women for forbidding Bacchus worship. His heartbroken “Eurydice, Eurydice . . .” whispers behind Ovid’s lamentation for his wife in Rome: Thee (absent) I embrace, thee only voice, And night and day belie a husband’s joys; Nay, of thy name so oft I mention make That I am thought distracted for thy sake. (“Translation of Ovid’s Tristia III.iii,” ll. 19–22)

Maybe there is a smidgeon more than meer coincidence behind the cluster of rhymes “dead/head; bed/head; head/dead” that fol-

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low fifteen lines on. Then in the Ausonius we are plunged into an underworld once more—the haunt of “silent shades,” betrayed lovers, a gallery of maudlin suicides, trapped in griefs and frustrated desires. It is a nightmare image—Vaughan’s interjected simile “As in a dream . . . ” insists on that—of a deadly paralysis of spirit and voice, a dark night of the soul. And the deadness of being (felt on the poet’s pulse) spills over into Boethius, “Eclipsed” within and engulfed in “outward darkness.” His story shadows Vaughan, from “youthful verse” giving way to “sad numbers” and a “broken style,” through to a reanimated sense of the “secrets” and mysterious power of the natural world by “Creation’s law controlled.” Like some Orpheus Redivivus restored, he breaks forth—“O thou great builder of this starry frame”— hymning the cosmic motions that control and can transform “this miserable world.” It may even—for it is “Love which rules Heaven, Land, and Sea”—bring “Plenty and Peace upon his wings” to rule the “Nation . . . Settle once more this floating Isle!” Or so Vaughan prays: for the “Nation” and the “floating Isle” are his. And so his Casimir opens with a prayer to the “All-mighty Spirit!” for inner peace in a world still “all to piece-meals cut, and hurled / By factious hands.” A better prospect beckons; and we move away from the “Litigious troubles and loud strife / Of this world” (“Translation of Casimir’s Epodes iii,” ll. 9–10) for the life of the spirit set in a regenerated landscape, part classical, part biblical, part local, by Vaughan out of Casimir out of Horace: Happy the man! Who in this vale Redeems his time, shutting out all Thoughts of the world, whose longing eyes Are ever pilgrims in the skies, That views his bright home, and desires To shine amongst those glorious fires. (“Translation of Casimir Ode III xxii,” ll. 15–20)

The griefs, tears, and weeping eyes of the Boethius carried us intermittently toward Silex. But in the Casimir we are steeped in its idiom of weeping eyes and tears, of “bright home,” “hills our fathers walked on,” “fresh groves,” busy bees, springs and fountains, of shady banks, hollow woods and vales ringing with sound, and wholesome mornings. So Vaughan, no longer an alienated Ovid, enters, or rather re-enters a renewed pastoral place where reformed poet and nature chime. It is at first sight idyllic enough, but not unreal: Virgilian pastoral seclusion has acquired the psychological complexity of hermetic introspection.

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And the concluding sketch of “A peaceful, loving neighbourhood” is underlined with a parting sideswipe at greedy usurers who buy up poor neighbors’ land. Nor is there a nymph in sight! A celibate dominates the last scene, a hermit (key figure in Vaughan’s spiritual odyssey), a man of tears, a “Saint” yearning for heaven yet rooted here, communing with nature, his inner self and his creator. We are in the introspective world of Silex Scintillans and the company of a “Saint” who speaks—and there is no mistaking the Orphic figuration now—who speaks . . . to the neighbour trees And many sad soliloquies To springs and fountains doth impart, Seeking God with a longing heart.27 (“Translation of Casimir’s Epodes iii,” ll. 59–63)

You could swear (though with two wives and eight children he was certainly no celibate) that it is Henry Vaughan himself, “his sleeps light, and soon past,” walking under the stars that “shine” in the silent sky; or in the spring botanizing in the “green fields and bowers,” communing with “the Deity”; lying near oak trees on shady banks; or in a boat midstream, fly-fishing. In this figure on the edge (you could say “cross to fashion”), part Orpheus, part Christian stoic, part self-sufficient countryman, in the world but not exactly of it, like Vaughan under the Commonwealth, Olor ends.

IV. OLOR: THE FRAME Actually it does not. Nor did it begin with the Isca poem. Framing the scene, first and last stand (the Silurist is no country bumpkin!) Latin verses: “Ad Posteros” before; “Ad fluvium Iscam,” “Venerabili Viro . . . Mathaeo Herbert,” “Praestantissimo Viro, Thomae Poello,” and “Ad Echum” after. With the frontispiece these poems are the most arcane, powerfully charged, and directly autobiographical pages in the book, articulating key figurations (of swan and phoenix, for example, first and last respectively) designed to bind together and pattern the collection. These are his credentials too—a concentrated curriculum vitae. At the outset he proclaims, for posterity, his Welsh birth—CAMBRIA capitalized in contrast to the pointedly lower-case “Anglos”; his early education; his reaction to disastrous Civil War; and his own endurance and integrity. And to close the book he pays his debts to

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place, tutor, science, and myth—the forces that shaped him, gave him his bearings and his belief in art as transformation and healing. To the initiated (“for we have not written for the foolish” as “Ad Posteros” puts it) he reveals the deepest undercurrents and impulses of his imagination, his inner as well as his outer landscape. Altogether it is a remarkable self-portrait—a picture of “the kind of man I have grown up to be”; a graphic epitome of Vaughan’s search for a renewed identity and a reformed, revitalized poetic. And Orpheus (archetypal singer) emerges as one of the most powerful of his evoked ghosts, a haunting, sometimes hidden, sometimes revealed presence. We glimpse him, obliquely, at the outset, in “Ad Posteros” where the Silurist sets himself apart from the Furies (in Orpheus’ hymns “To the Eumenides” and “To the Erinyes” they “punish the unjust.” “bring the deep pain of retribution,” come “Nocturnal and clandestine” from “deep down . . . in Hades”)28 who “divided and fragmented the English people,” a broken body politic. Then in the first of the end pieces, “Ad fluvium Iscam” (it comes immediately after the Casimir and circles back to the “ISCA pater” of “Ad Posteros”), he appears directly with full force: in the “murmurous whisper! . . . the plaints of the dismembered Thracian” traveling “along your waters, and the lyre of the divine old man.” Two rivers, Usk and Hebrus, are as one—and two bards too. The ambition of “To the River Isca” is accomplished. The river that in “Ad Posteros” “launches down from the windswept mountains” (as it sometimes does) here comes (as it sometimes does) “foaming from your quiet spring”; and the tears of “Ad Posteros” that eased “the burden of my destiny” and all the tears shed in Olor are absorbed (and redeemed) in that comforting Orphic whisper along Usk in which the voice of nature and the voice of indestructible song are as one. It is even now a moving image; but there is more to it than meets the eye. In the Renaissance imagination Orpheus stood as much for science as for poetry. From the moment Ficino took up his lira da braccio to chant for the first time in centuries the ancient hymns of Orpheus, the Thracian had moved into the mainstream of occult philosophy as the embodiment of hermetic magic, wisdom, and knowledge.29 He stood second only to Hermes Trismegistus (the father of alchemy and, in the words of Thomas Powell, Henry’s mentor and close friend, “first inventor of the lyre”)30 in the mighty line of prisca theologia—natural philosophers, seer-scientists, psychopomps, and priests of nature—stretching from Moses to Plato and beyond. So Thomas

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Vaughan, who in Aula Lucis (1652) tellingly described Virgil as “a great Poet, but a greater Philosopher,”31 repeatedly quotes and translates Orpheus (perhaps like John Dee he had him on his bookshelf )32 in Magia Adamica (1650), where he speaks of “that Orphic Night” and conjures from the Greek the magical “O Night! Thou black nurse of the golden stars,” adding “Out of this Darkness all things that are in this world came.”33 While Henry in turn translated and published hermetic texts: Hermetical Physick in 1655, the year of the enlarged Silex; and The Chymists Key in 1657. The Orpheus story stood (like the recurrent intersection of the twins’ allegiances, interests, and images) for the oneness of what has since been separated. So sundered, in fact, that it is all too easy not to register that the remarkable outburst of Vaughan publications around 1650 (in which year, for example, Silex I and four books by Thomas were brought out by Humphrey Blunden) looks very like a shared endeavor34 —a truly holistic Orphic enterprise—in which Thomas in London may have played a key role, finding publishers, editing texts, and seeing them through the press. Maybe even identifying in Thomas Henshaw’s Hartlibian-Andraean-Christian-Utopian community of a dozen disciples in Kensington, to which he belonged, the nucleus of a sympathetic readership for his brother’s penitential, devotional poetry and prose.35 Certainly Henry’s hope that his Silex poetry would be “as useful now in the public as it hath been to me in private” could be described as typically (though not exclusively) Andreaen.36 But that is another story. Meanwhile, Vaughan on the bank of his Orphic river intently listening—like brother Thomas who “spent on the Banks of Ysca many a serious Hour” after the example of Apollo who contemplated “by clear, Active Rivers”37 —is not being fanciful. Olor’s frontispiece image of the swan is not just an illustration prompting literary associations and echoes, but a process, part of a “virtual” hermetic/alchemical opus taking place textually in word and picture.38 Nor are the winged mermaid sirens embracing the volume’s subtitle, (“Select Poems and Translations by Henry Vaughan Silurist”) mere adornments: they proclaim, witness their reappearance in 1652 in Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, an hermetic operation—like the two flanking trees which seem to grow out of them, one dying the other burgeoning, representing the co-operating opposites of alchemical action. So too, the waters of the river are (like all those tears) a term for the philosophical mercury, the aqua vitae (etymologically the Usk connects with that) which kills and regenerates

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matter, the waters of grace that drown only to purify and revivify, bringing peace. Similarly the swan of the frontispiece is a “literary” and mythical figure—the embodiment of poetry, the bird of the swan-song singing as it dies, a royal and solary bird, attribute of Apollo, father of Orpheus, even Orpheus himself reincarnate,39 and in Celtic legend a supernatural, shape-shifting creature40 mediating between earth and the underworld! Equally, it is a key alchemical presence— shaped like the alembic in which the labor at the furnace takes place, and used as the standard symbol of the albedo, the first (white) stage in the transformative process. The busy bees, too, flying upwards like rising souls, suggest both the work of the poetic imagination and the natural alchemy (hence on both counts Vaughan’s “busy” Orpheus) which turns pollen into honey, the all-healing elixir that leads the adept through dissolution from an outmoded state of being to illumination and reformation culminating in the final red stage, the rubedo or Phoenix when the chemical wedding is consummated. Then new life—bathed (I quote from “Ad Echum”) in the “holy elixir of everlasting spring” and giving off odours as sweet as the effusions of the funeral pyre of the phoenix—rises out of the ashes, as it does in the last line of the last poem in Olor. But if Usk and Echo run deep through Vaughan’s life and works, what of the two presences between? The bond with the first, his boyhood tutor Matthew Herbert, was announced in “Ad Posteros” where his name stands capitalized alongside ISCA and CAMBRIA, for giving young Henry learning and love, “a double bounty.” Now “Venerabili Viro . . . Mathaeo Herbert” acknowledges the father who “gave me life . . . this brief and fleeting part,” but frankly subordinates him to the other father-figure, the “most cherished friend,” for he “enables that name, which would have perished with me, to re-echo after my death . . . beyond the grave.” And, as Vaughan recollects in “Daphnis,” it was Herbert too who gave him those “visions of our black, but brightest bard,” the great Celtic magus, Merlin. Little wonder, with such a pedigree, that Vaughan should subtly identify him here with Orpheus, the divine old man, “divini senis,” who appears at the end of “Ad fluvium” ushering in the Welsh “Venerabili Viro.” Perhaps Herbert, too, opened his pupil’s eyes to hermetic wisdom. Certainly Vaughan’s other Breconshire guru honored here, Thomas Powell, Fellow of Jesus College Oxford and close neighbor at home, did so, fostering the younger man’s scientific as well as his bardic interests. Vaughan’s possession of Powell’s manuscript “A Short Account of the Lives, Manners, and Religion of

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the British Druids and Bards” speaks for itself—though it makes one wonder why Vaughan in later years led cousin John Aubrey to believe that he knew little or nothing about such matters.41 Maybe “Short” was an understatement! On the scientific side, Vaughan possibly had a hand in the publication of Powell’s Humane Industry. “Praestantissimo Viro,” his Olor tribute, is shot through with that book’s Dee and Fludd-like antimaterialist hermeticism. Praising Powell’s Elements of Optics (it appeared in 1651 bearing these verses) Vaughan acclaims not just the skill of Powell’s hand in the diagrams depicting the hidden laws and workings (and the limitations) of sight, but also what Pico called “the disposition of the soul,” his “mind aware of heaven.” That, Henry asserts, truly teaches us to see, and see with “the living fires and divine light of the eye.”42 Or, as twin Thomas put it in Anima Magica Abscondita, 1650, “the inward Essential Trueth . . . is Light,” and one must “Learn to refer all Naturals to the Spirituals . . . for this is the way the Magicians went, and found out Miracles.”43 Just such a miraculous interfusion of Nature and Spirit is what Vaughan seeks in his final Latin flourish, “Ad Echum.” Praying for the wisdom and knowledge of the secrets of nature (“the means by which I may discover . . . the doubtful windings and recesses of the place”), he envisages a hermetic epiphany of regeneration in which under the stars (the divine light hidden in matter) the chemical wedding is consummated. Female and male, cold, moist, lunar tears and virgin dew, and the hot dry solar bird, the phoenix, are coupled in a union of opposite but complimentary qualities, bathed together in the resolving “holy elixir of everlasting spring.”44 We enter a familiar but transformed and transcendent landscape of “age-old woodland” and “unfelled bypaths” where the nymph, “voice of the sacred glade” wanders “talking through the deep grove,” silent before in “Ad fluvium.” Now Vaughan, who so insistently echoes not only other writers but also himself in the reiterated words and images that pattern and charge his poetry (eyes and tears, light and night, darkness and shining, hurling and headlong, and so forth) summons Echo to his aid. Her myth, like the hermetic opus, enacts a process of separation and transformation issuing in a union of opposites. Addicted to Narcissus, she wastes, pining, to a disembodied voice; while Narcissus, refusing the temptations of erotic love, is, as punishment, re-embodied in a flower—yet another term for the elixir or philosopher’s stone, and hinted at here in the “odours as sweet as the effusions of the funeral pyre of the

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Phoenix.” And so the classical myth of metamorphosis merges into the rubedo, the climax of the successful alchemical opus in which, through a sacrificial “dying” separating soul from body— it happens chemically in the alembic and metaphysically in the operator— the spiritualization of matter and materialization of spirit is achieved. The processes and purposes of poet and alchemist are one. Where poetry and alchemy meet, it seems, Orpheus is not far behind. This time, however, he appears by proxy in the “dying Narcissus and his prayers, . . . the strivings of his life’s last moments, . . . the sighs of his loosened tongue” that echo the “murmurous whisper . . . the plaints of the dismembered Thracian’ in “Ad fluvium.” And though Narcissus was not torn piecemeal, his dying (not elaborated in “Ad Echum”) at the hands of vengeful nymphs who drown him in the waters45 where, turning his back on women, he gazes on his own reflection, matches Orpheus’ fate at the hands of the Thracian women, no less resentful of his indifference to them. Both myths suggest the introspective imperative of creative activity, the necessity (intensified in Vaughan by the intestine destructiveness of civil war) of the turn inward, exploring the self, venturing even into the dark corners of the mind: but there is a price to be paid, and they register the danger too—of self-absorption, self-love, and self-indulgence, of self-destruction even, lurking there.46 And if that entails a sacrificial dying, Echo redeems, or completes, the creative process.47 For she is the voice of poetry, of the “sacred glade,” catching and repeating “our last-spoken words.” She records swan-songs. Without her there can be no posthumous fame. Ovid, through Vaughan, laments that when he dies there will be no one by to treasure his “soul’s last whisper . . . / My last words”; and though in “The Agreement” Vaughan was not talking about fame, he rehearses the same anxiety in terms that echo “Ad Echum” praying that “when in death my speech is spent” God will “hear my death’s last throes!” We are reminded not only of the continuities between his secular and devotional verse, but also of his anxiety to be heard, to find a renewed voice that would resonate as long as rivers run and men may read. Song did not come easy in untuneable times. But (for Vaughan) Orpheus stood guarantee that the poet’s voice could be heard above what Milton called the “hideous roar,” and outlast it. From that founding myth of poetry and music, and from the poets (notably Virgil and Ovid) who had rehearsed it, he drew an identity to endure adversity and grievous loss. More, Orpheus focused

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Vaughan’s hermetic passions too, underwrote the potency of poetry as an operative art able to change things. “Ad Echum,” the last piece in Olor’s frame, proclaims the necessity and possibility of a radical spiritual and poetic renewal. So in the midst of traumatic upheaval, Crown and Court swept aside, the Church driven into the wilderness, and the time-honored apparatus of patronage dismantled, Orpheus and Hermes offered, despite everything, empowerment. Vaughan especially admired Davenant’s Gondibert as a reformist poem, written in adversity, “mured in solitary stones” and (in a distinctly un-Baconian phrase) “Spun from thine own rich store.” Poetry ran too deep to be dammed. It could redeem itself, be “rescued” by its practitioners, living and dead. Vaughan’s Orphism attempts a recentering of his art in sources of energy and authority independent of statecraft and its institutions.

V. SILEX SCINTILLANS Which brings me, briefly, to Silex Scintillans dedicated to no one but Christ, and indebted to George Herbert, His priest and poet. Here, in Silex II in 1655, Henry sang, as he thought, his swansong, A grief so bright ’Twill make the land of darkness light; And while too many sadly roam, Shall send me (swan-like) singing home (“Jesus Weeping [II],” ll. 50–53)

And so he composed his last, most passionate and prophetic hymns, Orpheus-like, “nigh unto death, . . . at no great distance from it.” You might not expect (though he was commonly seen as a prototype of Christ)48 to meet the Thracian in a volume so emphatically dedicated. But his presence is felt across the text; and in the great engraved title-page of 1650 we see him face to face. Vaughan glosses the picture in “Authoris (de se) Emblema. He is more directly autobiographical, inward, and self-dramatizing even than in Olor—“your voice . . . haunting me, . . . without words . . . with its holy murmur,” “I was a flint,” “You . . . break my rocky heart.”49 He expounds a personal trauma and transformation: the stony mass made flesh, “torn” in “fragments,” but scintillating (“setting your heavens alight”) “at last,” and flowing like the rock of Horeb in the desert struck by Moses. Vaughan’s

Figure 5. Title Page of Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans (1650) This item is reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California

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“moriendo revixi” (“By dying I live again”), distills the essence of the emblem. For this too is a Christian hermetic manifesto. This heart, like the swan (only starker, and more dynamic) is densely alchemical—“rock,” “stone,” “tears,” the flame struck from the flint, and so on, are all images familiar to the adept. “Rock” is a term for the vessel and for the philosopher’s stone; “stone” denotes the place where the alchemical lovers unite in the chemical wedding; “tears” are the mercurial waters that cleanse dead matter in the first stage of distillation, and the droplets forming at the top of the still; the flames struck forth are the refining philosophical fire, both material and spiritual, and its third stage (the rubedo) known as “the fire against nature . . . because it is water.” And so forth. And so Vaughan’s Latin text points our reading of the visual sign, alerts us to the heart’s manifold possibilities. Nor, as he reminds us, is it only a heart. It has cheeks for tears to roll down and (like a Celtic tricephalos)50 three faces as Louis Martz saw,51 one in light, one in darkness, and the third (the new emergent spiritual being) looking out at us, till now buried in flesh. This heart is a head! Which is to say that alchemically it represents the alembic, always seen as analogous to the human body since the essential transformation takes place spiritually in us and materially in the vessel. It is also, we see, a severed head, like Orpheus’s—from which, as it were, the ensuing “Hymns” (the word is not only for Herbert) issue. And a severed head weeping represents alchemically the initial nigredo stage of the opus, the dissolution of matter in the vessel—a time of sacrifice and lament experienced by the adept as a death, marking the separation of soul from body—which stage is known, too, as the Beheading of the King. No need, I am sure, to press the political significance of that in 1650, with regicide still raw, but already readable as a saving sacrifice. There can be few images charged with such energy and multiple meanings as are generated here. Word and picture together speak with overpowering directness of Vaughan’s experience of political, poetic, and personal crisis. For they arise out of that descent into the self, into “that lonely region of stress and strife,” as Conrad called it,52 that normally hidden part of our nature where the deepest and most permanently enduring of human intuitions and feelings lie. And as a portrait, an apocalypse of one simultaneously wounded in mind and heart, and being healed, being spiritually remade through that process embodied in his hymns, it reaches out still (as the poet hoped he would) from its man and moment to the unchanging unfixed human condition.

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With hindsight it is tempting to imagine that this Orpheus Britannicus, like the great bard whose still singing head was brought to Delphos to utter oracles until summarily silenced by Apollo, intended no more after Silex II. For him, after all, a book published was not done and dusted, but brought to life; and in it the author “always lives” not as a memorial but as an active and enduring presence. As he put it in “The Daughter of Herodias,” “His art adds still (though he be dead,).” If in Silex he had sung a “true hymn” it would echo down the ages: no more was needed. Called back to Breconshire some fifteen years before, he had felt betrayed. Now he thanked God who “having brought me home, didst there / Show me the pearl I sought elsewhere.” He had found within himself, in the depths of darkness, that place (or the way to it) that he prayed for in “To the River Isca.” “To the Holy Bible” the last poem in Silex II before the final “L’Envoy” recollects the close of Olor’s opening poem, building to a triumphant climax of Christian hermeticism: Gladness, and peace, and hope, and love, The secret favours of the Dove, Her quickening kindness, smiles and kisses, Exalted pleasures, crowning blisses, Fruition, union, glory, life Thou didst lead to, and still all strife. (“To the Holy Bible” ll. 28–32)

And dies away on an echo: Living, thou wert my soul’s sure ease, And dying mak’st me go in peace: The next effects no tongue can tell; Farewell O book of God! farewell! (“To the Holy Bible” ll. 33–36)

The work of personal and poetic transformation and healing (embodied in four books of poetry in a decade) is accomplished. Like the alchemist laboring at the furnace, dissolving opposites, Vaughan has seen the light issuing from the heart of darkness, and known them to be the same—“deep, but dazzling.” In the event, of course, he did not die; but he had bade farewell to publication, if not to writing. If he thought God had spared him for a purpose, it lay not in books but his other healing—and no less Orphic—art of medicine.53 To practice that vocation was to be, as he had striven to be through poetry, “useful . . . in the public”

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(“The Author’s Preface to the Following Hymns” in Silex, 1655). It was only the intervention of Aubrey and Wood in the 1670s and the chance at last to honor brother Thomas’ memory, bring him home in verse from “the Isis and prouder Thames” to the river and valley where “his stars first saw him” (“Daphnis,” ll. 113– 17), that made Henry break his silence to bid his twin a last echoing “good night! . . . good night!”54 with the publication of Thalia Rediviva in 1678.

VI. THE TOMBSTONE: A LAST SELF-PORTRAIT And there in 1695 Henry died, and was buried in the hillside churchyard of Llansantffraed overlooking the river and out across the still magical valley. And here he remains, as he had decreed in “To the River Isca,” “laid to rest hard by thy streams.” This is his final self-inscription—this enigmatic image (is it of “Angel-infancy”?), this laconic text. This is the last utterance in word and picture of the dying man, an echoing voice from our past, echoing other voices. For neither image is of his making, but together are renewed and made resonant with personal reverberations and tensions beneath the surface. The coat of arms with three serpented infants’ heads (is this another hermetic triplicity; another form of tricephalos?) commemorates the celebrated miraculous birth (with an adder round his neck) of the founding father of the Vaughan dynasty, a Breconshire chieftain who adopted it as a thanksgiving for the singular providence and protection of the Holy Trinity.55 Perhaps for the uncanny twins of Newton Farm it had fortified a sense of being out of the ordinary, marked out for a special destiny even. More mundanely, of course, it signals social standing and family pride. The self-effacing (almost self-obliterating) Latin motto, however, runs counter. What use is a “Useless Servant”? The answer (which reconciles the two self-images without blurring their edges) lies, characteristically, in the submerged double reference of “Servus Inutilis.” The two words recollect both his poem “Unprofitableness” and, more immediately, the pair of Vulgate texts that stand behind that poem too:56 the first from Matthew is of damnation—“Throw out the useless servant into outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” So much for family escutcheons! The other, from Luke, is Christ’s response to the Apostles’ plea “Give us more faith”—“When you have done all the work you were given, you should say, ‘We are unprofitable

Figure 6. Tombstone in Llansantffraed Chrurchyard This item is reproduced from Archaeologica Cambrensis (1877) by permission of the current editor and of Cardiff University Library, Wales UK

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servants: we have done our duty.’ ” Which is to say, against that other terrible text, that the work given has been completed, no more and no less; and that the servants may now be invited, not as reward but out of God’s grace, to sit and eat. “Henricus Vaughan. Siluris M.D.” could only hope, in faith, that in the arduous public practice of his two healing arts—poetry and medicine—he had lived up to Christ’s uncompromising admonition. There could be no “O Altitudo!” here, no rapturous vision of beatitude, nothing vainglorious; nor any certainty of the outcome: only an unflinching recognition, as for the last time he steps into darkness, that (in his own words “To the Holy Bible”), “The next effects no tongue can tell.” This tombstone bears Christian witness; but it cannot, such is Henry Vaughan’s unsparing honesty with himself and his readers, give an unequivocal answer to “What next?” Half a century back, in his very first published poem, his lifelong curiosity about the impenetrable mystery of separation and loss and of what happens “When we are dead”—the first four words of that first poem—dissolved into fanciful prediction of Elysian reunion. He could hardly finish on such a note. Fittingly, his last and tersest self-portrait is deeply Christian and Orphically Delphic.

NOTES 1. All quotations of Vaughan’s verse are from Henry Vaughan. The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (1976; Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1995). 2. Metamorphoses, 11:61–66. 3. In, respectively, “To . . . R.W.” and “Upon the Priory Grove” published in Poems (London, 1646). 4. See The Secular Poems of Henry Vaughan, ed. E. L. Marilla (Uppsala: Lundequistika Bokhandeln, 1958), 154n. for comments on these Latin tags. 5. See Gwenllian Morgan’s biographical sketch of Theophilus Jones in Theophilus Jones F.S.A., Historian: His Life, Letters and Literacy Remains, ed. Edwin Davies (Brecon, Wales, 1905), 21; and Christopher J. Evans, Breconshire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 163. 6. In his History of Great Britain (London, 1611), 1:7.179–82, where he notes that Celtic warriors fought naked and tattooed and painted their bodies for battle. 7. For shape-shifting in Celtic religion and mythology, see in Miranda J. Green, Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend (1992; rpt. London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 150. It is, of course, central in shamanism. 8. See Shakespeare’s Sonnet 124. 9. “Ad Joannem Rousium,” dated 23 January 1647, in John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, rev. ed. (London and New York: Longmans, 1971; rpt. 1992), 297–302. The quotations here are from Carey’s translation, 301.

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10. In An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965; rpt. 1984), 98. 11. “In Answer of an Elegiacall Letter upon the death of the King of Sweden,” Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949; rpt. 1964), 74 –77, ll. 94 –100. 12. “Daphnis . . . An Elegiac Eclogue” in Thalia Rediviva (London, 1678). 13. Paradise Lost, 3.25. 14. See Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd. ed. (London: Longmans Annotated English Poets, 1998), 1.10n. 15. The Orphic Voice. Poetry and Natural History (London: Routledge, 1960), 3– 4. 16. See Classical Mythology in English Literature. A Critical Anthology, ed. Geoffrey Miles (London: Routledge, 1999), 65. 17. See his “Translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy III xii,” ll. 38, 71–74 (Vaughan’s additions), in Thalia Rediviva (London, 1678). 18. Georgics 4:457 and Aeneid 1:317. 19. Metamorphoses, 10:1 ff. 20. Richard Zouch’s Latin verse tribute to Bodley in Iusta Funebrii . . . Thomae Bodlei (Oxford, 1613), 36–37, imagines the same Orphic construction work; but has nothing that matches Vaughan’s celebration of the library’s holdings and the authors living still in their books. 21. The Secular Poems of Henry Vaughan, 173. 22. See chapters 2 and 3 of Jonathan Post, Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 23. Even here Vaughan confesses that poetry cannot match the heroic deed: he must leave Hall “to be read more high . . . / In thy own blood, a Soldier and a Saint.” 24. “To All Ingenious Lovers of Poesy,” the Dedication to Poems, 1646. 25. “To His Retired Friend, an Invitation to Brecknock.” 26. “ ‘Feathering some slower hours’: Henry Vaughan’s Verse Translations,” Scintilla 4 (2000): 154 –56. 27. The Encyclopaedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade et. al. (New York and London: Collins Macmillan, 1987), 11:111–14, characterizes Orphics as “renunciants” striving for saintliness: “They wish to heal themselves . . . by fleeing from the world.” 28. The Orphic Hymns, ed. and trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis, Society of Biblical Literature, Texts and Translations, Graeco-Roman Series 4 (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1977). 29. Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge, 1964), 14 –15, 78–80; John Warden, “Orpheus in Ficino,” in Orpheus. The Metamorphosis of a Myth, ed. John Warden (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), 85–109. 30. Humane Industry (London, 1661), 110. 31. The Works of Thomas Vaughan, ed. Alan Rudrum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 471. 32. Peter J. French, John Dee (London: Routledge, 1972; reprint 1984), 55. 33. The Works of Thomas Vaughan, 218. 34. Interestingly, publication of Thomas’ Anthroposophia Theomagica (London, 1650), seems, like Olor’s appearance, to have been delayed. Its dedication is dated “Oxonii / 48”; and Thomas says it was “compos’d in Haste, and in my Dayes of Mourning, on the sad Occurrence of a Brother’s Death,” in that year,

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which is, of course, when Olor was originally meant to appear. Perhaps that death was a principal cause of the non-appearance of both these works in 1648. 35. For the Henshaw-Thomas Vaughan collaboration see Donald R. Dickson, The Tessera of Antilia (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 207–18, and his introduction to Thomas and Rebecca Vaughan’s “Aqua Vitæ: Non Vitis.” ed. Donald R. Dickson, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 217 (Tempe: MRTS, 2001); Michael Srigley, “Thomas Vaughan, the Hartlib Circle and the Rosicrucians,” Scintilla 6 (2002): 31–54; and J.V. Andreae, Christianopolis, ed. Edward H. Thompson, International Archives of the History of Ideas 162 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999), 301. 36. John Hall of Durham (1627–56), translator of Andreae’s A Model of a Christian Society and an ardent Hartlibian, early renounced his youthful poetry (in the Cavalier/Metaphysical mode) in favor of what he saw as a more widely public kind of writing. Of course, as Fritz Graf argues in “Orpheus: A Poet Among Men.” Interpretations of Greek Mythology, ed. Jan Bremmer (1987; reprint, London: Routledge, 1988), 80–106, Orpheus, as a civilizer of all things barbarous and as a priestly leader, embodies, among other things, poetry’s public role. 37. Anima Magica Abscondita (London, 1650), in The Works of Thomas Vaughan, 135. 38. See in Don DuPree, “Labour at the Furnace: Henry Vaughan’s Hermetic Introspections” (PhD diss., University of Wales, 1996). My alchemical readings are deeply indebted to DuPree’s powerful and persuasive interpretations; and to Lyndy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Terminology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 39. Plato records in The Dialogues of Plato, ed. B. Jowett, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), 2:497–98, the legend of “the soul that had once been Orpheus choosing the life of a swan out of enmity to the race of women.” Michael Ferber, A Dictionary of Literary Symbols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 215, notes that “Ovid declares the final book of his Tristia to be the sorrowful song of a swan.” 40. See in Miranda J. Green, Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977). 41. The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), 690. 42. John Warden, Orpheus. The Metamorphosis of a Myth, 97–98, cites Ficino’s describing God as “the eye by which all eyes see, and, according to Orpheus, the eye which sees everything in every object, and truly sees everything in himself.” 43. The Works of Thomas Vaughan, 122, 135. 44. Marilla’s translation (in The Secular Poems) locates “the sacred healing of the eternal spring” in “these lines.” That, if a little free, expresses what is strongly implied. 45. For the symbolism of streams and springs as entrances to hidden realms, places where death and life cross, see Charles Segal, “Death by Water,” in his Poetry as Myth in Ancient Pastoral (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 46. On the “double valence” of the Orphic persona and Orpheus making out of his profound sorrow a lament that harrows hell, only to succumb to uncontrollable emotion, see Angus Fletcher, The Transcendent Masque (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 186–91. Ficino read Narcissus’ “tragic fate . . .

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which Orpheus records,” as an allegory of the soul’s distressing tendency to misread, succumbing to the allure of material embodiments of divine beauty— see in Sergius Kodera, “Narcissus, Divine Gazes and Bloody Mirrors: the Concept of Matter in Ficino,” in Marsilio Ficino, his Theology, his Philosophy, his Legacy, ed., Michael B. J. Allen and Valery Rees with Martin Davies, Brill Studies in Intellectual History 108 (Brill: Leiden, 2002), 288–89. 47. Fletcher 187, writes that “the Orphic design is . . . a myth of resonance. Fulfilment is an echo.” See also his section (198–209) on “The principle of echo.” On the myth of Narcissus and Echo in general, see James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (London: John Murray, 1974). 48. For example, by Alexander Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus, or the Muses Interpreter (London, 1647), quoted in Classical Mythology in English Literature, ed. Miles, 118: “Christ is the true Orpheus. . . . What in vain was attempted by Orpheus was truly performed by our Saviour, for he alone hath delivered our souls from the nethermost hell.” 49. Vaughan’s “Vox, sine voce” embodies the perception (see Encyclopaedia of Religion, 11:111–14) of Orpheus as “a voice—a voice that is like no other . . . ,” a voice preceding articulate speech. It summons the artist to that descent “within himself ” into that “part of our nature which . . . is necessarily kept out of sight . . . that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom” which Joseph Conrad speaks of in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus. 50. See, for example, in John Sharkey, Celtic Mysteries (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975). 51. Louis L. Martz, “The Man Within,” PMLA 78 (1963): 40– 49, reprinted in chapter 1 of The Paradise Within (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964). 52. In the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus. 53. Encyclopaedia of Religion, 11:111–14, describes the attainment of health (through saintliness) as a principal Orphic goal. Fritz Graf, “Orpheus: A Poet Among Men” in Interpretations of Greek Mythology, ed. Jan Bremmer (London: Routledge, 1988), 94, cites evidence for Orpheus as a healer, in images of his disembodied head dictating medicinal prescriptions. 54. Fletcher, 166–91, cites Marie Desport, L’Incantation Virgilienne: Virgil et Orphee (Bordeaux, 1951), on “ingeminare” (“to redouble as if by twinning”) as a key term associated with echo as a literary principle. Echoing, you might say, came naturally to Henry Vaughan. A characteristic doubleness informs both his reiterated “good night” and “farewell,” which are simultaneously adieus and benedictions. 55. M. P. Siddons, The Development of Welsh Heraldry (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, 1991–93), 1: 209–10 and 2: 563–64. 56. Matthew 17:10, and Luke 25:30. For a much fuller and more penetrating examination of their meaning to Vaughan and his understanding of the workings of grace and divine providence, see Ross Garner, The Unprofitable Servant in Henry Vaughan, University of Nebraska Studies, new series 29 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963).

“Winged and free”: Henry Vaughan’s Birds Glyn Pursglove

ONE OF EZRA POUND’S MANY ENTHUSIASMS WAS FOR THE PROSE of Richard of St. Victor (d.1173), the Scotsman who became Prior of St. Victor in Paris and one of the greatest of medieval contemplatives—“a considerar fu piu´ che viro,” [who, in contemplation, became more than man] Dante wrote of him in canto 10 of the Paradiso. In 1956 Pound published a selection of quotations from Richard’s writings (with translations). Among them is the following: “In avibus intellige studia spiritualia, in animalibus exercitia corporalia. Watch birds to understand how spiritual things move, animals to understand physical motion.”1 It is a sentiment which, one suspects, Henry Vaughan would have been happy to endorse. Like Richard of St. Victor, Vaughan belongs in a long tradition which conceived of the soul as a winged creature and reciprocally, as it were, found in the actual birds of the air constant reminders of the human soul. The Ancient Egyptian Amulet of the Soul was made of gold and inlaid with precious stones representing a human-headed hawk.2 The Egyptian Book of the Dead presents the newly dead as falcons in flight and in the “mythologies of Central Asia, Siberia, and Indonesia the birds perched on the branches of the World Tree represent men’s souls.”3 Plato’s beautiful image of the soul in his Phædrus (246c) declares that “when it is perfect and fully feathered it roams in upper air,” whereas “the soul that has lost its feathers is carried down till it finds some solid resting place.”4 Celtic legend is particularly rich in such traditions. Indeed, the Celtic lore of birds is very diverse. It includes: the birds of fairyland, singing everlastingly from the pure purple trees which stand at the Eastern door of the haunts of the blest. It is but a short step from this conception to that of the birds of Paradise, where a bird of red gold with its hundred wings sings from every golden cross which guards the entries, and the splendid bird-flock sustains a perfect melody from the flowering tree of life within the heavenly bounds . . . The souls of the blest take the forms of doves

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and swans; lost souls become ravens or birds of ill omen. Bird-souls gather in flocks around Elijah and Enoch in Paradise; they lament and beat their wings against their sides and weep tears of sorrow as he foretells the terrors of the day of doom.5

Amongst Vaughan’s contemporaries one need look no further than a famous stanza by Andrew Marvell for an especially beautiful version of the soul-as-bird: Here at the fountain’s sliding foot, Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root, Casting the body’s vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide: There like a bird it sits, and sings, Then whets, and combs its silver wings; And, till prepared for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light.6 (“The Garden” ll.49–56)

The birds that occur with some frequency in Henry Vaughan’s poetry bring with them many of the kinds of symbolic significances associated with such traditions as those so hastily sketched above. But, of course, Vaughan was also a countryman whose acquaintance with many of the creatures he writes about was far from merely bookish. Birds, in Vaughan, are both fact and symbol, as it were. The following lines in “The Pilgrimage” (for all that they have affinities with a passage in one of his translations from Boethius [Consolation of Philosophy, 3.2.21–34]) have about them a quality that suggests personal observation: birds robbed of their native wood, Although their diet may be fine, Yet neither sing, nor like their food, But with the thought of home do pine.7 (ll.17–20)

So, too, does a beautiful stanza from “They are all gone into the world of light”: He that hath found some fledged bird’s nest, may know At first sight, if the bird be flown; But what fair well, or grove he sings in now, That is to him unknown. (ll. 21–24)

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Nor is it hard to believe, for example, that Vaughan had direct experience of the nesting habits of the swallow, to which he alludes in “The World (II)”: Thou art the sand, which fills one glass, And then doth to another pass; And could I put thee to a stay, Thou art but dust! then go thy way, And leave me clean and bright, though poor; Who stops thee, doth but daub his floor, And swallow-like, when he hath done, To unknown dwellings must be gone! (ll.49–56)

Yet, for all our awareness that Vaughan had a real enough acquaintance with the birds of Breconshire, it is important to realize that when they reappear in his poetry they generally do so in ways that suggest his extensive acquaintance with the rich traditions of avian symbolism. Perhaps, one might say, the particular attractiveness of Vaughan’s birds resides in the fact that they are both fact and symbol in his work. “The Bird” is an especially interesting poem in this regard, and merits quotation in full: Hither thou com’st: the busy wind all night Blew through thy lodging, where thy own warm wing Thy pillow was. Many a sullen storm (For which course man seems much the fitter born,) Rained on thy bed And harmless head. And now as fresh and cheerful as the light Thy little heart in early hymns doth sing Unto that Providence, whose unseen arm Curbed them, and clothed thee well and warm. All things that be, praise him; and had Their lesson taught them, when first made. So hills and valleys into singing break, And though poor stones have neither speech nor tongue, While active winds and streams both run and speak, Yet stones are deep in admiration. Thus praise and prayer here beneath the sun Make lesser mornings, when the great are done.

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For each inclos`ed spirit is a star Enlightening his own little sphere, Whose light, though fetched and borrow`ed from far, Both mornings makes, and evenings there. But as these birds of light make a land glad, Chirping their solemn Matins on each tree: So 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. Brightness and mirth, and love and faith, all fly, Till the Day-spring breaks forth again from high. (ll.1–32)

The affectionate tenderness with which Vaughan writes of the bird’s vulnerability and resilience surely grows from experience; winter in the Welsh hills must have presented the early-rising Vaughan with many such scenes. The “warm wing” (l.2) and the “harmless head” (l.6) are delightful and intimate touches. In the way in which the poet comes to understand something about his own condition by comparing himself with the bird (“For which course man seems much the fitter born”), “The Bird” can be seen as, however distantly, an anticipation of such distinctly modern poems as, say, Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush.” But in other respects Vaughan’s poem is deeply embedded in much older traditions of symbolism, especially as represented by the bestiaries. Vaughan’s poem is, in important ways, structured around a division of birds into two antithetical groups: But as these birds of light make a land glad, Chirping their solemn Matins on each tree: So in the shades of night some dark fowls be, Whose heavy notes make all that hear them, sad. (ll.23–26)

The division into birds of light and birds of darkness here is not, of course, solely or even primarily a matter of natural history, of diurnal and nocturnal species. The “light” and the “darkness” of Vaughan’s poem represent contrasting spiritual conditions, as do

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the birds associated with them. In using birds as emblems of the range of human spiritual states Vaughan was working within a well-established tradition. It is familiar from medieval writings: “Odo of Tusculum, in his sermon 92, describes different kinds of spirituality in men in terms of the characteristics of different kinds of birds. Some birds, he says, are guileless, such as the dove; others, cunning like the partridge; some come to the hand, like the hawk, others flee from it, like the hen; some enjoy the company of men, like the swallow; others prefer solitude and the desert, like the turtle-dove. . . . Low-flying birds symbolize an earth-bound attitude; high-flying birds, spiritual longing.”8 The need to distinguish between the clean and unclean birds is precisely what structures the extraordinary, hieratic opening to one of the greatest of all English “bird” poems, Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and Turtle”: Let the bird of loudest lay On the sole Arabian tree Herald sad and trumpet be, To whose sound chaste wings obey. But thou shrieking harbinger, Foul precurrer of the fiend, Augur of the fever’s end— To this troupe come thou not near. From this session interdict Every foul of tyrant wing Save the eagle, feathered king. Keep the obsequy so strict. Let the priest in surplice white That defunctive music can, Be the death-divining swan, Lest the requiem lack his right. And thou treble-dated crow. That thy sable gender mak’st With the breath thou giv’st and tak’st, ’Mongst our mourners shalt thou go.9 (ll.1–20)

Shakespeare summons and forbids, invokes and “exvokes” (as it were); so too, in a less elaborate fashion does Vaughan in the opening of his beautiful early poem “Upon the Priory Grove, His Usual Retirement”:

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Hail sacred shades! cool, leafy house! Chaste treasurer of all my vows, And wealth! on whose soft bosom laid My love’s fair steps I first betrayed: Henceforth no melancholy flight, No sad wing, or hoarse bird of night, Disturb this air, no fatal throat Of raven, or owl, awake the note Of our laid Echo, no voice dwell Within these leaves, but Philomel. (ll.1–10)

The bestiary tradition made much of the division between the birds of day and night. This can be illustrated by considering what the bestiaries have to say of the “owls” which “howl” (l.28) in Vaughan’s poem and which provide the “shrieking harbinger” (l.5) in Shakespeare’s. The owl is one of the “unclean” birds of the Old Testament (see Deut. 14:15 AV). In the Latin Physiologus, a translation of an older Greek work, in circulation by the fifth century, the owl’s preference for darkness is allegorized as the Jews’ rejection of Christ. In the Aviarum, a compilation devoted entirely to birds that appears with some later versions of the Physiologus (and, interestingly, has been wrongly attributed to Hugo of St. Victor), the owl is said to live among ruins or caves and (borrowing material from Isidore of Seville) to hover around tombs. It is said to make its dwelling place filthy with its own excrement.10 It was long regarded as a bird of ill omen, as a “harbinger” of death. Thus, as Dido prepares to take her own life, so Virgil tells us, “solaque culminibus ferali carmine bubo / saepe queri, et longas in fletum ducere voces [and solitary upon the rooftops the night owl often lamented and drew out her notes into an extended wail].11 When the mad Ophelia declares (in Act 4, Scene 5 of Hamlet), “They say the owl was a baker’s daughter,” she alludes to an ancient legend of the baker’s daughter who refused bread to Christ and was turned into an owl (a symbol, as we have seen, of those who reject Christ) as a punishment. In its preference for darkness, its avoidance of the sun, the owl is in effect the symbolic opposite of the eagle (of which more later). It is related to the “sullen night-ravens” that “shun” the “sun” (ll.3– 4) in “Fair and young light!” The protagonist of “The Bird” naturally seeks to identify himself with, to be instructed by, the “birds of light” (l.23) rather than those that dwell “in the shades of night” (l.25). The dawn chorus

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of bird song was evidently a “natural” pleasure for Vaughan; but it was much more than just that. It celebrated the triumph of light over darkness, and the “release” of the soul: When in the east the dawn doth blush, Here cool, fresh spirits the air brush; Herbs (straight) get up, flowers peep and spread: Trees whisper praise, and bow the head, Birds from the shades of night released Look round about, then quit the nest, And with united gladness sing The glory of the morning’s King. The hermit hears, and with meek voice Offers his own up, and their joys: Then prays, that all the world may be Blessed with as sweet an unity. (“The Bee” ll.35– 46)

The birds of light “make a land glad,” they sing “early hymns” and can be heard “chirping their solemn Matins on each tree” (“The Bird” ll.8, 23–24). In a later poet, the idea of birds who sing “matins” would probably be no more than a rather idle poeticism.12 In reading Vaughan, however, we need to remember that he was heir to a well-established tradition of medieval and early Renaissance poems in which an assembly of birds were presented as celebrants of the mass. One of the most substantial of such poems is La Messe des Oiseaux by Jean de Cond´e and there are English “bird-masses” by, for example, Lydgate (The Devotion of the Birds), in Skelton’s Phyllyp Sparowe and, from around 1540, The Armony of Birds, a delightful anonymous poem in which, on a spring morning, the poet overhears the birds, from parrot to thrush, pelican to phoenix, performing the Te Deum. Such a tradition supports—and provides a convenient language for— Vaughan’s deep-rooted sense of what has been called the “prayer of the creatures.” Bird song was, for Vaughan, persuasive evidence for his conviction that, “All things that be, praise him; and had / Their lesson taught them, when first made (“The Bird” ll.11–12). Man had, sadly, failed to adhere to the lessons taught him “when first made” (l.12). For Vaughan, the birds he saw and heard in the valley of the Usk (or in the Priory Grove) were images of a lost innocence, of a simpler, less divided response to God. As such they embody a condition to which Vaughan repeatedly aspires:

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I would I were a stone, or tree, Or flower by pedigree, Or some poor high-way herb, or spring To flow, or bird to sing! Then should I (tied to one sure state,) All day expect my date; But I am sadly loose, and stray A giddy blast each way: O let me not thus range! Thou canst not change. (“And do they so?” ll.11–20) I would I were some bird, or star, Fluttering in woods, or lifted far Above this inn And road of sin! Then either star, or bird, should be Shining, or singing still to thee. (“Christ’s Nativity” ll.13–18)

The soul-as-bird occurs frequently in Vaughan’s work, sometimes in fully elaborated form, sometimes as a brief allusion. Thus, in “Isaac’s Marriage”: it was time To get thee wings on, and devoutly climb Unto thy God, for marriage of all states Makes most unhappy, or most fortunates; This brought thee forth, where now thou didst undress Thy soul, and with new pinions refresh Her wearied wings, which so restored did fly Above the stars, a track unknown, and high, And in her piercing flight perfumed the air Scattering the myrrh, and incense of thy prayer. (ll.43–52)

In “Holy Scriptures” the Bible is celebrated as the text that makes possible the liberation of the soul as a bird: Welcome dear book, soul’s joy, and food! The feast Of spirits, heaven extracted lies in thee; Thou art life’s charter, the Dove’s spotless nest Where souls are hatched unto Eternity. (ll.1– 4)

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Vaughan’s imagery here relates to an idea that has had widespread currency: “As in most other traditions, Islamic mysticism often compares ‘spiritual birth’ with the hatching of the spiritual body which breaks its earthly matrix like a bird cracking the shell of its egg.”13 Even in Vaughan’s early secular poems one encounters the imagery of the soul as a bird. The very first poem in the Poems of 1646, “To my Ingenuous Friend, R.W.,” imagines an after-death meeting: There (as the wiser few suspect, That spirits after death affect) Our souls shall meet, and thence will they (Freed from the tyranny of clay) With equal wings, and ancient love Into the Elysian fields remove, (ll.21–26)

The desire for freedom from “the tyranny of clay” (l.24) and the sense that birds (especially “birds of light”) embodied such freedom is at the heart of Vaughan’s fascination with them. In “Fair and young light!,” often thought to be occasioned by the loss of Vaughan’s first wife, the poet, in the midst of his tears, identifies his role as that of “the surviving turtle” (l.10). The turtledove seems always to have been a powerful symbol of faithfulness in love, especially to a dead mate. (It was often allegorized as a symbol of the church, remaining faithful to Christ in the years after his death). The bestiaries stated that a turtledove would not take a second mate, should its first die. (The Church Fathers are very fond of the story of the turtledove’s monogamy.)14 At the close of his poem, Vaughan’s wish to rejoin his dead wife is expressed in revealing terms: O that I were winged and free And quite undressed just now with thee, Where freed souls dwell by living fountains On everlasting, spicy mountains! (ll.47–50)

Here, expressed with striking intimacy, is the longing we have met earlier, the desire to share the freedom and weightlessness of the bird, to have that “veil” removed so that he might respond to God with the directness of the crowing cock: If joys, and hopes, and earnest throes, And hearts, whose pulse beats still for light

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Are given to birds; who, but thee, knows A love-sick soul’s exalted flight? Can souls be tracked by any eye But his, who gave them wings to fly? Only this veil which thou hast broke, And must be broken yet in me, This veil, I say, is all the cloak And cloud which shadows thee from me. This veil thy full-eyed love denies, And only gleams and fractions spies. O take it off! make no delay, But brush me with thy light, that I May shine unto a perfect day, And warm me at thy glorious Eye! O take it off! or till it flee, Though with no lily, stay with me! (“Cock-Crowing” ll.31– 48)

Much in the imagery of these lines has an avian background which may not be immediately obvious. In the general context of bird imagery, the poem’s references to the poet’s present condition, in which he can “spy” only “gleams and fractions” (l.42) and in which the “veil” denies him God’s “full-eyed love” (l.41), with his consequent wish that he “May shine unto a perfect day, / And warm [himself ] at thy glorious Eye!” (ll.45– 46) contain an implicit allusion to one of the most powerful motifs in traditional bird lore. Vaughan’s familiarity with the motif is well evidenced by his remarkable poem “The Eagle.” It was familiar to other poets, too. In Paradiso 1, Dante describes how Fatto avea di la` mane e di qua sera tal foce quasi, e tutto era la` bianco quello emisperio, e l’altra parte nera, quando Beatrice in sul sinistro fianco vidi rivolta e riguardar nel sole: aquila s´ı non li s’affisse unquanco. (ll.43– 48) [Almost this gate had morning yonder made And evening here; and there that hemisphere Was all white, and the other part in shade, When turned on her left side, I was aware Of Beatrice, fixing on the sun her eyes: Never on it so fixed was eagle’s stare.]15

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“The Eagle” was first published in Thalia Rediviva in 1678, a volume that also contained Vaughan’s translation of Claudian’s famous poem on “The Phoenix,” confirmation, if confirmation be needed, of Vaughan’s interest in and familiarity with traditional avian symbolism. The eagle was widely regarded as one of the noblest of all birds (Shakespeare, as we have seen, refers to it as the “feathered king”), and in traditional symbolism was often associated with the phoenix. Many of the bestiary authors quoted from the Psalms: Bless the Lord, O my soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; Who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercies; Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things; so that thy youth is renewed like the eagle’s. (Psalm 103:1–5)

(Psalm 103, from which these verses are taken, functions, in part, as a hymn of praise succeeding the “prayer of the afflicted” in Psalm 102, where the petitioner’s lament includes the declaration, “I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.”) The eagle’s power of renovation was variously presented in the bestiaries and related texts. It was said that when the eagle grew old, its eyes became covered with mist and its wings grew heavy. The aged bird sought a fountain and having found it, flew prodigiously high above it, into the region of the sun, where its eyes and wings were restored by the sun’s heat; the eagle then plunged three times into the fountain and was fully rejuvenated. In Vaughan’s desire to “warm” himself at God’s “glorious eye” (“Cock-Crowing” l.46) there is a distinct echo of this tradition. (The story presumably also accounts for the presence of the eagle as a decorative element on many baptismal fonts, often shown plunging into water). The eagle was said to be able to stare unblinded into the sun. It compelled its offspring to do the same, testing their virtue in this way; those who flinched or turned away were rejected. Vaughan recalls this belief in both his secular and his religious verse. In “To Etesia (for Timander,) the First Sight” the lover declares: I who yesterday did know Love’s fire no more, than doth cool snow

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With one bright look am since undone; Yet must adore and seek my Sun. Before I walked free as the wind, And if but stayed (like it,) unkind. I could like daring eagles gaze And not be blinded by a face; For what I saw, till I saw thee, Was only not deformity. (ll.9–18)

In “The Favour,” a poem that beautifully intertwines the language of courtly love with that of religious devotion, the lover’s desire for his lady’s glance is fused with the desire for God’s “fulleyed love” (“Cock-Crowing” l.41) in the image of the unfortunate eaglet: O thy bright looks! thy glance of love Shown, & but shown me from above! Rare looks! that can dispense such joy As without wooing wins the coy. And makes him mourn, and pine and die Like a starved eaglet, for thine eye.16 (ll.1–6)

The allegorists in the Christianized bestiaries are quick to point out the lesson: men in whom the eyes of the heart are covered with mist must seek rejuvenation in the spiritual fountain of God. Just as the eagle looks directly at the sun, so “Christ looks directly at his Father, and as the eagle lifts its young towards the sun, angels carry souls to God who receives only the worthy.”17 Another biblical text, Deuteronomy 32:11–12: As an eagle stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her wings: So the Lord alone did lead him [Jacob], and there was no strange god with him

prompted Rabanus Maurus to identify the eagle with Christ once more.18 Vaughan’s rhapsodic celebration, “The Eagle,” alludes to many of these traditions. There is an ecstatic quality to Vaughan’s vision of the bird’s direct encounter with the sun, of what one might, in Vaughan’s own phrase, call its experience of God’s “fulleyed love” (“Cock-Crowing” l.41):

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with such fury he begins his flight, As if his wings contended with his sight. Leaving the moon, whose humble light doth trade With spots, and deals most in the dark and shade: To the day’s royal planet he doth pass With daring eyes, and makes the sun his glass. Here doth he plume and dress himself, the beams Rushing upon him, like so many streams; While with direct looks he doth entertain The thronging flames, and shoots them back again. (ll.37– 46)

When Vaughan tells us of the acuteness of the eagle’s eyesight, how When thou in the clear heights and upmost air Dost face the Sun, and his dispers`ed hair, Even from that distance thou the sea dost spy And sporting in its deep, wide lap the fry. Not the least minnow there, but thou canst see; Whole seas are narrow spectacles to thee (ll.11–16)

he reproduces a commonplace in the bestiary accounts of the bird, a piece of information often allegorized as representing Christ descending from on high, with spiritual discernment, as it were, to take the souls of the virtuous. Vaughan’s closing lines sum up his understanding of the eagle (an understanding derived from a long tradition of Christian symbolism): Thus with his wings his body he hath brought Where man can only travel in a thought. I will not seek, rare bird, what spirit ’tis That mounts thee thus; I’ll be content with this; To think, that Nature made thee to express Our souls’ bold heights in a material dress. (ll.53–58)

Vaughan would probably have been inclined to call the eagle, as Dante does, “l’uccel di Dio” [the bird of God] (Paradiso 6.4). The eagle’s ability to fly to enormous heights was a subject of enduring fascination. Vaughan is, again, in a long tradition when he writes of how [h]e soars ’Bove wind and fire; gets to the moon, and pores

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With scorn upon her duller face; for she Gives him but shadows and obscurity. Here much displeased, that any thing like night Should meet him in his proud and lofty flight. (ll.27–32)

The bird’s soaring flight led to its very early adotion as a symbol of loftiness of thought and of poetic inspiration. Pindar, for example, employs the eagle as a symbol of the poetic mind at its most inspired (e.g., Olympian 2, ant. 5; Nemean 3, ep.4). Dante describes Virgil (Inferno 4.96) as ‘segnor de l’altissimo canto / che sovra li altri com’ aquila vola” [the lord of highest song, who soars above the others like an eagle]. In Chaucer’s House of Fame the poet is visited by a wonderful eagle, which carries him on high as part of his initiation into a new conception of his art: with devocion Myn eyen to the hevene I caste. Thoo was I war, lo, at the laste, That faste be the sonne, as hye As kenne myghte I with myn y¨e, Me thoughte I sawgh an egle sore, But that hit semed moche more Then I had any egle seyn. But this is sooth as deth, certeyn, Hyt was of gold, and shon so bryghte That never sawe men such a syghte, But yf the heven had ywonne Al newe of gold another sonne; So shone the egles fethers btyghte, And somwhat downward gan hyt lyghte.19 (1.494 –508)

When Eustace Deschamps addressed a Ballade to Chaucer he praised him as Aigles treshaulz, qui par ta theorique Enlumines le regne d’Eneas. [O lofty eagle who by your theoretical knowledge light up the kingdom of Aeneas.]20

The long-standing association of the eagle with poetic inspiration seems, again, to have been familiar to Vaughan and, interestingly, to some of his early readers. “The Eagle” opens with allusions to poetic madness, and to the poet’s own need for the eagle’s power of flight if his undertaking is

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to be undertaken successfully (if, to borrow a phrase from Milton, he is to deal successfully with a subject that involves “no middle flight” and for which, to borrow words from a later poet, he will need “the viewless wings of poesy”): ’Tis madness sure; and I am in the fit, To dare an eagle with my unfledged wit. For what did ever Rome or Athens sing In all their lines, as lofty as his wing? He that an eagle’s powers would rehearse Should with his plumes first feather all his verse. (1–6)

Vaughan’s awareness of the traditional identification is clear. For him, as for so many predecessors, the eagle’s flight (to which, metaphorically, his “unfledged” wit aspires) represents the loftiest poetic achievement. It is intriguing to note that among those who contributed commendatory verses to the volume in which “The Eagle” appeared there were two who chose to make allusions to this very same tradition. “To the Ingenious Author of Thalia Rediviva,” which is signed “N. W. Jes. Coll. Oxon.” and which is usually assumed to be the work of Nathaniel Williams, opens with the observation that Vaughan’s “Muse . . . / Advances to the galaxy” (ll.5–6) leaving “grovelling mortals” to “gaze below” (l.9): And long in vain to know Her wondrous paths, her wondrous flight In vain; alas! we grope, In vain we use our earthly telescope, We’re blinded by an intermedial night: Thine Eagle-Muse can only face The fiery coursers in their race, While with unequal paces we do try To bear her train aloft, and keep her company. (ll.10–18)

In “To my Worthy Friend, Mr Henry Vaughan the Silurist,” by “I. W. A.M. Oxon” (probably John Williams, brother of Nathaniel), Vaughan’s poetry is itself compared to an eagle in the effect it has on the reader, sweeping him upward like Ganymede in the claws of the eagle:21 Who can refuse thee company, or stay, By thy next charming summons forced away,

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If that be force which we can so resent That only in its joys ’tis violent: Upward thy Eagle bears us ere aware Till above storms and all tempestuous air We radiant worlds with their bright people meet, Leaving this little All beneath our feet. (ll.19–26)

Both poets go on to make allusions to the phoenix, too—the bird often symbolically associated with the eagle, a bird that also has definite associations with traditions of poetic vision, and which is represented in Thalia Rediviva by Vaughan’s translation of Claudian’s poem.22 Clearly both “N. W.” and “I. W.” were quick to appreciate the significance of these birds and their symbolism in the work of the poet they admired. Vaughan had, after all, earlier chosen to represent himself in the terms of this same tradition, not merely to make use of it in his poems themselves. Vaughan’s miscellaneous collection of 1651 carried the title Olor Iscanus (“The Swan of Usk”) and the commendatory lines to Thalia Rediviva by “N.W.” find time (between their references to the eagle and the phoenix) to praise “the Uscan Swan.” The swan was Apollo’s bird. On the day that he was born on Delos sacred swans flew seven times round the island. The swan has long been associated with poets and the power of poetry.23 The epithet of “swan” was given to many poets, such as Pindar, Anacreon, Virgil, Shakespeare, and Drummond of Hawthornden. Emblem writers such as Alciati and Whitney made the swan “insignia poetarum” [the insignia of poets]. Famously the swan was supposed to sing most beautifully just before its death (in some versions it sang only then). Vaughan doubtless knew this legend. Perhaps, too, he knew Socrates’ beautiful and profound interpretation of its significance, as reported by Plato: When they perceive that they must die, you know, they sing more and better than they ever did before, glad to be going away into the presence of that god whose servant they are. But men tell lies against them because they fear death themselves, and they say that the swans are mourning their death and singing a dirge for sorrow; men don’t take into account that no bird ever sings when it is hungry or cold or feels any other pain, not the swallow or the hoopoe or even the nightingale, which they say all sing a dirge for sorrow. But I don’t believe those birds do sing in sorrow, nor do the swans, but these I think, because they belong to Apollo, are prophets and know beforehand the good things in the other world, and sing and rejoice on that day far more than ever before. (Phaedo 85b)24

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In representing himself as the “swan” of Usk, Vaughan did more than proclaim himself a poet. He implicitly claimed to be a poet of a particular kind, a poet whose ultimate concern was with “the world of light” (“They are all gone into the world of light” l.1). For a poet who so longed to be “winged and free” (“Fair and young light!” l.47), “freed from the tyranny of clay” (“To my Ingenuous Friend, R.W.” l.24), birds were a natural (and inevitable) subject—just as they were for a later poet with similar longings to learn from, and share the powers of, the skylark as “higher still and higher” it rose from the earth and “soaring ever singest.”25 Vaughan’s birds are, as they were for Richard of St. Victor, measures of spiritual movement.26 But they are also emblems of his aspiration as a poet. (It would, I suspect, be rewarding to explore the significance of Vaughan’s birds in the light of the immense significance that birds have in the symbolic traditions of alchemy as well as in the broader hermetic traditions). We must not, however, forget that most of the birds Vaughan wrote about were also facts of his daily experience, and that in one of his letters to Aubrey he writes of such time as he had spent in what he called “attendance vpon (rather than speculations into) Nature.”27 Vaughan’s lifetime saw the beginnings of scientific ornithology, building on such works of the previous century as William Turner’s Avium praecipuarum apud Plimium et Aristotelem mentio est, brevis et succincta historia (Cologne, 1544), Gesner’s De avium natura (Zurich 1555) and Belon’s Histoire de la Nature des Oyseaux (Paris, 1555). For Vaughan, however, any such knowledge as these early ornithologists acquired co-existed with an older way of understanding of birds, as messengers of the spirit, words in a divine vocabulary, and means to a poetic understanding of the self. For Vaughan, the eagle was still a bird “that with his sharpe lok perseth the sonne.”28 Douglas Bush discovered in Milton “a basic belief that there is a gulf between the knowledge of external nature and the knowledge of God and the supreme ends of life.”29 Such a gulf is far less evident in Vaughan’s work. He might more readily have shared the vision of the Victorian poet R. S. Hawker: “Birds: They were first seen in the soft Sunlight of the fifth day, and as they floated through the silent air with their silver plumage and feathers like Gold, the Angels said to one another, ‘Behold what beautiful images of the Mind of God have come forth with wings.’ ”30

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NOTES 1. Ezra Pound: Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. W. Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973), 73. 2. E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic (1901; New York: Dover, 1971), 50– 51. 3. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, trans. W. R. Trask (1964; London: Penguin Arkana, 1989), 480–81. 4. Five Dialogues of Plato bearing on Poetic Inspiration, trans. J. Wright (London: Everyman, 1910), 231. 5. C. and J. Matthews, The Encyclopaedia of Celtic Wisdom (Shaftesbury: Element, 1994), 87–88. 6. Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972). 7. All quotations from Vaughan’s poetry are taken from Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (1976; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995). 8. J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, trans. J. Sage, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 28. Cirlot cites R. de Pinedo, El Simbolismo en la escultura medieval espanola ˜ (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1930). 9. William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 10. See Florence McCulloch, Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 147– 48. 11. Virgil, Aeneid, ed. and trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (1916; rpt., London: Heinemann, 1978), 4:462–63. My translation. 12. For Vaughan however such phrasing seems to be as natural and meaningful as it is, say, for Dunbar when he tells us that “Full angellike thir birdis sang their houris (“The Goldyn Targe” l.10) or for Spenser announcing that “The merry Larke his mattins sings aloft” (“Epithalamion” l.80). 13. Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant, The Penguin Dictionary of Symbols, trans. J. Buchananan-Brown (London: Penguin, 1996), 89. 14. See Beryl Rowland, Birds with Human Souls (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), 41– 48, and McCulloch, Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries, 178, citing F. Sbordone, Ricerche sulle fonti e sulla composizione del Physiologus greco (Naples: G. Torella & figlio, 1936), 131 ff. 15. Dante: The Selected Works, trans. Laurence Binyon (London: Agenda Editions, 1979), 368. 16. See also “The Star,” stanza 2. According to some of the bestiaries, the coot “adopted” the eaglets thus orphaned. 17. See McCulloch, Mediaeval Latin and French Bestiaries, 114 –15. 18. See Rowland, Birds with Human Souls, 53–54. 19. The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (London: Oxford University Press, 1987), 354. 20. Text and translation are quoted from Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. J. A. Burrow (London: Penguin Critical Anthologies, 1969), 26–27. 21. Christian interpretation of the story sometimes interpreted Ganymede as St. John, raised on high by Christ the Eagle, and thus given the power of prophecy.

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22. I have, for reasons of space, left Vaughan’s allusions to the phoenix undiscussed in this essay. 23. See Victor Magnien, Les myst`eres d’Eleusis (Paris: Payot, 1950). 24. Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W. H. D. Rouse (New York: Mentor Books, 1956), 489. 25. “Ode to a Skylark,” The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (1905; London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 602. 26. It is intriguing to note that Dante’s interest in birds, on the evidence of his poetry, was “more in their movement than in their shape or colour.” Patrick Boyde, Dante: Philomythes and Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 121. 27. Vaughan to John Aubrey, Brechon, 28 June 1680, The Works of Henry Vaughan, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), 692. 28. “The Parlement of Foules,” The Riverside Chaucer, 331. 29. Douglas Bush, Science and English Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 46. 30. Quoted in A. L. Rowse, “Robert Stephen Hawker of Morwenstow: A Belated Medieval,” Essays and Studies 12 (1959): 115.

Water, Wood, and Stone: The Living Earth in Poems of Vaughan and Milton Diane Kelsey McColley For who will believe that water can be made a stone, and a stone water, nothing being more different than these two? And yet in very truth it is so. Thomas Vaughan, Magia Adamica1

I

“LIVING WATER” IS A BIBLICAL METAPHOR OF THAT FOR WHICH THE spirit thirsts. “Therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation” (Isaiah 12:3); “If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldst have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water” (John 4:14).2 The metaphor embodies—for water and language have bodies—the experience of a desert people for whom thirst is dire and water is life. John Milton, Henry Vaughan, and other early modern poets shared an impulse to renew the relationship of such metaphors to their sources in nature, and so to restore the connection, or even identity, between spirit and matter. This reunion was needful for the life of poetry in a time when the old polarities of God and nature, king and body politic, man and woman, body and soul were intensely scrutinized and debated. Three modes of thought wedged these dyads apart. One wedge was the uses of Renaissance allegory that detach types from particulars. If man represents reason and woman passion in art it is easy to apply those supposed essences to individual persons. Living things become dead tropes: lions are not lions, but fortitude or wrath, and roses lose their particular faces as emblems of perishability that exhort us to seize the day. Another wedge was a theological instrumentalism that regarded all bodies as servants of the human soul. Others were the natural 269

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philosophy by which Descartes separated mind and body, and the natural history by which Bacon and the Royal Society, in the processes of categorization and experiment, sometimes separated other creatures from human empathy and their own lives. Vitalist poets, not by denying figurative meanings but by insisting on the actualities of their origins, brought the victims of dualism, which robbed them of self-life, home to the earth from which they sprang. Alan Rudrum discerned forty years ago what may now be called an ecosophical element in the works of Henry Vaughan and his twin brother, the hermetic philosopher Thomas Vaughan: a tendency “to see man as part of nature rather than as standing over and against Nature.”3 His editions and interpretations of both Vaughans are (among other things) pioneering works of ecological criticism, a dimension of literary scholarship only now becoming incorporated into literary studies generally. He recognized that attitudes toward other-than-human beings were matters of theological and philosophical contention that vitally concerned the Vaughans and other early modern writers. Henry Vaughan, in spite of his allegiance to the English church and crown, radically departed from orthodox opinion, Rudrum has shown,4 in deeming plants and animals denizens of eternity: a contention that for a Christian culture bears on whether the earth is to be treated as a way station replenished with organic edibles, slaves, and pests or as the shared habitat of various lives, each with its own telos, unfolding out of the great mystery of being in its own way. The personification of nonhuman nature is a common poetic practice, but that is not all that is happening in vitalist poetry like Vaughan’s, which is connected to natural philosophy. Stephen Fallon defines vitalism as “the belief that life is a property traceable to matter itself rather than to either the motion of complex organizations of matter or an immaterial soul”; “Animist materialism—the belief, shared by Milton, that matter can possess the traits of mind—is an extension of vitalism.”5 The poets I shall discuss come to their sense that all things are alive by various paths—hermetic, hylozoic, monist materialist, or combinations of these. The Greek word for both wood and matter is u{lh, hyle: forest, woodland, undergrowth, timber, firewood, and, in Aristotle, twigs for nests. It also means “the stuff of which a thing is made” and “matter for a poem or treatise.”6 The Latin materia, timber or building material, has a similar development, while silva also

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means materials or supplies as well as woods, forest, or foliage— hence pages are folios and leaves. Numerous seventeenth-century poets, including Jonson, Milton, and Cowley, use either Latin or English versions of this word as titles of poetic miscellanies. Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum, however, is a collection of occasional observations about natural history, and John Evelyn’s Sylva is literally about reforestation and the best means of planting and caring for various species of trees. These words carry trees in their etymologies as Greek columns carry them in their forms. In late Greek and early Christian writing hyle came dualistically to mean nondivine matter, with the connotation of “sinful, hostile to God,”7 perhaps with reference to wooden idols and pagan sacred groves as well as atheist philosophies. The history of the word reflects the philosophical contentions of seventeenthcentury theology.8 The Oxford English Dictionary defines hylozoism as “The theory that matter is endowed with life, or that life is merely a property of matter.” Of these alternatives, Christian vitalist poets may be suspected of the former but not the latter, which may more properly be called hylomorphism (u{lh and morfhj or form), “the doctrine that primordial matter is the First Cause of the universe”—a teaching obviously incompatible with Hebraic and Christian accounts of God as First Cause. Ralph Cudworth, the Cambridge Neoplatonist, counts hylozoism as a form of atheism because it makes unnecessary both the incorporeal soul and the Deity. But he cautions that “as every Atomist is not therefore necessarily an Atheist, so neither must every Hylozoist needs be accounted such. For whoever so holds the life of matter, as notwithstanding to assert another kind of substance also, that is immaterial and incorporeal, is no ways obnoxious to that foul imputation.”9 Thomas Vaughan, the poet’s brother, denies the imputation of atheism in a comic dialogue with Cudworth’s colleague Henry More: “you say there is a quarrell between Israel and Hyle, or the first matter, but Mrs. Hyle / Can nothing avayle ’gainst Israel. / I prithee Moore, how came these two to fall out? is Hyle one of the Philistines . . . ?”10 Milton went further, holding all matter to have come from the substance of God, who has the power of heterogeneity within himself, and who liberated this “one first matter” to produce diverse kinds of being which in Paradise Lost actively emerge from their active habitats of water and earth.11 Christian vitalist poets also retain a hylozoic sense of the origins within other living things of their own words and forms,

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omitting the atheistic denial of God and the pantheistic denial that God transcends, as well as giving his own substance to, the natural world. They recognize the connection between the living matter of created things and the living matter of words. What I shall call hylozoic poems are literally about living things, connect the matter of life with the matter of language, and are, in various degrees, organically constructed and impulsively alive beyond any dogmatic grasp—not wooden icons but living forms responsive to the spirit-matter of all life. In “The Book,” a poem through which Alan Rudrum opened a new critical dimension by discovering significance beyond the genre of devotional lyric, Vaughan writes hylozoically about the literal stuff of which a book was made: flax, wood, and leather. Part of ecological thinking is knowing where our artifacts come from, with what cost to the earth, to habitats, to species, to individuals of those species, and in human labor. We owe to the matter of language a similar attentiveness. Vaughan’s book required materials from an oak, a cow, and a field of flax, all of them a kind of sacrifice or sacred making, as is his poem. Plants, animals, and words are divine materials. The Book Eternal God! maker of all That have lived here, since the man’s fall; The Rock of ages! in whose shade They live unseen, when here they fade. Thou knew’st this paper, when it was Mere seed, and after that but grass; Before ’twas dressed or spun, and when Made linen, who did wear it then: What were their lives, their thoughts & deeds Whether good corn, or fruitless weeds. Thou knew’st this tree, when a green shade Covered it, since a cover made, And where it flourished, grew and spread, As if it never should be dead. Thou knew’st this harmless beast, when he Did live and feed by thy decree On each green thing; then slept (well fed) Clothed with this skin, which now lies spread A covering o’er this aged book, Which makes me wisely weep and look On my own dust; mere dust it is,

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But not so dry and clean as this. Thou knew’st and saw’st them all and though Now scattered thus, dost know them so. O knowing, glorious spirit! when Thou shalt restore trees, beasts and men, When thou shalt make all new again, Destroying only death and pain, Give him among thy works a place, Who in them loved and sought thy face!12

Rudrum writes, “To see the world of nature as a book was a medieval and Renaissance commonplace; Vaughan’s originality is to see the world of nature in a book,” and compares Vaughan to the hermetic philosophers, of whom the poet’s brother Thomas was one, quoting Paracelsus on the eternity of all things: “That flowers should not be eternal is clean contrary to philosophy; which though they wither and perish, yet at last they shall appear in the general meeting together of all things. There is nothing created out of the great mystery but shall have an image without [beyond] the Firmament.”13 Vaughan does not speak in abstractions, but of this grass, this tree, this skin, which he holds in his hands as this book. And he invests his contemplation of them with sacramental vitalism, including his belief that “Thou shalt restore trees, beasts and men, / When thou shalt make all new again.” The living cow, grass, and tree are still in God’s mind and will be restored; the repeated “this” suggests that he goes beyond Paracelsus to believe in the resurrection of not only species or forms but individuals. And the man—who, like all mortal life, is grass (1 Peter 1:24)—asks for a place among them, in whom the speaker has sought not God’s power or magnificence but God’s face: this is not transcendental dualism but love of creatures in whom he finds the face of the Maker. At the same time, the poem itself is constructed like a book. The couplets suggest a folio, made of sheets folded in two; the stanzas are gathered in three parallel signatures, one for each species named, and enclosed in the front and back matter of human time, from creation to apocalypse, within the covering prayer to the Rock of Ages. The book in the speaker’s hand need not be identified as a Bible or a prayer book—it is any “aged” book—but the poem’s construction binds together the scope and the liturgical form of those two chief books of the poet’s time.

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Rudrum observes, however, that the book is not just “an artifact” but “gives us a strong impression of God’s world and the interdependence of its parts.” The book is, literally, an epitome. “It is as if the ‘trees, beasts, and men’ have been restored to life by Vaughan’s imagination” and can be experienced as “a poetic analogue of that hermetic experiment mentioned by Sir Thomas Browne in which the stock and the leaves of a plant are restored from ashes.” The restoration in the final stanza is “not a mere poetic flight of fancy or wishful thinking but rather a conclusion logically earned.”14 The poem opposes the opinion of Thomas Aquinas that “dumb animals, plants, and minerals . . . are in no way subjects of incorruption” and will not participate in the final restoration.15 It provides “an experience analogous to that offered by an ecological survey: the sense of connexion and interdependence”; and it resembles Browne’s belief that “at the last day God would command all things back to their proper shapes.” Since, as for Paracelsus “the world exists as an exteriorization of the imagination of God . . . if Vaughan, by the imaginative contemplation of a man-made object, could recall the world of nature hidden within it, then God at the last day by an analogous process could restore all things from the dust.”16 Here metaphor is re-reversed. Real things are the products of God’s imagination; since they return to the country, heaven, from whence they come (a topic to which we will return as well), real things personified are made more than metaphor by their actual unity with what they represent, since their spiritual meaning is intrinsic in their matter. In this way, the truth of poetry becomes the poetry of truth. Let us consider together what Christian vitalist hylozoic poets tell us of living waters, speaking trees, and testifying stones.

II. LIVING WATERS David Abram, ecological linguist, defines magic as “the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences.”17 For Vaughan, too, devout Anglican yet brother of the vitalist hermeticist, all of nature is percipient, responsive, and “quick.” In “The Morning Watch” the dew of evening and of grace that fell all night “bloods, / And spirits all my earth,” which is to say his body, while his soul “breaks, and buds.”

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In what rings, And hymning circulations the quick world Awakes, and sings; The rising winds, And falling springs, Birds, beasts, all things Adore him in their kinds. Thus all is hurled In sacred hymns, and order, the great chime And symphony of nature.

Can it be an accident that the words “blood” and “circulation” appear together in a poem published a year after the vitalist William Harvey published his revolutionary work on the circulation of the blood? John Rogers places this work among “de-centralized paradigms of bodily organization” that challenged habitual analogies between natural processes and political hierarchies.18 Though both Harvey, the king’s physician, and Vaughan were loyal to the crown, Vaughan applies this principle to the body of nature; all the earth is as “quick” with life as his own body’s vital circulation, and especially those dews and springs that gather in the Usk valley of his native Brecknockshire. In “To the River Isca,” his early, secular statement of poetic calling as a poet of place, Vaughan tells how poets divine and human from Apollo to Vergil to Sidney have brought forth flowers of poesie on the banks of rivers, where their protective genii live. Poets “Hallow the place.” Vaughan vows so to write that he will hallow the Usk valley where he was born and means to die. When I am laid to rest hard by thy streams, And my sun sets, where first it sprang in beams, I’ll leave behind me such a large, kind light, As shall redeem thee from oblivious night.

He invokes blessings from the river so that “vocal groves” like Dodona’s may grow there. And he invokes blessings for the river—fair name, poetic praise, true lovers, mild weather, “The turtle’s voice, joy without fear,” freedom from real or emblematic events, toads, and snakes (Vaughan is not, here, a species egalitarian) and freedom from pollution. No nitrous clay, nor brimstone-vein Mix with thy streams, but may they pass Fresh as the air, and clear as glass.

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His final fervent wish alludes to the Civil Wars that had so disturbed his own peace: “The land redeemed from all disorders!” Vaughan’s “The Water-fall,” from his later sacred vein, begins, With what deep murmurs through time’s silent stealth Doth thy transparent, cool and watery wealth Here flowing fall, And chide, and call, As if his liquid, loose retinue stayed Ling’ring, and were of this steep place afraid, The common pass Where, clear as glass, All must descend Not to an end: But quickened by this deep and rocky grave, Rise to a longer course more bright and brave.

Here, Jonathan Post points out, “the exuberant play with liquid sounds and shifting, cascading rhythms and abrupt enjambments present us with more than a visual hieroglyph of a waterfall.”19 This is not just any water, but a particular parcel of that element in its passage through a particular place where the Usk makes a rocky descent. One can see its shape: it plunges over two ledges of rock, the pairs of longer lines, and resumes, for the rest of the poem, its progress within its banks; the short lines represent both the swiftness and the narrowness of its descent. The “watery wealth,” with the many voices of water moving at various speeds, seems to the poet’s ears to chide hesitant followers, the quieter water before the noisy plunge, but—and this is the allegory—“Not to an end,” teaching doubtful man not to fear that “What God takes, he’ll not restore.” The “thy” of line two is not just the waterfall but the whole “Dear stream!” of the ensuing lines, a river addressed as alive in “Each drop of thy quick store.” But the addressee is also water itself—“O useful element and clear!”—in part of its circulation from sea to mist to cloud to rain to river to sea; and finally it is the primordial (and still present) waters out of which all creation sprang when the Spirit “first upon thy face did move, / And hatched all with his quickening love.” “Sublime truths” do not just compare with but “Lodge” in it. Yet in the end he turns from the tributaries of the Usk to the “invisible estate” toward which the waterfall has taught him confidently to flow: that passage is “the channel my soul seeks, / Not this with cataracts and creeks.” Vaughan is often thought of as a

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transcendental or transcendent poet—one always chafing at the clogs of the world of the body in which we become mired, seeking the freedom of heavenly joys.20 And he does indeed see emblematic metaphors in nature. But what if the whole natural world itself makes the same journey? What if, as Milton has it, all of nature, like the human segment, is working up to spirit (Paradise Lost 5.469–505), and that spirit is made of the same divine substance as the body, and is not separable from it in the world of light? Rudrum connects such natural epiphanies to the hermeticists, who “thought of the Paradise of God as offering a glorification of normal sense experience: it is not likely that they should imagine a final bliss purged of the objects of sense.”21 Vaughan expands even the clearly metaphorical object of sense towards the literal. “Religion,” in the poem of that name, is personified as a spring of water who brings “Cordials in every drop” but who “Passing through the earth’s dark veins . . . both her taste, and colour stains.” What is unusual is Vaughan’s attention to the details of actual pollution: the spring picks up “sulphur underground” and “So poisoned, breaks forth” and pleases but sickens the drinker as “puddle, or mere slime.” Since for Vaughan the religion imposed by Parliament is “Just such a tainted sink . . . Like that Samaritan’s dead well,” he pleads for the “living waters” of John 4:10: “Heal then these waters, Lord; or bring thy flock / Since these are troubled, to the springing rock” (ll. 49–50). Vaughan, then, brings geology and hydrology to the spiritual meaning of “living waters,” connecting the tenor of the metaphor firmly to its source in nature. Milton gives vitalist expression in Paradise Lost to the relation of nature and spirit in the Creation, when in Genesis 1:2 “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” and, in Milton’s words, “vital virtue infused, and vital warmth / Throughout the fluid mass” (7.236–37), purging and sorting the elements of life to create a “self-balanced” earth (7.242). As Harinder Singh Marjara notes, Paracelsus, Helmot, and Boyle all gave water “the pre-eminent role . . . in the process of generation.”22 In Milton’s epic, the Archangel Raphael reports, The Earth was formed, but in the womb as yet Of waters, embryon immature involv’d, Appeared not: over all the face of earth, Main ocean flowed, not idle, but with warm Prolific humor soft’ning all her globe, Fermented the Great Mother to conceive,

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Satiate with genial moisture, when God said Be gather’d now ye waters under heav’n Into one place, and let dry land appear. (7.276–84)

John Leonard glosses, “Earth is both the Great Mother about to conceive, and the foetus enveloped (involved) in protective waters. . . Prolific humour [is] generative liquid. Earth’s seas now act as penetrating seed as well as nursing fluid.”23 On the fifth day of creation, God says “Let the waters generate” reptiles, fowl, whales, fish, and “each / Soul living, each that crept,” Raphael reports, whereupon “lakes and running streams” and “sounds and seas, each creek and bay” and “tepid caves, and fens and shores / Their brood as numerous hatch” (7.387– 418). Milton not only recognized that waters and wetlands are the breeding places of numerous species but attributes their production, as he does with other animals, to the habitat itself. “Fens” was a potentially inflammatory word. The draining of the fens or “levels” of northeastern England by Stuart monarchs and the Commonwealth government was part of the widespread dispute between advocates of enclosure and defenders of common lands. From an ecological point of view, drainage of wetlands reduces biodiversity; fenlanders, supported by the Levellers, wanted wildlife conservation for the preservation of their hunting-andfishing way of life. Eventually, with improved technology, the fenlands became fertile croplands. But in the seventeenth-century, since the engineering of the fens put much communal land into private hands and ditching isolated neighbors, the commonalty felt these changes as an invasion and usurpation of the rights of traditional communities by implacable powers. (Marvell’s metaphor of leveled fields as a model for Levellers in “Upon Appleton House” may ironically allude to the redistribution of the Levels, which Levellers protested.) In Paradise Lost the nurturing activity of water is the lifeblood of the garden that is the epitome of Earth. The originary river of Eden flows right under the mount of Paradise, high raised Upon the rapid current, which through veins Of porous earth with kindly thirst up drawn, Rose a fresh fountain, and with many a rill Watered the garden. (4.226–30)

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From there these streams reunite and fall “Down the steep glade” to rejoin the underground river, which emerges and divides into the four famous rivers of Eden. The narrator does not recount their well-known geography but aims rather to tell how, if art could tell, How from that sapphire fount the crisp`ed brooks, Rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold, With mazy error under pendant shades Ran nectar, visiting each plant, and fed Flow’rs worthy of Paradise, which not nice art In beds and curious knots, but nature boon Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain, Both where the morning sun first warmly smote The open field, and where the unpierced shade Embrowned the noontide bowers: thus was this place, A happy rural seat of various view. (4.236– 47)

Critics have seen “mazy error” as a sign that nature is fallen or ominous before the Fall, but that spoiling of the theodicy is not necessary, since only by wandering can these waters do their work of “visiting each plant.” Water, like nature herself, pours bounty on not just all but each. The various views include rich groves, lawns, downs, flocks, and hillocks, “irriguous” valleys, and “grots and caves”; meanwhile murmuring waters fall Down the slope hills, dispersed, or in a lake, That to the fring`ed bank with myrtle crowned, Her crystal mirror holds, unite their streams. (4.260–63)

The syntax imitates the gathering of waters; it is a living lake, not a pool of Narcissus, in which newly made Eve sees her reflection. The morning prayer of Adam and Eve praises, like Vaughan’s, earth’s “Hymning Circulations.” Air, and ye elements the eldest birth Of Nature’s womb, that in quaternion run Perpetual circle multiform, and mix And nourish all things, let your ceaseless change Vary to our great Maker still new praise. (5.180–84)

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The four formative and feeding elements receive four lines of description, with four stresses each, until at the mention of “ceaseless change” the meter varies. The mists and exhalations onomatopoetically “wet the thirsty earth with falling showers,” and the “winds, that from four quarters blow” are invoked to “Breathe soft or loud” in open vowels. “Wave your tops, ye pines, / With every plant” is pricklier with plosive consonants, while “Fountains and ye, that warble, as ye flow, / Melodious murmurs, warbling tune His praise” imitates, like Vaughan’s waterfall, the layered sounds of moving water. The birds that “singing, up to heaven gate ascend” and the animals, “Ye that in waters glide, and ye that walk / The earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep” are all acknowledged in imitative flights and gaits of prosody. Like the waters of Paradise, “visiting each plant,” the elements are self-active; they run, blow, breathe, warble, and nourish. In their care of each being they share and exemplify the vocation of dressing and keeping the garden given to Adam and Eve and us. In A Mask at Ludlow, performed to celebrate the inauguration of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales, Milton attributes reparative nurturing to Sabrina, the genius or goddess of the river Severn. A figure of grace operating through nature, Sabrina rescues the mask’s ensnared heroine, the earl’s young daughter, who speaks for a temperance those in power especially need: in this case power over a conquered people whose hope of just government depends on the English earl. Sabrina also links moral probity with the health of the earth. She especially helps “Ensnared chastity” but also “Visits the herds along the twilight meadows / Helping all urchin blasts” and healing with “pretious viold liquors” that are the opposite of Comus’s seductive cup.

III. SPEAKING LEAVES When Nicholas Brady, “Chaplain in Ordinary to His Majesty,” contributed an ode set by Henry Purcell to the annual celebration of St. Cecilia’s Day in 1692, poet and composer gave hyle another level of literality. The ode calls upon the patron saint of music to “make the British Forest prove /As famous as Dodona’s Vocal Grove”; and in response, “each Tree its silence breaks”:

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The Box and Fir to talk begin! This [in] the sprightly VIOLIN, That in the Flute distinctly speaks! ’Twas Sympathy their list’ning Brethren drew, When to the Thracian Lyre with leafy Wings they flew.24

The oracle of Zeus in Dodona spoke through the sounds of the forest. Purcell literally makes British trees “speak” through flutes (recorders), made of boxwood, and violins, made of fir. It was not just Orpheus’s playing but the sympathy of wood for wood that drew trees to Orpheus’s lyre with “leafy Wings” whose fluttering flight the voices musically mime along with instruments made of those very trees. Such literal attention to natural materials, as in “The Book,” recognizes the dependence of human arts on the natural world. This recognition was promoted by the plant biologist Nathaniel Grew, who in 1670 gave to Henry Oldenburgh, secretary of the Royal Society, the manuscript of his Anatomy of Vegetables, which John Wilkins read to a meeting of the society in 1671.25 Grew comes near to vitalism in the way he writes about plants, comparing their organs, processes, and sexual reproduction to those of the human body. Like Vaughan, he helps us think about the once-living materials we hold in our hands. The stuff of a walking stick “is so exquisitely fine, that no Silk-worm is able to draw any thing so small a Thred. So that one who walks about with the meanest Stick, holds a Piece of Natures Handicraft, which far surpasses the most elaborate Woof of Needle-Work in the World.”26 In vitalist poems, trees speak and listen, and poets speak and listen to them. In “The Timber” Vaughan addresses a fallen tree as a formerly living entity: “many light hearts and wings / Which now are dead, lodged in thy living bowers. / And still a new succession sings and flies; / Fresh groves grow up, and their green branches shoot” skyward; but not the fallen tree: “thou . . . dost waste all senseless, cold and dark; / Where not so much as dreams of light may shine, / Nor any thought of greenness, leaf or bark.” Yet even the dead tree may “resent” or feel again a coming storm, manifesting a response to the changing weather. The gist is metaphorical: just as the tree re-senses the coming storm, “what resentience can work more within, / Than true remorse, when with past sins at strife?” Yet even the reformed sinner whose mind is only on heavenly things may feel “old wounds” again, as one does on rainy

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days. But the literality is vitalist: if the tree now wastes “senseless” it once had sense; it still can re-sense storms; it had dreams of light and thoughts of greenness. People who put such ideas into tracts instead of poems were thought heretical or mad. “Mad Meg” Cavendish was one of these. In Philosophical and Physical Opinions Cavendish questions Aristotelian and mechanist limits to sentience. There may be in Nature More Sensitive Passages or Organs, than the Sensitive Organs in Animals, and . . . more Various; for though Animals cannot see Outward Objects without an Eye, yet certainly Nature can, and hath made Different Organs in Different Creatures . . . for it is not probable, that the several Works in Nature can be in Obscurity to most, and only be Divulged to some particular Sorts or Kinds.27

She is perhaps working out her version of the hylozoism of Pierre Gassendi, who argued that the Epicureans “did not consider atoms, which they said are the matter of all things, as inert or motionless, but rather as most active and mobile.”28 And he proposed a teleology for each created thing: “Each natural agent tends to a certain end. . . . You say, therefore, must a certain cognition be attributed to the seeds, not only of animals, but also of plants, stones, and other things? But if you wish me to deny this, explain therefore how they finish their own operations so exquisitely.”29 Cavendish wrote poems speculating on the intelligence of animals, including fish, and an extended “Dialogue between an Oake, and a Man cutting him downe.”30 Given the symbolism of oaks as royalty, this one may be thought to speak for Charles I, but in fact it speaks for trees. Cavendish’s choice of species is appropriate; Vergil calls it the “oracula quercus” (Georgics 2:26), which Dryden renders “vocal Oke / Where Jove of old Oraculously spoke.” The man’s language is Royalist and managerial, the oak’s simple and wise. The oak points out its usefulness alive to man and animals, and the man’s ingratitude, describing the man’s intended violence to the tree as Ovid describes violence to the ox: “For all my Care, and Service,” must I be laid on the fire? Thus love is slain and tortured. Cavendish likens the tree to a human body, as does Grew, and even alludes to the wounding of Christ: With Wedges you do peirce my Sides to wound, And with your Hatchet knock me to the ground. I minc’d shall be in Chips, and peeces small, And thus doth Man reward good Deeds withall.

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The oak wants to “live the Life that Nature gave,” and when the man offers to make “a Stately House” of him, where he could enjoy lavish entertainments, the oak rejects burdensome preferment and “Nailes, and Hammer strong” that “pierce my Sides, to hang their Pictures on.” This bathetic crucifixion does not work as an allegory of Charles, who loved pictures and preferment. Anne Finch, Countess of Winchelsea, in “The Tree” also expresses gratitude to a tree and wishes it a natural death. “To future Ages may’st thou stand / Untouch’d by the rash Workman’s hand,” until the winds kindly forfend the ax by blowing it down, when it will no longer be the “Care” of “Clouds” and “Ev’ning dews” but will “like ancient Heroes, burn, / And some bright Hearth be made thy Urn.”31 Andrew Marvell in “Upon Appleton House” not only feels sympathy with trees but nearly becomes one. Contemplating the estate’s old growth forest, culled but never clear cut, he considers that it might have furnished timber for Noah’s Ark, but now furnishes a green and ever-growing ark for not just pairs but multitudes of birds and animals. He learns the birds’ and plants’ own languages (not the ornithologists’ and botanists’) and has nearly the means to become a bird or a plant himself: Thus I, easy philosopher, Among the birds and trees confer. And little now to make me wants Or of the fowls, or of the plants: Give me but wings as they, and I Straight floating on the air shall fly: Or turn me but, and you shall see I was but an inverted tree.32

He con-fers with the birds and trees, and enters their kind of being. Milton’s “Genius of the Wood” also talks to his plants, but as a part of his role as caretaker in Arcades, an entertainment for the dowager Countess of Derby in 1632 to which the twenty-threeyear-old Milton was asked to contribute. He furnished three songs and the remarkable speech by the Genius, a local spirit who protects and nurtures a particular place and sometimes the people in it, as Sabrina and Lycidas do.33 This one introduces himself: For know by lot from Jove I am the pow’r Of this fair wood, and live in oaken bow’r,

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To nurse the saplings tall, and curl the grove With ringlets quaint, and wanton windings wove.

“Quaint” and “wanton” retain their early definitions of “elaborate” and “unrestrained” (OED 3); the Genius ensures, in a sense proceeds from, the grove’s intrinsic processes or “pow’r.” He dresses plants and keeps them as God in Genesis 2:15 enjoins Adam to do, but also “saves” them from the effects of the first gardeners’ defection: And all my plants I save from nightly ill, Of noisome winds, and blasting vapours chill. And from the boughs brush off the evil dew, And heal the harms of thwarting thunder blue, Or what the cross dire-looking planet smites, Or hurtful worm with cankered venom bites.

The Genius accords with the instructions of Gabriel Plattes for preventing mildew on field crops: “let two men with a cord between them shake off the dew before sunrise.”34 He continues, When evening grey doth rise, I fetch my round Over the mount, and all this hallowed ground And early ere the odorous breath of morn Awakes the slumb’ring leaves, or tasselled horn Shakes the high thicket, haste I all about, Number my ranks, and visit every sprout With puissant words, and murmurs made to bless.

The Genius does what instructors from Xenophon onward say a good farmer does, makes his rounds morning and evening visiting each plant, like the waters of Eden in the epic, and like Eve. Does any real gardener not speak to plants? A poignant example occurs in the epic when the archangel Michael announces the Expulsion, and Eve bids farewell to the flowers she named, identified, and nursed: O flow’rs, That never will in other climate grow, My early visitation, and my last At ev’n, which I bred up with tender hand From the first op’ning bud, and gave ye names, Who now shall rear ye to the sun, or rank Your tribes, and water from the ambrosial fount? (11.273–79)

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She will learn that the whole earth is worth such tending and that they can renew their lost vocation, as Adam will soon learn from the vision of the animals emerging from Noah’s Ark and exclaim to the instructive archangel, O Thou, who future things canst represent As present, Heav’nly instructor, I revive At this last sight; assured that man shall live, With all the creatures, and their seed preserve. (11.870–73)

His false assurance leaves the task to us.

IV. TESTIFYING STONES Like water and trees, minerals were being turned into commodities with increasing rapidity. Gold and jewels were motives for empire over both nature and other peoples, and adorned monarchs and the powerful generally; and tearing up the earth for them has been mocked in poems at least since the Book of Job.35 Poets defended earth’s face and womb. Earth speaks in vitalist poems, and even rocks are percipient and can listen and testify. As Bruce Bohrer notes, in Milton’s Prolusion 7 “ignorance exists nowhere in nature: ‘Rocks, too, show a certain aptitude for learning in that they reply to the sacred words of poets; will not these also reject Ignorance?’ ”36 Margaret Cavendish also assigns “a certain cognition” to stones because they achieve their own ends. Thomas Vaughan writes in hermetic mode, “Pan transformes himself into a Proteus, that is, into all varieties of Species, into Animals, Vegetables, and Minerals; for out of the Universall Nature, or first matter, all these are made, and Pan hath their Proprieties in himself.”37 The statement corresponds with Milton’s principle that all beings were made of one first matter proceeding from the power of heterogeneity in God himself, and his monism was shared by hermeticists and vitalist atomists alike.38 Henry Vaughan called two volumes of poems Silex Scintillans, the flashing flint, suggesting as Graham Parry notes “the hardened heart buffeted by affliction until it yields a holy fire.” The sinful heart is stone, but this stone has the power of fire. Further, Parry writes, The Creator has instilled a grain of star-fire into all created forms, so that there is a constant interchange of sympathy between heaven

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and earth, which Vaughan commonly describes as a “ray” or “influence,” “magnetism” or “commerce.” Man himself has a soul which is a portion of God’s nature, which should enable him to feel the heavenward stress that runs through all things, but this awareness has been deadened by sin. The star-fire burns brightly among the lesser creatures, however, which is why Vaughan is so attentive to them in his verse. . . . Even . . . stones stand fixed in mute adoration.39

In “The Stone” Vaughan meditates upon Joshua 24:27, in which not only is the law engraved in stone but the stone itself hears: “Behold, this stone shall be a witness unto us; for it hath heard all the words of the Lord which he spake unto us.” The poem is about a conscience wishing to hide, but finding that “dark designs” cannot be hidden from the creatures. Not only do “Hedges have ears” in the metonymical sense: bushes and the creatures they shelter are aware of our doings, and we neglect “That busy commerce kept between / God and his Creatures,” who “hear, see, speak, / And into loud discoveries break.” Even God does not condemn men outright but seeks the testament of stones; Vaughan treats such practices as the casting of lots as the actual evidence of mineral voices. Hence sand and dust Are shaked for witnesses, and stones, Which some think dead, shall all at once With one attesting voice detect Those secret sins we least suspect.

The statement has metaphysical wit but does not seem to be jocular. Everything in nature “turns Scribe and Register.” David Abram describes the “perceptual interplay” or “the transitivity of perception” by which “we may suddenly feel that the trees are looking at us,” a feeling shared by traditional cultures for whom the natural world has not been distanced by Western objectivity.40 It resides also in Western breasts as panic, the experience of the presence of Pan. Monism, the principle of one first matter that originates in God, gives such intuitions warrant in natural philosophy. All creatures are kindred. That even stones should be communicative may seem less outlandish if one considers the theories of sympathy and antipathy that Bacon thought worth study in jewels in Sylva Sylvarum.41 The belief that the whole earth is alive was widely shared in the seventeenth century and is now a serious consideration in ecological philosophy.

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Margaret Cavendish’s Earth’s Complaint gives Earth a speaking voice to lament the wounds of plow and mine. O Nature, Nature, hearken to my Cry, Each Minute wounded am, but cannot dye. My Children which I from my Womb did beare, Do dig my Sides, and all my Bowels teare: Do plow deep Furroughs in my very Face, From Torment, I have neither time, nor place. No other Element is so abus’d, Nor by Man-kind so cruelly is us’d.42

Her thought is traceable to Hesiod, Vergil, and Ovid; plowing and mining have historically been accompanied by a kind of dread of tearing the face and inward parts of the Mother. But in her own time technology was more advanced, and projectors were broadcasting the idea, both Calvinist and commercial, that it was the duty of human beings to “improve” every possible inch of the land. Milton’s epic attributes abuse of mother Earth to Mammon, leader of the miners of Hell, by whose suggestion men Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands Rifled the bowels of their mother Earth For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew Opened into the hill a spacious wound And digged out ribs of gold. (1.686–90)

Milton and Vaughan, though on opposite sides in the English Revolution, shared not only poetic empathy with the creatures but the belief, widely proclaimed heretical, that all beings will participate in the “All in All” after the apocalyptic union of Heaven with a purged and renewed Earth. Vaughan explicitly includes plants, animals, and even stones among the creatures that “groan for thee, Their liberty.” The “thee” addressed is Christ (“thy blood is mine”), so that Vaughan suggests that the incarnate Redeemer will bring the liberty of being themselves to all creatures now enslaved and impaired by human sin. The immortality of nonhuman species, as Rudrum points out, receives biblical evidence in Romans 8:19–22, which reads in the Authorized Version, 19. For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. 20. For the creature was made subject to

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vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope. 21. Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. 22. For we know that that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

Further, in Revelation 5:13 “every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them” worship the Lamb together. Perhaps Milton, a scrupulous literal reader of the Bible’s problematic texts, alludes to this verse in Michael’s prophecy that after the Last Judgment the faithful will be received into bliss “Whether in Heav’n or earth, for then the earth / Shall all be Paradise” (12. 463–65). Alan Rudrum, tracing interpretations of the verses from Romans, finds that although the common gloss of 8:19 includes only mankind and sometimes only the elect, opinion varied widely in Vaughan’s time, but that Vaughan’s position “is, surely, more extreme than that of any of the commentators.”43 Vaughan, like Milton, includes all species: animal, vegetable, and mineral. In “And do they so?” he asks “have they a sense / Of ought but influence?” and rejects the “volumes,” Aristotelian or mechanist, that did not attribute life to matter or soul to creatures other than man. In Vaughan’s reading, all created things “expect” the revelation and are surer than he is of liberation from the throes they share with fallen humanity: I would I were a stone, or tree, Or flower by pedigree, Or some poor high-way herb, or spring To flow, or bird to sing! Then should I (tied to one sure state,) All day expect my date; But I am sadly loose, and stray A giddy blast each way; Oh let me not thus range! Thou canst not change. Some rise to seek thee, and with heads Erect peep from their beds; Others, whose birth is in the tomb, And cannot quit the womb, Sigh there, and groan for thee, Their liberty.

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The idea that other creatures “watch”—stay awake and aware— while “I sleep, or play,” attributes consciousness and innocence to them; only man is morally corruptible and needs sterner measures. Following the logic of the first stanza, the creatures who “cannot quit the womb” are stones. Even they expect liberation at the renewal of all things when earth’s womb will no longer be rifled, sacred groves no longer violently hewn, the seed of all creatures preserved, water neither dammed nor polluted able to “pass / Fresh as the air, and clear as glass.” These poets’ imaginations participate in Arne Naess’s definition of the ecological self whose maturity is in its ability to identify with more and more kinds of life. As to the “pathetic fallacy,” Naess dismisses its common accusatory use with a comment closer to Ruskin’s counsel against the separation of objectivity from subjectivity practiced by solipsist philosophers. “Is joy in the subject?”—the subjective consciousness—Naess asks. “I would say No. It is just as much, or as little, in the object. The joy of a joyful tree is primarily “in” the tree we should say—if pressed to choose between the two possibilities. But we should not be pressed: there is a third position. The joy is a feature of the indivisible, concrete unit of subject, object and medium,” not located “inside my consciousness” but “an attribute of a reality wider than a conscious ego.” Naess’s philosophy is friendly to poetry because he sees intuition as a reliable faculty, the one that discerns unity between us and the rest of reality. “[I]t is unwarranted to believe that how we feel nature to be is not how nature really is. Rather, it is that reality is so rich that we cannot see everything at once.” In a secular age, even those who do not expect the revelation can work for a renewal of joy by renewing living habitats of water, wood, and stone.

NOTES 1. Magia Adamica: or, The Antiquitie of Magic, and the Descent thereof from Adam downwards, proved. Whereunto is added a perfect, and full Discoverie of the true Coelum Terrae, or the Magician’s Heavenly Chaos, and first Matter of all Things. By Eugenius Philalethes. London: T. W. for H. Blunden, 1650. In The Works of Thomas Vaughan, ed. Alan Rudrum with the assistance of Jennifer Drake-Brockman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 2. For a full discussion of the religious symbolism of water and the history of hydrology, see Donald R. Dickson, The Fountain of Living Waters : The Typology of the Waters of Life in Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne (Columbia : University of Missouri Press, 1987).

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3. Rudrum, “Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Book’: A Hermetic Poem.” Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 16 (1961): 161– 65. 4. See especially “Henry Vaughan, The Liberation of the Creatures, and Seventeenth-Century English Calvinism,” in The Seventeenth Century 4 (1989): 39–52. 5. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 111. 6. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon. (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 7. William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature [translated and adapted from the German of Walter Bauer] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). 8. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon. 9. Cudworth, True Intellectual System (London: Thomas Tegg, 1845 [1678]), 1.iii.145. 10. In The Second Wash: or The Moore Scour’d once more, . . . By Eugenius Philalethes (London, 1651), in Works, 408 11. The clearest statement of this principle is in Milton, Christian Doctrine, Yale Press vol. 6, bk 1, ch. 7, “Of the Creation”; cf. book 7 of Paradise Lost. 12. Alan Rudrum, ed. Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976). 13. Complete Poems, 641. 14. Rudrum, Henry Vaughan, Writers of Wales Series (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, on behalf of the Welsh Arts Council, 1981), 116–18. 15. Rudrum, Complete Poems, 641n. 16. Rudrum, “Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Book,’ ” 163–64. 17. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous : Perception and Language in a Morethan-Human World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1996), 9. 18. De Circulatione Sanguinis, 1649; Rogers, Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 22. 19. Post, “Henry Vaughan,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 260. 20. Jonathan Post traces the transcendentalizing tendency and points out some of its deficiencies in “Henry Vaughan”; George Parfitt, though recognizing his sense of identity with “organic nature,” finds that “the urge to pull clear of the dross of earthly life means that Vaughan, by definition, will show little interest in the ethical” and that his lyrics “reject the material world in favour of the transcendental” (statements with which Rudrum disagrees in both the natural and the political spheres) in “The Lyric,” in English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (London and New York: 1985), 50–51. 21. Rudrum, Henry Vaughan, 116. 22. Marjara, Contemplation of Created Things: Science in Paradise Lost (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 165. 23. Leonard, John Milton: Complete Poems (Penguin: London, New York, et al., 1998), 807, nn. 277 and 279. All quotations from Milton’s poems are taken

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from this edition. John Rogers interprets this passage as Earth giving birth to herself (Matter of Revolution, 115). 24. Purcell, Henry, and Nicholas Brady, Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day (1692), ed. Michael Tippett and Walter Bergmann (London: Schott, 1995). 25. Grew, The Anatomy of Vegetables Begun (London, 1672). 26. Grew, The Anatomy of Plants, London: W. Rawlins, 1682. Dedicatory Letter to Charles II. 27. Newcastle, Margaret. Philosophical and Physical Opinions. Written by the thrice noble, illustrious, and excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle (London: William Wilson, 1663), “To the Reader,” Signature Nnn2. 28. Gassendi, Syntagma philosophicum, “The Physics,” book 4. in Selected Works, ed and trans. Craig B. Brush (New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1972: 411–12; Fallon, 44. 29. Gassendi, “Physics,” quoted in Lisa T. Sarasohn, “Motion and Morality: Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes, and the Mechanical World-View,” Journal of the History of Ideas 46 (1985): 372. Quoted in Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, 43– 45. 30. Cavendish, Poems and Fancies: Written by the Right Honourable, The Lady Newcastle (London: Printed by T. R. for F. Martin, and F. Allestrye, 1653), 66–70. 31. Finch, The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, ed. Myra Reynolds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903), 266–67 32. Marvell, “Upon Appleton House,” stanza 71, in Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978). 33. Lycidas becomes “the Genius of the shore” who aids mariners in Lycidas, ll.183–85. 34. Plattes, A Discovery of Infinite Treasure (London, 1635), chap. 9. 35. Job denounces greed for gold in ch. 27 and mining in 28, which George Sandys renders in part “Men through the wounded Earth inforce their way . . . / While from her bowels they her Treasure teare,” in A Paraphrase vpon the Divine Poems (London, 1638), 34. 36. Boehrer, “Milton and the Reasoning of Animals: Variations on a Theme by Plutarch,” Milton Studies 39 (2000), 56. 37. Thomas Vaughan in Works, ed. Rudrum, 223. 38. Milton, Christian Doctrine, Yale Prose, vol. 6, bk 1, ch. 7, “Of the Creation,” 307–10, and Paradise Lost, 5.469–79. 39. Parry, Seventeenth-Century Poetry: The Social Context (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 101 and 107. 40. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 68. 41. Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum, or, A Natural History (London, 1664), 211. 42. Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, 106. 43. Rudrum, “The Liberation of the Creatures,” 46. See also “For then the Earth shall be all Paradise” in Scintilla 4 (2000).

Time and the Word: A Reading of Henry Vaughan’s “The Search” Matthias Bauer

ALAN RUDRUM, IN HIS STUDY OF HENRY VAUGHAN, POINTS OUT that “a good way of ending one’s reading of ‘The Search,’ and one that Vaughan obviously intended, is to ponder the meaning and relevance of the quotation from Acts 17:27–28 that Vaughan appends to it: That they should seek the Lord, if happily they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far off from every one of us, for in him we live, and move, and have our being. Another is to return to the beginning of the poem and read it as if it were the end, a suggestion which the reader may find strange, but which is perhaps fair enough if we recall that the poem, so much of which refers to the historical past, begins in the present tense.”1 In this essay, I would like to take up Rudrum’s suggestions but, as it were, begin where he ends. This is shown to be an appropriate way of proceeding by Rudrum himself who suggests that we consider the beginning of the poem as its possible ending and thus become aware of its circular structure. The quotation from Acts with which Vaughan’s poem ends may be said to provide its causa finalis, as it shows, for example, the search for the Lord to be the task of everyone. But what exactly is the “meaning and relevance” of this biblical text? Syntactically, it consists of a final clause (“That they . . .”) that depends on the previous verse and is followed by a dependent question (“if happily”),2 as well as a concessive clause (beginning with the adversative particle “though”), which refers either to the final clause or the dependent question (or to both) and which in turn is supplemented, in the next verse, by a causal clause (“for . . .”) explaining one or several or all of the preceding statements. The relationship between the four clauses thus appears to be a flexible or even somewhat ambiguous one, inviting interpretation. The context of the verses is St. Paul’s sermon on Mars’ hill to the men of Athens who are reproved for their superstition (Acts 17:22). 292

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Paul has noticed the altar they erected “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD” and offers to “declare” whom they “ignorantly worship” (17:23). He then goes on to explain to them that God “dwelleth not in temples made with hands” (17:24) nor “is worshipped with men’s hands, as though he needed any thing” but rather provides everything himself, giving “to all life, and breath” (17:25) and determining “the times before appointed” to men “and the bounds of their habitation” (17:26). Time and space are determined and limited in order to make humankind “seek the Lord”—this is at least what seems to me the most plausible reading of the final clause with which Vaughan’s quotation begins: “That they should seek the Lord. . . .” This construction—serving to emphasize that the very bounds of time and space make humankind seek God—is then completed by the concessive “though” clause; God appointed, as it were, a search, even though he has always been, or is already, present, for the searcher’s own life and movement take place (with)in the Lord. Thus Luke’s statement in the Authorized Version of Acts 17:27 (as well as in the Vulgate) is (at least latently) paradoxical: one is not to seek God because he is far away nor is one, haply, to find him because he is near but one is to seek and perhaps to find him although he is “not far off.”3 The paradox of searching and finding in Vaughan’s biblical motto may help us understand the remarkably circular nature of “The Search,”4 pointed out by Rudrum as the “second way of ending one’s reading” of it, namely “to return to the beginning of the poem and to read it as if it were the end.” This reading is suggested to Rudrum by the fact that the poem “begins in the present tense” even though so much of it “refers to the historical past.” And indeed the treatment of time (and concomitantly, space) attracts the reader’s attention: the predominant semantic field of traveling and pilgrimage, the striking sequence of tenses, the number of adverbs referring to place and time—all of which make it difficult to identify a clear temporal sequence in the speaker’s account. The temporal and spatial relations are striking in spite or because of the fact that the pilgrim or wanderer is Vaughan’s favorite poetic persona throughout Silex Scintillans;5 even more than other poems, “The Search” makes the reader wonder about the nature and goal of the journey and, accordingly, about the meaning of the poem itself. A reading that takes into account the ambivalence of these relations may also contribute to overcoming the critical impasse marked by the contradictory positions of Louis Martz and Anthony Low. The one considers the poem as “a highly original

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variation on the whole procedure of meditating on the life of Christ” and links it with the “Admonitions” regarding preparation for Communion in The Mount of Olives, whereas the other regards “The Search” and “Vanity of Spirit” as “rejections of meditation.”6 To Martz, the journey to the place of the Temple, where the speaker is shown only “A little dust” (l.16) suggests the human body and, accordingly, St. Paul’s “temple of the Spirit” (compare Acts 17:24): “It is within this ‘Temple’ that the Saviour will be found: not in the external places of his Incarnate manifestation.” He finds his interpretation confirmed by the first stanza of the song that forms the latter part of the poem (“Who pores / and spies / Still out of doors / descries / Within them nought” [ll.76– 80]). This “suggests that Christ is to be found within one’s self, hence the phrase, ‘Search well another world’ suggests the little world of man.” To Low, the poem cannot possibly be regarded as a genuine meditation since “Vaughan” (that is, the poet’s persona) “is always too late. . . . He works against the full meditative effect.” Referring to Martz, he points out that “the song seems to say that . . . one should search within. But in the context of the whole poem this reading does not hold, because searching within is precisely what Vaughan has done and is told to abandon.” To Low, in “The Search” God is neither found in external nature (the “skin and shell of things” [l.81]) nor by meditating. He considers “The Search” as a rejection of meditation from a mystical point of view; the poet is to seek “another world, totally divorced from the knowable and imaginable.” To take this view, however, means rejecting the clarity and evidence of the beginning, for at this point the end seems obvious: ’Tis now clear day: I see a Rose Bud in the bright East, and disclose The Pilgrim-Sun;7 (ll.1–3)

The speaker makes his listeners or readers immediately share his experience. We witness with him the moment of daybreak, the “beautiful now” (in the words of Bach’s cantata),8 which is, or seems to be, Christ himself, made manifest by the Rose, the symbol of Mary9 and the Church,10 which discloses him. “A Rose” itself, in a pun familiar from George Herbert’s “The Rose,” is a reference to the risen Christ, whose disclosure thus implies both his birth and his resurrection. The “Pilgrim-Sun,” as Louis Martz has pointed out, coincides with Vaughan’s notion of Jesus as a pilgrim and searcher in his Mount of Olives.11 Thus, when the speaker, in line 3, begins to describe his search for Jesus during

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the preceding night, he has already established a link in the form of likeness or imitation: “all night have I / Spent in a roving ecstasy / To find my Saviour” (ll.3–5). At this point, Rudrum’s conclusion (implicitly confirming Martz’s reading) is entirely plausible: “the way in which the poem begins entitles us perhaps to think of it as emotion recollected in tranquility or at all events as an account of a search of which the object has been attained.”12 When Vaughan’s persona is speaking or writing he is, as it appears, in view of the Savior—and what lies behind him, as we learn from his ensuing speech, is the desire to reach that very moment. But this clarity begins to disappear when one reads on. The account of the speaker’s “roving ecstasy” is first given in the present perfect (“all night have I / Spent . . .” [ll.3– 4]; “I have been / As far as Bethlem, and have seen / His inn . . .” [ll.5–7]) and then in the past tense (“I met the wise-men, asked them . . .” [l.8]). But the following indirect question only begins in the past tense (“where / He might be found” [ll.8–9]) and then switches to the present (“or what star can / Now point him out, grown up a Man?” [ll.9–10]). This could of course be explained as a shift from an indirect to a direct question (“I asked them: what star can now point him out?”) and may be motivated by the rhyme but especially since it is closely linked paratactically to the indirect question by means of “or” the shift of tenses also implies a reference to the present day of the speaker. The question may have been asked during the night that lies behind him, but it nevertheless still seems to be current, as is emphasized by the prominent position of the word “Now” at the beginning of the line, which links up with the first “now” of “ ’Tis now clear day” (l.1). The second now implies a temporal distance: even though the speaker returns to the place of Christ’s birth, he does not find him there as a child. He knows that he is “grown up a Man” (l.10). This would mean that the “Now” in line 10 refers to the time of the adult Jesus, to which the speaker has imaginatively returned and when he makes a journey to the places of Christ’s childhood and youth. At any rate there is both a link and a tension between the two moments indicated by now in lines 1 and 10: both are distant from the time of Jesus’ birth; but whereas the first now refers to the actual but symbolical presence of Christ in the “Rose” and the “Pilgrim-Sun,” the second one refers to the historical person of Christ who is known to exist but is never actually met. In spite of his knowledge (that Jesus is now “grown up a Man”), the speaker did not stop looking for Jesus as a child since—now again in the past tense—he says, “To Egypt hence I fled” (l.11).

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He follows the Savior’s tracks, moving both backward in time (from his present day to Bethlehem where the wise men are still to be found) and forward, following the course of Jesus’ life. This double movement is not entirely unlike the one in Vaughan’s “The Retreat,” in which the speaker “long[s] to travel back” (l.21) only to move forward once again with the child (“And tread again that ancient track!” [l.22]). In “The Search,” however, it is even more complex and involved. According to Matthew (2:12–13 AV), the wise men departed to their own country before Joseph was told in a dream to flee to Egypt but for Vaughan’s speaker the sequence seems reversed. Another aspect of time is introduced by the journey to Egypt: the natural cycle of fertility represented by the Nile as Egypt’s “yearly nurse” (l.13). And when the speaker returns, continuing his past tense account, he finds the “doctors” but not the Temple where “Christ as a boy had been found ‘both hearing them, and asking them questions’ (Luke 2:46).”13 This implies further levels of time. The doctors are still there, a fact that might coincide with the time of Jesus “grown up a Man” but the destruction of the Temple and of Jerusalem means that the speaker in his “roving ecstasy” comes there after AD 70 and/or AD 135,14 long after Jesus’ historical presence as a grown man. The doctors thus blend with later ones, such as the Doctors of the Church who, temporally speaking, are found between Vaughan’s own days and the days of the New Testament. This casts some light on the hysteron proteron of the wise men, too: like the doctors they are latter-day guides in the speaker’s search for Jesus. The first section of the poem (up to line 20) is concluded by yet another temporal perspective: a surmise in the past (“some said” [l.17]) concerning a future event (“Which would one day” [l.19]), which even from the present-day speaker’s point of view is only to be hoped for: the moment when all shall be restored (“Awake, and then refine the whole” [l.20]).15 Having thus spanned the past and the future, the speaker in line 21 reverts to the present tense, but there is no doubt that he is still giving an account of his nightly journey rather than his present state: “Tired here, I come to Sychar; thence / To Jacob’s well” (ll.21–22). Tense and time nevertheless agree, for the first use of the historical present16 in the poem goes along with a specific way of making the past present on the level of content: Sychar and Jacob’s well are places Jesus visited (according to John 4:5–6, “wearied with his journey,” just as the speaker is tired) in order to show the typological fulfillment of the Old Testa-

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ment by the New: the well of Jacob turning into, or being replaced by, “a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:14). Donald Dickson has pointed out that Vaughan’s searcher “does not find Christ at Jacob’s well,” for “he has not yet understood the full importance of Christ as the antitype to such promissory events.”17 The typological link is expressly evoked, though, when the speaker exclaims, “and here (O fate!) / I sit, where once my Saviour sate” (ll.27–28); but he cannot close the temporal gap between the moment of typological fulfillment in Christ and his own visit. The gap is felt especially since the historical present of “I come” is now the present of “I sit” and thus provides yet another moment at which the past events of the night and the present situation of the speaker are beginning to merge. This is underlined by “here,” the equivalent of the “now” with which the poem begins. This moment is framed by a reference to Jacob’s sons (l.23) and to his children (l.32), whose temporal relation to the past and present experience of the wanderer is quite complex. When the speaker tells us that he came to Jacob’s well, which was “bequeathed since / Unto his sons” (ll.22–23), one may assume that his temporal journey actually brought him all the way back to the days of Jacob but that he knows what happened since; the “golden evenings” (l.24) of Jacob’s sons would therefore belong to the period between his journey and his account of it. But when he sits “where once [his] Saviour sate” (l.28), we realize that he has come there at a much later time; he learns that “Jesus had been there, / But Jacob’s children would not hear” (ll.31–32). While the Patriarchs’ (Jacob’s sons’) “days” were “white” (l.26),18 a very similarly named group of persons, “Jacob’s children” (l.32), rendered Christ’s presence futile since they rejected his word. The explanation of his absence is not given by wise men, doctors, or anonymous voices but, characteristically, by the voice of nature.19 The well itself whispers the truth; it provides a continuum between all the temporal and historical levels evoked and turns “Jacob’s children” into a comprehensive name that includes the wanderer and his contemporaries.20 If the typological fulfillment of the Old Testament by the New Testament remains fruitless, this is due to the failure of the latter counterparts of Jacob’s sons. This is especially painful since, in Sir Thomas Browne’s words, we, who may contemplate the localities of Christ’s life and death, have our faith “thrust upon” us: “Nor is this much to beleeve, as we have reason, we owe this faith unto History: they only had the advantage of a bold and noble faith, who lived before his comming, who upon obscure prophesies and mysticall Types

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could raise a beliefe, and expect apparent impossibilities.”21 The sighs of the well, reminiscent of the little fountain and the “music of her tears” (l.52) in “Regeneration,” give the speaker insight in the reason of his failure and make him wish to linger, to dwell on his feeling of nostalgic mournfulness. Jacob’s sons are to be envied for they could still “expect apparent impossibilities” but his latter children do not even have the excuse of lacking historical evidence for their faith. The voice of nature is not the end of the speaker’s quest, but neither is it left behind for he takes it with him when he rises “with the fountain” in his “eyes” (l.34). The whole poem could be read as an attempt to reestablish the full impact of believing in spite or even because of the fact that history does not give any certainty: certum est quia impossibile est [it is certain because it is impossible], as Browne in the same section quotes the famous dictum from Tertullian’s De carne Christi. In the following lines the time of the search is again indicated by the historical present that once more links up with the time of the opening lines by means of the deictic conjunction “here”: “And here a fresh search is decreed / He must be found, where he did bleed” (ll.35–36). The speaker must not sit still; he receives orders to go on, even though the ensuing search of the garden and the cross will only provide him with “Ideas of his agony” (l.38) rather than the “Corner-stone” (l.48), that is, Christ himself. The account here reverts to the past tense (“I climbed the hill, perused the cross” [l.41]) and leads up to a direct speech made by the wanderer in the past: “Sure (then said I,) my quest is vain, / He’ll not be found, where he was slain” (ll.49–50). Arriving there at a vaguely indicated period of history, the cross is still to be seen and interpreted emblematically as a pair of scales “Hung with my gain, and his great loss” (l.42) but, since the Crucifixion itself is past, Christ is gone. If we try to integrate the direct speech of lines 49 to 66 into the temporal structure of the whole poem, we meet a present speaker who reports the events of the preceding night in which he presents himself as a speaker describing his further plans. This temporal construction is further established by lines 67–68, which also refer to the speaker in the preceding night rather than the present one who begins the poem (“But as I urged thus, and writ down / What pleasures should my journey crown” [ll.67–68]). The direct speech itself (lines 53 to 66), however, again reaches out to several temporal levels at once. It points to the future (“I’ll to the wilderness” [l.53]) but it is again the past that motivates

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the speaker, for “He lived there safe, ’twas his retreat” (l.55). On the level of biblical history, Vaughan’s searcher does not go on22 after the Crucifixion to the Resurrection but goes back to the time immediately after Jesus’ baptism when he was “led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil” (Matt. 4:1). He deliberately seems to leave out Easter and only speaks of it, as it were, unawares when he sees “a Rose / Bud in the bright East” (ll.1–2). The wilderness seems to be especially congenial to the speaker’s desire, as he remembers that Christ transformed the desert by his presence, and with his eyes, Made those wild shades a Paradise, Thus was the desert sanctified To be the refuge of the bride; (ll.61–64)

This future heaven (“I’ll to . . .”), imagined in the past (“said I”) and prepared (“Made”) at a far earlier time is then enthusiastically envisaged with words echoing those with which the poem begins: “see, it is day, / The sun’s broke through to guide my way” (ll.65–66). The poet here suggests an identity of times, a logical impossibility, after having established their difference. Does the poet’s persona, during his journey in the night, imagine the morning which actually comes when the poem begins and when he starts remembering the journey? Or has he, in a kind of Moebiusstrip reversal, actually left behind the “roving ecstasy” and reached the moment of line 1 again? If this is the case, the time when the poem is supposed to be written or spoken is not then the present of the beginning but comes later, for the exclamation of lines 65–66 is clearly fixed in the past: “But as I urged thus, and writ down / What pleasures should my journey crown” (ll.67–68). The speaker envisages the transformed wilderness as a kind of locus amoenus, a happy place, the end or “crown” (l.68) of his journey where he “should rove” (l.71) but, it seems, never wishes to leave for he is content with the knowledge of Christ’s past presence. It is an imagined or wildly anticipated paradise of nostalgia and thus as dangerous or illusionary as Herbert’s “Paradise” would be without the presence of the strict gardener. He imagines a place of rest, where the journey, in a phrase ringing with etymological irony, is sugared with “success.”23 The success is only a sugarcoat, however, for as the speaker’s ambiguous syntax suggests, the “sugaring” might be due to the speaker himself (or his pleasures) rather than the Lord:

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I should rove in, and rest my head Where my dear Lord did often tread, Sugaring all dangers with success, (ll.71–73)

The traditional “sweetness” of the Passion24 is thus brought dangerously close to the “sugared lies” of Herbert’s “The Rose”; the passionate search threatens to be turned into something like an enthusiastic religious archeologist’s and nature lover’s success story. But the poem does not end there. After the wise men (l.8), and the doctors (l.14), and the rumors, (l.17), and the whispering well (l.31), and the anonymous decree (l.35) there is yet another voice heard by the speaker that urges him onward, in contrast to the speaker’s own voice in lines 49 to 66 that urges him to go to the wilderness and stay there: “Me thought I heard one singing thus” (l.74). The similarity to the final call in Herbert’s “The Collar”25 reinforces the impression that this is a divine voice. It is hardly to be located within the intricate poetic texture of times and tenses. Strictly (that is, grammatically) speaking, the song either belongs to the past and is sung before the speaker sees the “Rose / Bud in the bright East” (ll.1–2); or, if the morning is the same as the one in lines 65–66, it is sung later and remembered after the event. The implication of this ambivalent relation of tenses for the meaning of the poem is mainly that in the first case the speaker actually attains his goal (in terms of symbol and metaphor), whereas in the second he remains a searcher, driven by the (present) imperatives with which the song begins and ends: “Leave, leave, thy gadding thoughts” (l.75) and “Search well another world; who studies this, / Travels in clouds, seeks manna, where none is” (ll.95–96). But it seems the very point of Vaughan’s ambivalence as regards grammatical tenses to make us realize the limits of temporal logic itself when it comes to him who “hath determined the times before appointed” (Acts 17:26). The point is confirmed by the fact that the temporal ambivalence which comes to the fore in the first part of the poem is complemented by a spatial one that is especially prominent in the song. Of course, the many adverbs and pronouns of place in the first part (“here,” “there,” “where,” “thither”) and the references to time in the song (“still,” “old”) qualify this distinction, but while the complicated relations of time are highlighted in the first part, spatial relationship is emphasized in the song. A visible indica-

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tion of this is the different layout of the lines with their alternating lengths. The striking spatial ambivalence of the song seems to be one of the reasons for the conflicting readings of the poem by Martz and Low, but it may also help us realize that both readings fall somewhat short of its complexity.26 The first imperative tells the speaker to “Leave, leave,” that is, to go on but leave behind him the misdirected movement of the gadding thoughts, the imaginary success of a desert-turned-paradise. This inside is in fact no inside at all as it consists of thoughts that make the speaker stray abroad; moreover, the temporal adverb “Still” (l.78), which here primarily means always,27 should be taken into account, too. The voice thus does not reject the outside world in general but rather the permanent, exclusive mental devotion to it. “Still out of doors” refers to the wilderness as the outside par excellence, which the speaker regards as the end of his journey (“What pleasures should my journey crown” [l.68]) even though Christ himself, as a closer look at his Word might have told him and as the very fact of his absence might have made him remember, only stayed there for a period of forty days. The voice reminds the speaker (and the reader) of Christ by the very words chosen to instruct him, for the “doors” within which he is told to look point to him who said “I am the door” (John 10:9) and in whom, as the epigraph explains, “we live, and move, and have our being.”28 “Still out of doors” could thus well refer to a kind of introspection and meditation that remains outside Christ. The outside in a slightly different sense is referred to again by “The skin, and shell of things” (l.81) in the second stanza of the song, but this shell is, remarkably, not contrasted with a core or kernel but with “wings” (l.87), instruments that may carry the addressee swiftly to further regions rather than inside. Again a biblical reference, which links up the words of the song with the very wilderness the speaker is told to leave, makes clear that outside may well become inside and vice versa. The “mere despair / of wings” (ll.86–87) that makes the speaker consider the “skin, and shell of things” refers to Revelation 12, which was already evoked by the speaker’s memory of Christ sanctifying the desert by his stay so that it could become “the refuge of his bride” (l.64). This is the “woman clothed with the sun” (Rev. 12:1), a mystical image of the mother of God who, pursued by the dragon, “fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God” (12:6) and who is “given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nour-

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ished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent” (12:14, italics added). The reference to the wings thus implies a mysterious reference to time as well, reminding the reader of time as the essential condition of the speaker’s search (who moves in time but is never in time for Jesus), as it is reflected by the complex structure of tenses and times in the first part of the poem. The advice of the song does not reject either inside or outside or both but warns against an outside incapable of becoming another inside and vice versa. This can also be seen in the last stanza of the song. Christ cannot be forced to stay in the material remnants of the past (“old elements / or dust” ll.88–89), for this would mean consigning him to a historical “reality” that turns out to be a cloud-cuckoo-land. To be in this world means to be outside it, “in clouds”—which is just another word for being inside a fantasy world of one’s own invention.29 Accordingly, the voice decrees “Search well another world” (l.95)—not the little world of man, as Martz assumes, but the “country / Far beyond the stars” (ll.1–2), as Vaughan calls it in “Peace,” a poem in which the soul is told, very much like the speaker of “The Search”: “Leave then thy foolish ranges” (l.17). Verbal echo gives a hint as to how this new journey is to be undertaken: “Search well another world.” This connects with earlier uses of “well” in the poem: “Jacob’s well,” where in the “white days” (l.26) his sons drove home “Their well-fleeced train” (l.27). To the wanderer, this is a speaking well, which reminds him that “Jacob’s children would not hear” (l.32) God’s word. The speaker is told to “search well” rather than be content with the “hallowed wells” (l.70) of a landscape visited as a nostalgic touristpilgrim. The implicit reference to the word of God as the world to be studied instead of “this” one is confirmed by the search for “manna” (l.96), which, like the wings, once more refers to the wilderness.30 In Matthew’s account, Jesus is tempted by the devil to turn stones into bread. Jesus’ well-known answer (“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” [Matt. 4:4; compare Luke 4:4]) typologically refers to the manna given to Israel in the desert, a connection already made in the verse from Deuteronomy (8:3) quoted by Jesus. Thus God’s word is the true end of the search, just as his Word, preached by St. Paul, is the end of “The Search” as it consists in the epigraph from Acts 17. The function of the wilderness in the “The Search” becomes a little clearer when we look at a poem which is in many ways

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congenial with it (published twenty-one years after the first part of Silex Scintillans) and in which Jesus himself is shown to identify the desert of Exodus 16 with the place of his temptation: Man lives not by bread only, but each word Proceeding from the mouth of God; who fed Our fathers here with manna;31 (Paradise Regained, 1.349–51)

In Paradise Regained, Jesus’ time in the wilderness (rather than his death and resurrection) is presented as the eschatological counterpart to the Fall. It is almost as if Milton had shared the speaker’s view in “The Search” who does not think he can find the Savior “where he was slain” (l.50) but rather where he “Made those wild shades a Paradise” (l.62) or, in Milton’s words, “And Eden raised in the waste wilderness” (1.7). This is a place where he is “with dark shades and rocks environed round” (1.194) and where, to Christ in his “holy meditations” (1.195) inside and outside interact.32 The lesson to be derived from this, however, is not an encouragement to dwell on fantasies of a wilderness transformed into a locus amoenus but to realize that the bewildering experience of time was shared by Christ himself. To be in time, tempus, means to be subjected to temptation. As Milton’s Christ says to his tempter (4.174 –75): “But I endure the time, till which expir’d / Thou hast permission on me.”33 Vaughan’s speaker is tempted by a vision of Paradise Regained not at all unlike the tempting vision presented to Jesus by Satan. The shades are turned into Eden, however, and the (temporal) word points to the Word because Christ voluntarily endured (the) time. The danger from which Vaughan’s speaker is rescued by the singing voice34 is his desire to indulge in a vision which, though it formally gives credit to the “dear Lord,” runs the risk of turning the speaker into one of those men who “in themselves seek virtue” (Paradise Regained 4.314), and instead of “True wisdom” (4.319) only meet “An empty cloud” (4.321; compare “The Search”: “Travels in clouds” [l.96]). In “Vanity of Spirit” Vaughan’s speaker comes to realize that he can only catch a “little light” (l.28) before death; unlike the broken letters met within the heart in Herbert’s “JESU” the hieroglyphics of the Lord’s name cannot be puzzled out in this life. As “The Search” makes clear, however, the very process indicates a necessity: to live means to search and to realize the vanity of one’s insight, that is, of one’s own spirit but nevertheless to go on searching “another world.”

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Though the search may go on, however—and this is where the “beautiful now” is to be considered once again—living in time means to begin. In “The Search,” as in Paradise Regained, the focus is on Christ as “our morning star, then in his rise” (1.294). Milton chooses the beginning of Christ’s public course of life as the epitome of his redemptive act of obedience, his humbly becoming a human being. This is the moment when he “no more should live obscure, / But openly begin” (1.287–88). Milton’s Christ at this point knows “the time / Now full” (1.286–87), and even Satan realizes that “Now at full age, fulness of time” the prophecies of Christ are “best fulfilled” (4.380–81). The endurance of time by Christ is the paradoxical reason why the erring, tempted human wanderer may become Christlike, that is, like the “Pilgrim-Sun.” They share the now, the moment of sunrise, which like the dawn in Augustine’s famous meditation on time (Confessiones 11.18.24) enables the onlooker to predict the future rise of the sun (which itself does not belong to the future but already is), a prediction impossible “nisi animo imaginarer,” if one did not possess a mental image of it, that is, impossible without the presence of a past moment.35 The end of the search, as well as the reason for its repetition, is thus to be found in the now as the kind of religious carpe diem demanded in “The Check”: “play not away / Thy glimpse of light” (ll.23–24). The coexistence of the presence of the past, the present and the future in this moment is, in the Augustinian pattern, “a reflection of the simultaneous presence of all ‘timeless moments’ in the Divine Mind.”36 In “The Search” the relationship of temporal image and eternal presence is ambivalent: introspection and mental pictures are necessary, but they may tempt into a vanity of spirit; the past is the record of Jesus’ enduring time as a man but being fixed on the remnants of the past means being preoccupied with “The skin, and shell of things”; the mental or imaginary may thus turn out to be merely material. But the reverse is also true: the speaker’s movement proves to be a perfectly circular one when he comes to say “see, it is day” both in the past and the present; he has to begin again and again but this very beginning is an image of Christ who is symbolized by the morning sun. In terms of letters, “old elements” (l.88) or (as in “Vanity of Spirit”) “broken letters scarce remembered” (l.24), “being” is a re-ordering or a remembering of “begin.” In this sense, the ending of the poem, the quotation from Acts 17, which ends with the word “being,” is its true beginning. The paradox of having to search for the Lord although he is not far off is thus mimetically (or iconically) repre-

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sented and enacted (rather than expressly reflected) in the poem. Its scintillating grammar itself imitates its biblical motto. Within “the time before appointed” to him (Acts 17:26) the speaker lives and moves and writes in search of the Lord and thus gives evidence of what Luke’s text says, that he has his being in the Word.

NOTES 1. Alan Rudrum, Henry Vaughan (Cardiff: University of Wales Press on behalf of the Welsh Arts Council, 1981), 74. 2. If is here to be regarded as a synonym of whether; see OED “if ” 9. and “whether” II. conj. 4. “Happily” is used in the archaic sense “1. By chance; perchance; = HAPLY.” 3. The Vulgate also has a concessive clause: “quamvis non longe sit ab unoquoque nostrum” [which the Douai-Rheims translation of the Vulgate renders as “although he be not far from every one of us”]. Luther seems to eliminate the concession and thus the paradox (“Und zwar er ist nicht ferne von einem jeglichen unter uns” [“and in fact he is not far from any one among us”]), in accordance with what today is accepted as the standard Greek version (“kaiv ge ouj makra;n ajpo; eJno;" eJkavstou hJmw'n uJpavrconta”). Erwin Nestle and Kurt Aland, ed., Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine, 23rd ed. (Stuttgart: W¨urttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1963), note a Greek variant, however, which has the adversative particle kaitoi instead of kaiv ge and on which the AV translation is obviously based. The Vulgate and the Authorized Version thus seem to give evidence to a certain similarity of the biblical verse to the classical topos of nosce teipsum (as in the last two lines of Herbert’s “Content”): what is right next to the seeker is most difficult to find. 4. Circles are of course to be found throughout Silex Scintillans, such as the circle of human life in the speaker’s desire to become a child again (“Childhood”), the circle of doing “what was done before” by Christ (“The Hidden Treasure” l.2) or the circle of sin and repentance within “this round of life and death” (“Repentance” l.73); moreover, Vaughan’s poems are frequently circular in that the ending repeats or echoes the beginning (e.g., in “Righteousness” or “Quickness”). The specific way in which the circularity of the poem enacts the circularity of the subject in “The Search” will be discussed here. 5. See Inge Leimberg, “Heilig o¨ ffentlich Geheimnis”: Die geistliche Lyrik der englischen Fruhaufkl ¨ arung ¨ (Munster: ¨ Waxmann, 1996), 404 –15, especially 410–12 on the characteristic “here-and-now” of Vaughan’s pilgrim-speaker and the pattern of the searching wanderer as the successor of the Fathers in Hebrews 11. I am grateful to Inge Leimberg for a number of suggestions and in particular for the critical discussion that made me reconsider the representation of time in “The Search.” 6. For these and the following quotations see Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 85, 88, 90; and Anthony Low, Love’s Architecture: Devotional Modes in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 183–88. Low’s view seems to be shared by Stevie Davies, Henry Vaughan (Bridgend: Seren, 1995), 157, whose main emphasis, however, is on a political interpretation of lines 16–20.

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7. Silex Scintillans is quoted from Alan Rudrum’s edition of Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983). L. C. Martin’s edition of The Works of Henry Vaughan, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), has also been consulted throughout. 8. See the recitativo “Mein Gott! Wann kommt das sch¨one: Nun!” [My God! When does it come, the beautiful: now!] from his cantata no. 82, BWV 82 (“Ich habe genug”); cf. Christiane Lang-Graumann, Counting Ev’ry Grain: Das Motiv des Allerkleinsten in George Herberts “The Temple” (Munster: ¨ Waxmann, 1997), 207n14. Horace H. Underwood, “Time and Space in the Poetry of Vaughan,” Studies in Philology 69 (1972): 234 –35, points out the significance of “the point of contact between time and eternity, the Day of Judgment, symbolized by dawn” in Vaughan. George Herbert expressed the idea of a momentary vision paradigmatically in “The Glimpse”: “Whither away delight? / Thou cam’st but now; wilt thou so soon depart, / And give me up to night?” (ll.1–3). See LangGraumann, 203–68; especially 207–09 and 218–25 on the traditional theological interpretation of the moment (from Augustine to Nicholas of Cusa) which has its biblical origin in the account of the walk to Emmaus and the momentary opening of the disciples’ eyes (Luke 24:30–31). 9. Noted with regard to “The Search” by Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, 87. 10. Cf. Song of Solomon 2:1, “I am the rose of Sharon,” traditionally interpreted as a typological reference to the Church. Martz also points out that Vaughan twice refers to Christ as the “Rose of Sharon” in his Communion meditations (The Poetry of Meditation, 87). 11. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation 87; Martin, ed., The Works of Henry Vaughan, 161. 12. Rudrum, Henry Vaughan, 75. 13. See Rudrum’s note on l.14 of “The Search.” 14. See Rudrum’s note on ll.15–16 of “The Search.” 15. Cf. Rudrum’s note comparing “The Book,” ll.25–27. 16. On the historical present see Wilhelm Franz, Die Sprache Shakespeares in Vers und Prosa: Shakespeare-Grammatik, 4th ed. (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1939), 516–18 (§ 633–34), and N. F. Blake, A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 109 (4.3.2). 17. Donald R. Dickson, The Fountain of Living Waters: The Typology of the Waters of Life in Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 141. 18. On the typological and historical meaning of Jacob for Vaughan, see the chapter “Patriarchs and Pilgrims” in Philip West, Henry Vaughan’s “Silex Scintillans”: Scripture Uses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 25–62. 19. Cf. Rudrum’s observations on the relationship of historical and natural reference in the poem (Henry Vaughan, 73). The example of the whispering spring shows, however, that the natural reference already belongs to the first part of the poem and not only, as Rudrum suggests, to the lyric that forms its second part. 20. Thus I would qualify the statement in John R. Mulder, The Temple of the Mind: Education and Literary Taste in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Pegasus, 1969), 148: “But God resides no longer in the typical places of His grace; the temple is ‘a little dust,’ and Jacob’s well ‘an angry Spring.’ The types have been discarded, because the promise implied in them has been fulfilled.”

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The Spring has not been discarded because it is “angry” but it is angry because no one listens to what the Lord says. 21. Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici and other Works, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), 10 (1.9). 22. Cf. Rudrum: “The reader will notice that the chronological scheme . . . is broken at the point where the poet decides I’ll to the wilderness” (Henry Vaughan, 72). 23. OED “success” n.: “†1.a. That which happens in the sequel; the termination (favourable or otherwise) of affairs . . .” (last example 1733). On the speaker’s error in seeking “success” see Leimberg, 460. E. C. Pettet, Of Paradise and Light: A Study of Vaughan’s “Silex Scintillans” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 113, points out the significance of “the interpolated lines 47– 48 from the translation of Ovid’s De Ponto, lib. 3” for lines 69–70 of “The Search”: “These errors grieve: and now I must forget / Those pleased ideas I did frame and set / Unto my self, with many fancied springs / and groves, whose only loss new sorrow brings” (ll.45– 48). 24. On the sweetness of the Passion and related ideas of divine sweetness, see Friedrich Ohly, Susse ¨ Nagel ¨ der Passion: Ein Beitrag zur theologischen Semantik (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1989). His analysis is based mainly on patristic and medieval sources. 25. Pointed out by Martin, ed., The Works of Henry Vaughan, 730. 26. When Louis Martz explains the speaker’s desire to go to the wilderness as a search for solitude which “becomes the symbol for the spiritual retirement of the soul (the bride of Christ) in its devotions,” he does not seem to take into account that the singing voice rejects the speaker’s imaginary retreat and tells him to leave his “gadding thoughts” (The Poetry of Meditation, 89). And when Anthony Low reads the poem as a double rejection of looking for God in external nature and in “the world within” (Love’s Architecture, 187) he does not seem to consider that the singing voice reminds the speaker of the fact that he “Who pores / and spies / Still out of doors / descries / Within them nought” (ll.76–80). Moreover, the verb “descries,” which denotes visual perception, hardly suggests “the imageless world of the via negativa” (Love’s Architecture, 183, a notion that in itself seems problematic). 27. OED 3.a. Obs. exc. poet. 28. Cf. Vaughan’s “Retirement”: “Up then, and keep / Within those doors, (my doors) dost hear? I will” (ll.54 –55). 29. Cf. OED “cloud” 9. a. and b. (where “in the clouds” is glossed as “Obscure, mystical; fanciful, unreal”). 30. The connection is underscored by the fact that the poem at this final stage, after the embracing and alternating rhymes and varying line lengths of the song, returns to the rhyming couplet, albeit in pentameter rather than tetrameter lines, which were used in the first part. The special character of the final couplet is also emphasized by the fact that whereas in the first two stanzas of the song, there is an embracing rhyme formed by the first and last lines of each stanza, this pattern is given up in the third stanza where the first line (“To rack old elements”) is without rhyme. There is an irony in this: the “old elements,” referring to elementary nature as well as to letters (OED “element” 14.a.) are—as the final couplet points out—to be replaced by the other world of God and his word. “Elements” moreover, provide a hint to the Eucharist (OED “element” 3.), which is then taken up by the reference to manna.

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31. Quoted from John Carey’s edition of Milton’s Complete Shorter Poems (London: Longman, 1981). 32. Cf. 1.196–98: “O what a multitude of thoughts at once / Awakened in me swarm, while I consider / What from within I feel myself, and hear / What from without comes often to my ears.” 33. For the paronomastic field including tempus and temptation, see, for example, Paradise Regained, 2.378: “To whom thus Jesus temperately replied” or 2.404 –8: “Only th’ importune tempter still remained / And with these words his temptation pursued. / By hunger, that each other creature tames, / Thou art not harmed, therefore not moved; / Thy temperance invisible besides.” For the notion of time in Paradise Regained, see, for example, 3.182–83, echoing Ecclesiastes 3:1: “All things are best fulfilled in their due time, / And time there is for all things.” 34. For the divine call that intervenes, cf. Paradise Regained 3.433–35: “Yet he at length, time to himself best known, / Rememb’ring Abraham by some wondrous call / May bring them back repentant and sincere.” 35. See also the comprehensiveness of the now in 11.20: “tempora ‘sunt’ tria, praesens de praeteritis, praesens de praesentibus, praesens de futuris” [there are three times: a present of past things, a present of present things, and a present of future things] in Aurelius Augustinus, Confessiones: Lateinisch und Deutsch, ed. Joseph Bernhart (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984). 36. C. A. Patrides, “The Renaissance of the Renaissance: T. S. Eliot and the Pattern of Time,” The Michigan Quarterly Review 12 (1973): 192. See also LangGraumann, 219–22; Louis Martz, The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 17–31, discusses Vaughan’s “Augustinian Quest”; his general statement, “the way home lies through an interior ascent,” however, has to be qualified in the light of “The Search.”

Henry Vaughan’s Poems of Mourning Alan Rudrum

FESTSCHRIFTEN

ARE ESSENTIALLY ELEGIAC ENTERPRISES, NOT customarily offered to “the forward youth that would appear.” Mixed emotions are likely to be felt: in this case pleasure and gratitude most certainly, but also a melancholy sense of “the lyf so short, the art so hard to learn,” and of having left undone those things that ought to have been done. So when it was kindly suggested that I might contribute an essay, a consideration of Henry Vaughan’s poems of mourning seemed both timely and appropriate. Vaughan has been a constant “significant other” to me for fifty years, on three continents, through the vicissitudes of an entire adult life. It seems right, then, on this occasion, to think of his meditations on his significant others, in his poems of mourning. No other period of English literature has surpassed the poems of mourning of the early seventeenth century; and while most readers will doubtless feel that no one poem of Vaughan’s can challenge King’s “Exequy” or Milton’s “Lycidas,” few other poets of the period produced so large a body of splendid verse in that kind as he did. The literature on poems of mourning is extensive, and accustomed as one has become to the comparative neglect of Vaughan by many who regard themselves as specialists in the literature of his period, it still came as a surprise to discover that his work is scarcely mentioned in it.1 In this paper I consider Vaughan’s poems of mourning in the light of conventions of funeral practices, mourning, and the poetics of elegy. After a brief discussion of context, I shall turn to a few poems of mourning from Olor Iscanus (1651) and Thalia Rediviva (1678), before passing on to Silex Scintillans, first published in 1650, and reissued, with a new preface and additional poems, in 1655. In the literature on poems of mourning we soon encounter statements about the transition from medieval to early modern and modern thinking about death. The important distinction is,

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as so often, articulated by Shakespeare. In Hamlet (1.2.72 ff.) Gertrude says to her son: Thou know’st ’tis common: all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity. Hamlet. Ay, madam, it is common. Gertrude. If it be, Why seems it so particular with thee?2

Hamlet’s grief for a particular person, as opposed to Gertrude’s view of the commonality of death, is what is regarded as modern. The exchange, involving the distinction between death perceived as the common experience and death thought of in reference to the particularity and uniqueness of the deceased, sums up what scholars have written of the difference between mediaeval and modern ways of thinking about death. This particular distinction is regarded as a constant in postmediaeval thought, in both Protestant and Catholic contexts.3 Within reformed typology, according to Arnold Stein, the correlative to this interest in the individual death was to see the company of the dead, not as an indiscriminate throng under a compulsion leveled upon them, but as a select community of the faithful.4 Or as Vaughan was to put it, “They are that City’s shining spires / We travel to.”5 One question we can put to Vaughan’s poems of mourning, then, is how do they correspond to this distinction? In addition to the written evidence for a major shift in attitude, there is the physical evidence provided by burial customs. Phillipe Aries points out that “in the Middle Ages the dead were entrusted to or rather abandoned to the care of the Church, and the exact location of their place of burial was of little importance, most often being indicated neither by a monument nor even by a simple inscription.”6 He suggests that “the spectacle of the dead, whose bones were always being washed up to the surface of the cemeteries, as was the skull in Hamlet, made no more impression upon the living than did the idea of their own death. They were as familiar with the dead as . . . with the idea of their own death” (24 –25). We might contrast this with Vaughan’s poem “The Charnel-House” in which what is presented is clearly a scene of horror. In the early modern period there is a more pronounced concern for marking the site of the tomb. Nevertheless Aries considers that “the pious or melancholy visit to the tomb of a dear one” was still “an unknown act” (69). But clearly it was not unknown to Vaughan, who writes: I “steal to thy grave undressed” in one

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poem7 and “At whose dumb urn / Thus all the year I mourn” in another.8 If Aries is right, then in this aspect Vaughan appears to be modern rather than mediaeval in his practice, whereas in others, notably in the near-anonymity of the subject of most of his elegies, he seems to revert, and I suspect consciously, to earlier practice. The distinction between mediaeval and postmediaeval attitudes to death is one context in which to consider an early modern poet’s poems of mourning. Another is the moral attitude of the time in relation to the process of grieving. Here there seems to have been an important change between the sixteenth and the mid-seventeenth century, when Vaughan was publishing. There is, for the bereaved Christian, an obvious tension between human grief and Christian hope. There is a view, characterized by one critic as rigorism, that we should not grieve at all. This attitude was based upon 1 Thessalonians 4: 13–14: “I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.” Cyprian, in Of Mortality, was the patristic authority for rigorism and Colet and Erasmus supported this position.9 Thomas Becon’s The Sicke mannes Salve, of which there were nineteen editions between 1560 and 1632, promoted the rigorous attitude.10 This work is twice mentioned in Ben Jonson’s plays; and indeed Jonson’s elegies, anachronistically in relation to the practice of other poets, are seen as conforming to this ideal. Calvin opposed rigorism in his commentary on Thessalonians: “it is one thing to bridle our grief to submit it to God and another to harden like a stone after throwing off human sensibility.” Calvin goes on: “Let therefore the grief of the pious be mingled with consolation, which instructs to patience; the hope of blessed immortality, which is the mother of patience, brings this about.”11 Matthew Parker’s funeral sermon for Martin Bucer (1551) is considered to be a landmark in the history of thinking about mourning. This sermon exemplifies an emotional split characteristic of mourning, in which the dead person is idealized, and the living are blamed, or blame themselves, for the death. For Parker, Bucer’s death is a sign of God’s wrath at the guilt of the survivors, who must confess their wicked and detestable lives, repent, beg pardon, and amend. Mourning is permissible for sin, but not for the dead. Moreover, bereavement is a form of punishment.12 Almost a century later, in the first of the pilcrowed ele-

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gies in Silex Scintillans, Vaughan writes: “But ’twas my sin that forced thy hand / To cull this prim-rose out.”13 Just over a century later than Erasmus, and a few years later than Jonson, Vaughan seemingly turns away from rigorism through one hundred and eighty degrees, setting the elegies of Silex Scintillans within a cult of tears, to judge from the poem “Vain wits and eyes,” itself pilcrowed, which introduces that volume. Before considering the elegies of Silex, it is worth glancing at the poems of mourning which occur in the more secular contexts of Olor Iscanus and Thalia Rediviva. Such comparisons enable us to see the verse of Silex more clearly; to see, in this matter as in others, that Vaughan’s turning toward the pious themes of Silex involved conscious rhetorical and artistic decisions: to reformulate Kermode’s memorable but not quite accurate characterization, something happened, something to do with poetry as well as with prayer.14 In Olor Iscanus we find two elegies on friends slain in the Civil War, the first on the death of Mr. R.W. slain in the late unfortunate differences at Rowton Heath, near Chester, 1645; the second on the death of Mr. R. Hall, slain at Pontefract, 1648. In the first Vaughan notes that he has struggled with a full year’s grief; this was the conventional period of mourning, after which one could commemorate without expressing grief.15 It is reasonable then that this poem should conform to what most scholars have agreed to be the major purpose of Renaissance elegy, that is to praise the deceased, while giving lament and consolation, the other recognized components of elegy, a secondary place.16 In the two elegies of Olor Iscanus, Vaughan praises the young men slain in battle both for the way they lived, and the way they died. Vaughan seems to have been in the battle in which his friend Mr. R.W was slain, and though he did not witness his death writes as with authority of his bravery in that fight. He was not at Pontefract in 1648 when Mr. R. Hall was slain, but his report of the courage of his friend is borne out by independent testimony. In both cases, valor is what we might expect to be reported in an elegy on one slain in battle, but Vaughan is concerned with the manner of life too; in the first of these elegies he gives as much space to R.W.’s intellectual ability and his capacity for friendship as he does to his courage in battle. In both cases, as for Milton in “Lycidas,” the body of the deceased is unavailable for Vaughan as mourner to participate in the exequies. And like Milton in “Lycidas” Vaughan takes the occasion for invective; anger is a normal part of mourning, and Vaughan’s here is di-

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rected against those who profited from the troubles of the times which had occasioned R.W.’s death, those “vast pretenders, which of late / Swelled in the ruins of their King and State.”17 As Milton saw the “corrupted clergy, then in their height,” as “blind mouths,” Vaughan sees these profiteers as leeches, filling their own veins with the people’s blood. The subject of the second elegy of Olor Iscanus was a clergyman as well as a brave soldier, bringing him closer to Edward King, and he is praised for piety and learning as well as courage. Vaughan sums up his first subject in terms of his “loyal upright life, and gallant end” and his second as written in his own blood as “a Soldier and a Saint.” Vaughan elsewhere excoriated the Puritans for having misappropriated the word saint; its use here may therefore be considered deliberate and strong.18 These poems were published in 1651 but one may have been written in 1646 and the other in 1648 or 1649. They are comparatively early poems. The elegy for Vaughan’s cousin Charles Walbeoffe, not published until Thalia Rediviva in 1678, was probably written late in 1653 or in 1654.19 During the Interregnum Royalist gentry were confronted with complex problems of loyalty and duty. In his elegy for Walbeoffe, Vaughan contemplates the life of a kinsman, whom he obviously loved and respected, who chose to confront the times in a way very different from that chosen by Vaughan himself. The poem is accordingly more complex and interestingly considered than the two elegies of Olor Iscanus. Vaughan took no office under the Commonwealth, and seems to have explicitly rejected overtures to do so.20 Walbeoffe, on the other hand, became a magistrate; his signature occurs many times in the Brecon Jail records for 1651 and 1653. He was then a public man and the poem’s opening refers somewhat satirically to the “public sorrow” at his death, as Vaughan contrasts the “outside mourners” to his solitary self: Now, that the public sorrow doth subside, And those slight tears which custom springs, are dried; While all the rich & outside mourners pass Home from thy dust to empty their own glass : I (who the throng affect not, nor their state:) Steal to thy grave undressed, to meditate On our sad loss, accompanied by none, An obscure mourner that would weep alone.

There is some complexity here, reinforced by the possible double entendre of the fourth line: “to empty their own glass.” If

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Walbeoffe’s death attracted public sorrow of such a quality, what kind of man was he really? The poem’s opening in effect acknowledges a problem; its satire is softened as Vaughan modulates into a long, shifting simile, the terms of which are mostly drawn from the natural world, but which ends with Vaughan, the “obscure mourner that would weep alone” nevertheless claiming for himself the office of “the just recorder of thy death and worth.” The encomium that follows acknowledges the moral ambiguities created by the times, which gave rise to “such mists, that none could see his way”; Walbeoffe did what other Royalists in his immediate circle refused to do, but Vaughan stresses that he yielded neither to intimidation nor to bribery. Lines 31– 41 acknowledge that other Royalists might feel tempted to blame Walbeoffe for agreeing to serve as a magistrate under the Commonwealth; Vaughan argues, rather oddly, I think, that Walbeoffe should be seen as patient rather than agent, as suffering rather than as committing crimes: we should no more blame him than we blame the sun when it is eclipsed by the moon. Then, becoming less metaphorical and more explicit, he explains why Walbeoffe should not be blamed; just as poisons can be “corrected” and so turned into antidotes, so the magistrate Walbeoffe’s “just soul did turn even hurtful things to good.” Historians of Wales tell us that Royalist complaints of corruption on the part of those in power were justified.21 Vaughan refers to those who throve “by fraud and blood and blasphemy” and to the “bribes” and “fees” which are “our new oppressors’ best annuities.” Walbeoffe, on the other hand, did not multiply his “just inheritance” by “sacrilege, nor pillage”; his hands were clean.22 Vaughan then improves upon his claim to be the just recorder of Walbeoffe’s death and worth by saying that he had the key to his heart, “man’s secret region and his noblest part.” The obscure mourner, we now learn, was an intimate of the public figure. The poem concludes that Vaughan will not weep, because “the great Victor” “counts every dust, that is laid up of thee.” This turns the locus of the real struggle from this world to the next; the rigorism of the conclusion is apparent, not real; and at the end we see Vaughan comforting himself, for his bereavement but even more for the disordered times, with the thought that the world is nearing its end: “The next glad news (most glad unto the just!) / Will be the Trumpet’s summons from the dust.” This elegy, probably written in time for publication in the 1655 Silex, but excluded from it, compares usefully, like the others mentioned, with poems of mourning in both the 1650 and the

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1655 Silex. In general when we turn to them we are conscious of strong differences between them and those of Olor Iscanus and Thalia Rediviva. An important difference is registered in the first line of the first of them. Addressing God, Vaughan writes “Thou that know’st for whom I mourn.” The subject is anonymous; from the poem’s fifty-seventh line [O let me (like him,) know my end!], we know the subject’s gender, but it is not until “Silence, and stealth of days,” with its reference to a brother (ll. 27–28), that we are made aware of the deceased’s relationship to the elegist. It has been generally agreed that the elegies of the 1650 Silex were all written for Vaughan’s younger brother William, who died in 1648, possibly from injuries received in the Second Civil War. It is a sign of the distance between the treatment of those slain in battle in Olor Iscanus and the way in which the dead are memorialized in Silex, that there is no indication in these poems of the “glorious imployment” which brought about William’s end, and of which we only know because Thomas Vaughan refers to it in the course of his controversy with Henry More.23 Why did Vaughan leave the identity of his subjects indeterminate, except in one case, and that an arguable one, given that the word “brother” is sometimes used of those who are not in fact siblings? Partly, it relates to what I have elsewhere called “the theme of hiddenness” that runs through both the 1650 and the 1655 Silex.24 In the case of the elegies, a shadowy subject enables readers to identify with the mourner as they would not were the subject named, described, and praised. Here is another important difference between the elegies of the other books and those found here: the subjects of Silex are praised either by implication, in the intensity of the sorrow and love expressed, or in terms that apply to all those who have been promoted from the Church Militant to the Church Triumphant. Individual human characteristics, such as courage, intelligence, learning, and capacity for friendship, are not at issue here. The dead, it is implied, were good people, worthy to be mourned: but there is no catalog of particular virtues. Here, of course, is one of the ways in which the elegies of Silex Scintillans differ from those one finds treated so often in the voluminous literature on poems of mourning: they do not celebrate the lives of great men; they do not mark the passing of a royal personage or of a poet. The virtues they imply in the deceased are not those of public life or of great achievement, but rather of those obscure Christians whose lives are “buried with Christ in God.”

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One cannot deal seriatim with the elegies of Silex in a brief paper. It seems to me that the best of the poems in the 1650 volume in which Vaughan employs the light imagery that is thematic to elegy is “Joy of my life!”25 This poem is strong from beginning to end, but its method is, so to say, to appear to become stronger as it proceeds. This is a poem of mourning in which very little mourning can be descried; through its progressively strengthening images of travel and pilgrimage, mediated through light imagery, we can discern the distance Vaughan has traveled in his own work of mourning. Nevertheless, it might surprise that one of this group of poems should begin on such a note of joy. However, the joyful burst of energy with which the poem opens is the only such passage in the first twenty-four lines. There is a patient work of teaching to be undertaken, a deliberate sententiousness emphasized by the dimeters of each stanza’s last five lines. The first stanza, we may notice, appears to be almost entirely un-metaphoric, and such light-imagery as might be involved in the notion of “steering from above” can only be read back from what follows. One is tempted to gloss the first four lines of the second stanza by reference to the entry on seventeenth-century travel in the Companion to Pepys’s Diary.26 Its plain diction, sententiousness, and mundanity have the effect of downplaying the fact that these stars, this night and this road are metaphorical, so that the connection between the observations made in the first and second stanzas is not immediately clear. The point of the light imagery, introduced in the second stanza, is precisely that it should become clearer as the poem proceeds. Wordsworth’s contemplation of his dead brought forth “How fast has brother followed brother, / From sunshine to the sunless land!”27 Vaughan’s was, in another poem than this, to issue in “They are all gone into the world of light.” The actual static condition of the body of the person mourned (or perhaps for this poem better to say, who is celebrated) is in the poem opposed by the idea of movement, just as the darkness of the grave is opposed by the imagery of light. Those of us who are on the move, by land or by water, or metaphorically through life, need to gain our bearings, by celestial navigation or by the fixity of beacon and landmark. Because this poem evokes the journey so strongly, of course it becomes about the living as well as about the dead, until in the final stanza the dead are seen as living too, but transmuted (“we shall all be changed”).28 Vaughan’s inwardness with the Bible was never I think put to more impressive use than in the fourth stanza here:

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They are (indeed,) our pillar-fires Seen as we go, They are that City’s shining spires We travel to; A swordlike gleam Kept man for sin First out; this beam Will guide him in.

The strong simplicity of “God’s saints are shining lights” is here changed to a wonderful metaphoric expression, the collocated references to Exodus and Revelation (the beginning and the end of pilgrimage) transmuting light into substance and solidity. “Let light perpetual shine upon them” we pray for our dead; but Vaughan’s dead in this poem and others are those from whom light perpetually shines, and an important part of the point of the poem is that its readers should think about the theological and existential realities expressed in the symbolism. The prosaic element in the poem is there precisely to tie mundane actuality to theological truth. The steady strengthening, through the poem, of the light imagery that it shares with so many other elegies, helps one to see why Abbie Findlay Potts, in her posthumously published book on the elegiac mode, should have singled out anagnorisis, or discovery, as one of the distinguishing marks of elegy. The poem enacts the process of discovery by which we who are the living learn what our significant dead mean to us.29 It also conforms well to what Sacks calls the residually ceremonial structure of the elegy; with its “measured pace and direction” it “develops the effect not only of an action but of a performance.”30 Sacks goes on to suggest that the performance is foregrounded by what he calls the “staging devices” of the genre, a convention that “draws attention to the mourner or cast of mourners.”31 Certainly the mourner is brought to our attention in the next poem I should like to discuss, “I walked the other day,” which has thirteen instances of the first person pronoun in nine stanzas, including the first and last lines of the poem. That is counting nominatives only; we may add three accusatives (me), two genitives (my, my own) and a reflexive (my self ). This is, by the way, in the penultimate poem of the first Silex; the final poem, “Begging (I)” puts forward the persona of the poet almost as strongly. In this Vaughan is within one of the conventions, that of “the crucial self-privileging of the survivors.”32 Many years ago, in reviewing Imilda Tuttle’s Concordance to Silex Scintillans, I regretted the omission of the word “I,” since Vaughan’s self-

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presentation, what I then called his dramaticity, is of interest through all his religious verse.33 Sacks associates with what he calls the self-privileging of the survivors an emphasis on “drama” or “doing” in the elegy, as a way of keeping the survivors in motion, “ensuring a sense of progress and egress, of traversing some distance.” As he says, “For a stationary poet that distance may be figurative and purely psychological, but it is crucial to any act of mourning.”34 In “Joy of my life,” a sense of the significance of time’s passing is suggested through images of movement, of pilgrimage. Here, through tense, and through words denoting times and seasons, the passing of time is suggested more directly: “the other day”; “to spend my hour”; “winter”; “springs”; “all the winter”; “all the year”: this is not an exhaustive catalog. Indeed the whole of time is suggested, as in stanzas 7– 10, where the creation is referred to in terms of the warming of the dead, and the end of time, or the transcending of time, is suggested in the spatial opposition of “here below” and “above.” Vaughan’s particular time, his particular grief and particular need to rise again from his grief, is, not diminished but put into perspective, by being placed against the panorama of Christian history, from Creation to the end of time. An all but universal view among critics is that “the greatest influence on the form of the elegy has been the rituals associated with the death and rebirth of vegetation gods.” “I walked the other day” seems to conform to the remark of Sacks that “features of this influence are to be found even in those elegies that are not strictly pastoral.”35 The central image of the poem, however, the “poor root,” which “fresh and green” “lived of us unseen” reverses the strategy of the vegetation rites, in which extrahuman nature is symbolized by a human or quasi-human figure: here the human, dead William, is symbolized by the natural, in imagery owing as much, we may say, to 1 Corinthians 15, as to early pastoral elegy. Nevertheless, the impulse and the basic strategy of the mourner conform to the established pattern. There is an act of troping, of substitution, to be performed if the mourner is not to remain frozen and immobilized by grief: Daphne turns into a tree and Apollo turns from the object of his love to a sign of her.36 William turns into a poor root, and Vaughan’s grief is thereby both focused and generalized as the poem recalls, at a distance that precludes mere rote-Christianity, St. Paul’s exposition of the relationship between death and resurrection.37 By the time he published the 1655 Silex, Vaughan had accumulated more dead: and so the first elegy in the 1655 volume begins

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“They are all gone into the world of light.” In relation to the 1655 volume I shall treat only one topic, a biographical aspect hitherto unexplored. The poem beginning with the words “Fair and young light,” which appears in the 1655 additions to Silex Scintillans, is the last of the so-called pilcrowed elegies. Unlike the poems of Olor Iscanus in memory of friends slain in battle, and that in Thalia Rediviva on his cousin Walbeoffe, these are untitled and carry no indisputably clear indication of their subject. They have been thought, with good reason, to mourn his younger brother William, who died in July 1648, perhaps of injuries incurred during the Second Civil War. “Fair and young light,” together with the poem that precedes it, has generally been thought of as honoring the memory of Vaughan’s first wife, Catherine Wise.38 Such a view of it would seem to justify closer inspection than the poem has hitherto been given. I shall from the beginning refer to the person elegized as “she” in accordance with the view that the poem is indeed an elegy for Catherine; my reasons for accepting that view will soon become clear. The poem begins: Fair and young light! my guide to holy Grief and soul-curing melancholy; Whom living here I did still shun As sullen night-ravens do the sun, And led by my own foolish fire Wandered through darkness, dens and mire. How am I now in love with all That I termed then mere bonds and thrall, And to thy name, which still I keep, Like the surviving turtle, weep!

There is an ambiguity in the first couplet. Did the person commemorated act as a “guide to holy / Grief ” during her lifetime, or become such a guide only after her death? If the author of the pilcrowed elegies of the 1650 Silex needed to do more than “look in his heart and write,” we may conclude from their quality that such guidance as he needed in turning grief to spiritual benefit was available to him at that time. While the date of Catherine’s death has not been established, she is unlikely to have predeceased Vaughan’s younger brother William, who died in 1648. On the other hand, the likelihood that the person commemorated acted as such a spiritual guide during her lifetime seems less-

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ened by the four lines that follow, in which the poet writes of shunning the “fair and young light” [while] “living here.” Vaughan’s choice of “light” in near-collocation with “guide” in the first line might also seem to diminish the likelihood that the person commemorated was accepted as a spiritual guide during her lifetime, since it follows his custom of seeing the memory of the dead as lights to guide the living. One might refer here to “They are all gone into the world of light” and indeed a number of other elegies to illustrate this assertion. Use here of his own accustomed language enables him to set up the opposition between her as “sun” and his “own foolish fire” in the lines that follow. The “foolish fire” is metaphor drawn from the “false fire” or “will o’ the wisp” he refers to elsewhere,39 the point of course being its capacity to lead men astray, to their destruction in the “darkness, dens and mire” of sin. If we accept Catherine as subject for the moment, then she is in retrospect seen as domestic sun, in opposition to the “foolish fire” that may be read as the devices and desires of Vaughan’s own heart or as the woman or women to which those devices and desires led him. This rather specific reading, perhaps startling in relation to readings the poem has received to date, is supported by language used elsewhere in the poem; it is perhaps indicative of a certain unease that Hutchinson quotes the poem no further than I have to this point. There are of course even in this first-quoted passage indications that the elegy refers to a deceased wife rather than to some other person. The words “mere bonds and thrall” express a commonplace; marriage is not merely notoriously and proverbially a confining relationship, it is legally defined as being so, whether we consult the Book of Common Prayer or present divorce law. Moreover, the poet’s simile in which he likens himself to “the surviving turtle” suggests that the relationship between himself and the person elegized was that of marriage. If “turtle” suggests a fidelity that the poem elsewhere disclaims, it should be noted that the simile is introduced by the word “now” in clear contrast to the time when the person elegized was alive. Like other elegies, this one appears to say more about its author than its apparent subject. Immediately after likening himself to “the surviving turtle,” the poet exclaims O bitter cursed delights of men! Our souls’ diseases first, and then

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Our bodies’; poisons that intreat With fatal sweetness, till we eat; How artfully do you destroy, That kill with smiles and seeming joy! If all the subtleties of vice Stood bare before unpractised eyes, And every act she doth commence Had writ down his sad consequence, Yet would not men grant, their ill fate Lodged in those false looks, till too late.

Clearly, gluttony might be one of the soul’s diseases that eventuate in bodily disease, but on the whole lust seems a more likely occasion of the guilt that accompanies mourning for a dead wife. The “smiles and seeming joy” of the sixteenth line of the poem seem to support this interpretation; one recalls the “bought smile / Of Harlots” of Paradise Lost 4.765. The words “chaste” and “lustful” in lines 28 and 30 surely offer further support, suggesting clearly enough the lines along which Vaughan was thinking. The word “keep” of line 9 is another that has a rich entry in OED, and there are various senses in which a grieving widower might have kept his wife’s name. In the context set up by a number of explicit words in the poem, it is worth recalling that the inexplicit “name” that was kept was, if the poem was written for Vaughan’s first wife, a Christian name than which none could be more strongly relevant to the succeeding lines, since Catherine connotes “purity.” The possibility that the poet may have been remembering both an act of infidelity and disease occasioned by it cannot be ruled out. It is surely because the view of Vaughan promulgated by his Victorian editors and furthered by Gwenllian Morgan, Louise Guiney, and F. E. Hutchinson has persisted strongly into twentieth-century criticism that the inference has not been drawn before now. The poem goes on: O holy, happy, healthy heaven, Where all is pure, where all is even, Plain, harmless, faithful, fair and bright. But what earth breathes against thy light! How blest had men been, had their Sire Lived still in league with thy chaste fire, Nor made life through her long descents, A slave to lustful elements!

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It will be remembered that a line from another of Vaughan’s poems found its way into D. B. Wyndham Lewis’s collection of bad verse The Stuffed Owl. He was incautious enough to write in the poem “Looking back” in Thalia Rediviva, “How fair a vision is a bright backside” at a time when the word “backside” was beginning to take on its modern connotation. Some have thought of the first line of this section as deserving a similar fate. Jonathan F. S. Post writes that the poem “is finally wasted because after ten remarkable lines describing the wayward spirit, he views ‘holy / Grief ’ from the side of too easy a salvation. ‘O holy, happy, healthy heaven’ is a line Simmonds quite correctly points out as among the worst in Vaughan.” Post concludes that Vaughan, “barely in need of a hair shirt,” “reduces the experience of ‘holy grief and soul curing melancholy’ to a tract for the times—‘For he that’s dead, is freed from sin’ (1.46)—and so loses his poem along with it.” This apparent failure to recognize the quotation from Romans 6:7 goes along with the observation that Vaughan “seems literally to have traded Herbert’s poems, with their splendid response to life, for an anchorite’s ancient manual on the reasons for denying all pleasures.”40 Perhaps a rereading of Herbert’s “Church monuments” is in order? James D. Simmonds’s reference to the poem climaxes a purple passage in dispraise of Vaughan, than whom “nobody can produce uglier rhymes, flatter, stiffer, more ungainly and limping rhythms, or more monotonous meandering through drab wastes of prosaic banality and puerile platitude. Surely one of the most inane lines in all poetry is Vaughan’s ‘O holy, happy, healthy heaven.’ ”41 Even if we concede that this is not the best line in Vaughan, “inane,” with its principal connotation of “emptiness,” seems hardly the word to describe it. Four of its five words carry a considerable freight, as a glance at their entries in OED will confirm for those in doubt. Clearly it is the word “healthy” which is bathetic to a modern’s ear. But Vaughan was not a modern, and it is perhaps worth distancing ourselves momentarily from twentieth-century fitness magazines and television commercials for health clubs to think about why Vaughan might have used the word. First, it should be noted that Vaughan had used the idea before, in Olor Iscanus: “Fresh as the hours may all your pleasures be, / And healthful as eternity!”42 Second, it should be noted that there and in “Fair and young light!” Vaughan is thinking of lines 5–6 of “The H. Scriptures.I” in which that “blessed man, Mr. George Herbert, whose holy life and verse gained many pious converts, of

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whom I am the least” (142) had written, of the Bible, “Thou art all health, health thriving till it make / A full eternitie.”43 It should also be noted that Vaughan, like Milton, was quite capable of thinking in Latin while writing in English. In using “healthy” as his final adjective, he may have had in mind the orthographic connection between salvare, to save and salvere, to be in good health, the meanings of which come together in the noun salus, which could refer both to bodily health and to spiritual salvation. The phrase “year of our salvation,” common in Vaughan’s time, was formed after the mediaeval Latin anno salutis (in the year of salvation). In his eschatological poem “The Book” Vaughan, who was a physician, envisaged an afterlife in which God would “make all new again, / Destroying only death and pain.” Considered as fusing the concepts of salvation and of physical wellbeing, the word “healthy” might be seen as suitable within, if not climactic of, a sequence that begins with “holy” and “happy.” It makes explicit senses of Old English and Old Norse words related to our “holy” that for moderns might be obscured by the more familiar Christian applications: free from injury, whole, hale, health, happiness, good luck. These senses remind us both that “happy,” the second adjective in Vaughan’s sequence, is often used to translate Latin felix, which refers to lucky choice or good fortune, and that it is an alternative to the word “blessed” as a translation of the New Testament Greek word makarios. Whatever else it might be, Vaughan’s line is not inane. If the word “healthy” picks up meanings within the two adjectives it immediately follows, it also relates to an earlier section of the poem, where Vaughan writes that the “bitter cursed delights of men” are “Our souls’ diseases first, and then / Our bodies”; poisons that intreat / With fatal sweetness, till we eat.” The word “fatal” is intended to have literal force: “How artfully do you destroy, / That kill with smiles and seeming joy.” The considerations here put forward do not necessarily clear the poem of charges brought against it as an aesthetic object. It might even be fair to suggest that it is an even stranger poem than modern observations on its twenty-third line have suggested. There may be, as a colleague has suggested, a certain agonized wit in that word “healthy”; and is Vaughan likely to have been unaware of the double entendre of his closing wish “O that I were winged and free / And quite undressed just now with thee”? To put the question is not to deny that the word “undressed” refers primarily to the shedding of the body in death; in his “early days” he “felt through all this fleshly dress / Bright shoots of everlasting-

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ness.”44 The word “free” also, quite clearly, has more than one connotation here; its reference back to the earlier statement that he is “now in love with all / That I termed then mere bonds and thrall” makes the optative the more poignant and makes it difficult to agree that Vaughan has “lost the poem.” An interpretation of this poem as autobiographical and confessional is not necessarily going to find ready acceptance, nor should it be expected to. After all, I had read and re-read “Fair and young light” for more than thirty-five years before the reading presented here floated into consciousness. This reading might be an aberration, but I prefer to think that its taking so long to arrive at reflects the potency of received opinion, in this case the general sense of Vaughan as a “devotional” poet whose status as Anglican puritan is guaranteed by his invective against “lascivious compositions” in the preface to the 1655 Silex Scintillans. Yet if we think about it, the very vehemence of that preface might hint at the remorse of a widower who felt that he had failed in devotion to a loving wife. Leo Miller wrote what I am (naturally) inclined to think of as a good comment on the power of received opinion at the beginning of his book on the heterodoxy of one of Vaughan’s contemporaries: Aside from some passing comments in his History of Britain (begun about 1647, finished about 1670), so far as is now known [Milton] never published anything overtly on polygamy in his lifetime. A few contemporaries knew Milton’s private opinion (and, as we shall see, mentioned it in print), but the memory was soon forgotten so thoroughly that for three hundred years Milton devotees read and reread Milton’s hymn to wedded love in Paradise Lost, “Whose bed is undefil’d and chaste pronounc’t / Present or past, as Saints and Patriarchs us’d” (IV, 761–762), and never guessed its polygamophile content.45

The suggestion that readers can read and re-read a famous passage from Paradise Lost for rather more than thirty-five years and still fail to understand it (it is not merely lines 761–62 that are at issue) will, I hope, caution readers not to dismiss an interpretation of “Fair and young light” as a “confessional” poem too readily. Beyond recalling that I have been here before (Molly Mahood wrote to me that she could not accept my argument for a “polygamophile” reading of Milton’s hymn to wedded bliss), I have no further argument, except one that might be considered a low blow, depending as it does upon hearsay and guilt by association. It has always seemed to me probable that Henry and Thomas Vaughan were identical twins. Stevie Davies states that the fact

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of Vaughan’s twinship is at the center of her reading of his life and work, though as she says, “without making any statement that could not hold for a close fraternal pair” (35). Thomas Powell’s verses in the frontmatter to Olor Iscanus are significant: What Planet ruled your birth? what witty star? That you so like in souls as bodies are! So like in both, that you seem born to free The starry art from vulgar calumny. My doubts are solved, from hence my faith begins, Not only your faces, but your wits are twins.46

It is well established I think that the lives of identical twins, even when separated from each other for most of their childhood and into adult life, tend to follow uncannily similar patterns. It has been noted that the charges against Thomas Vaughan, when he was removed under the Act for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, were more serious than those against any other Breconshire incumbent. He was described as a “common drunkard, a common swearer, no preacher, a whoremaster and in armes personally against the Parliament.”47 Here “whoremaster” presumably means “lecher” rather than “pimp,” and it may be that the collocation of the three vices was as conventional in the middle of the seventeenth century as it was in the middle of the eighteenth.48 However, we are still left with the fact that no other Breconshire incumbent was described in this way. Hutchinson suggested on the basis of Thomas Vaughan’s MS Notebook (MS Sloane 1741) that there is some evidence for the charge that he was a common drunkard. Under the date of 9 April 1659, he describes a dream in which appeared “a certaine person, with whom I had in former times revelled away many years in drinking.”49 Supposing, then, that the charge of “whoremaster” also had some factual basis, and recalling the similarity of identical twins, do we not arrive at some circumstantial support for the suggestion that Henry Vaughan might have had an extra-marital experience that ensued in, or caused him to fear, a sexually transmitted disease? If the poem does not suggest that, what then does it suggest?

NOTES 1. I shall refer to the following works by author’s name and, where necessary, by date: Abbie Findlay Potts, The Elegiac Mode: Poetic Form in Wordsworth and Other Elegists (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967); Phillipe

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Aries, Western Attitudes Toward Death, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Eric Smith, By Mourning Tongues (Ipswich: Boydell Press, 1977); Phillipe Aries, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981); G. W. Pigman III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy. Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); Arnold Stein, The House of Death: Messages from the English Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 1986. 2. Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, The Arden Edition (London and New York: Methuen, 1982), 183. 3. “The major change in the response to death, a constant among other changes brought on by the crises of the religious struggles, was general acceptance, in spite of differences in doctrine, that the individual death was a subject worthy of close attention” (Stein 13). 4. Stein 15–16. 5. “Joy of my life! While left me here” (Alan Rudrum, ed. Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems (London: Penguin Classics, 1995), ll. 27–28. All further references to Vaughan’s poems will be to this edition. 6. Aries, Western Attitudes Toward Death, 69. 7. “To the Memory of C.W., Esq,” l. 6. 8. “I walked the other day,” ll. 62–63. 9. Pigman, 28–31, 136. 10. Pigman, 31. The Christian who has “an earnest faith in the bloud of Christ” . . . “cannot perish, [for his] faith is an undoubted assurance . . . that [he is] predestinate to be saved.” (Thomas Beacon, The Sicke Mans Salve (London, 1582), 196; copy consulted, Huntington Library 371076). Accordingly God is thanked for his “departure . . . out of this world” in a variety of scriptural texts (240– 41). 11. For the first part of the quotation see Pigman (137 n. 3), translating from the Geneva 1551 edition of Ioannis Calvini in omnes D. Pauli epistolas, 481–82. The Latin reads: sed aliud est, fraenare dolorem nostrum ut subiiciatur Deo: aliud abiecto humano sensu, instar lapidum obdurescere. Sit ergo piorum dolor consolatione mixtus, quae eos ad patientiam erudiat: id efficiet spes beatae immortalitatis, quae patientiae mater est (quoted from the Huntington Library copy). 12. Pigman, 30. 13. “Thou that know’st for whom I mourn,” ll. 9–10. 14. Frank Kermode, “The Private Imagery of Henry Vaughan,” The Review of English Studies 1 (1950): 206–25. Kermode wrote “and not with prayer.” 15. Pigman (42) writes that Renaissance authors of poetics implicitly side with Menander and counsel the combination of lament with praise and consolation. Julius Caesar Scaliger, the most influential of them, states that an elegy for a person who has died recently should consist of five parts: praise, demonstration of loss, lament, consolation, and exhortation. An anniversary elegy has no lament because no one grieves for a person dead a year or more; Menander is the unacknowledged source of this distinction as of much else in Scaliger’s chapter on funeral poetry. 16. Pigman, 40. 17. “An Elegy on the Death of Mr. R.W. Slain in the Late Unfortunate Differences at Rowton Heath, near Chester, 1645,” ll. 45– 46.

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18. “Who saint themselves, they are no saints” in St. Mary Magdalen,” l. 72. 19. Its exclusion from the 1655 Silex testifies to the care Vaughan took to ensure the aesthetic unity of that volume, an aesthetic unity with a political purpose. See Alan Rudrum, “Resistance, Collaboration and Silence: Henry Vaughan and Breconshire Royalism,” in The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, eds. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 102–18. 20. See “The Proffer,” discussed in “Resistance, Collaboration and Silence.” 21. Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 59–60. 22. I have given elsewhere the reasons for thinking that “there may have been more to Vaughan’s assertion of Walbeoffe’s financial probity than mere conventional praise.” See “Resistance, Collaboration, and Silence,” especially 113–14. 23. See Alan Rudrum, ed., The Works of Thomas Vaughan, 281, l. 1642 and note. 24. In a review of Jonathan F.S. Post, Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision, in The Times Literary Supplement, 24 June 1983, 681. 25. Three earlier versions of this essay were written and delivered orally before the publication of Stevie Davies’s Henry Vaughan (Bridgend: Seren, 1995); no use is made here of what she wrote on “Joy of my life!” (90 ff.); however I should like to recommend it as a sensitive and accurate account. 26. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, vol. 10, compiled and edited by Robert Latham (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 448–56. 27. “Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg,” William Wordsworth, Last Poems, 1821–1850, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), ll. 23–24. 28. 1 Corinthians 15:51. 29. Potts, 36–66. 30. Sacks,19. 31. Sacks,19. 32. Sacks,19. 33. “Vaughan’s Each,” a review of Imilda Tuttle, A Concordance to Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans, in Essays in Criticism 21, no. 1 (1971): 86–91. 34. Sacks,19. 35. Sacks, 19. 36. Sacks, 5. 37. 1 Corinthians 15. 38. Hutchinson, 107–8 and 196–97 39. See for example “False stars and fire-drakes” in “The Hidden Treasure,” l. 4; “this world’s ill-guiding light” in “The Night,” l. 47. 40. Jonathan F. S. Post, Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 111. 41. James D. Simmonds, Masques of God: Form and Theme in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), 42– 43. 42. “To the Best, and Most Accomplished Couple,” ll. 7–8. 43. I have quoted from F. E. Hutchinson, The Works of George Herbert, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959, 58, which reflects the Williams MS. The line, which appears in different forms in the Williams MS, the Bodleian manuscript, and the 1633 edition, has occasioned textual controversy. See my review of Mario di Cesare, ed., George Herbert. The Temple. A Diplomatic Edition of the

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Bodleian Manuscript (Tanner 307), in Seventeenth-Century News 56, nos. 3 and 4 (Fall–Winter 1998): 100–102. 44. “The Retreat,” ll. 19–20. 45. Leo Miller, John Milton Among the Polygamophiles (New York: Loewenthal Press, 1974), 4. His note on this passage reads: “Alan Rudrum, ‘Polygamy in Paradise Lost,’ ” Essays in Criticism 20 (January 1970): 18–23, demonstrated the correct interpretation of Paradise Lost, IV,761–62, by showing that it echoes the same passage from Paul to the Hebrews, xiii, 4, which Milton cites to justify polygamy as lawful in his Treatise on Christian Doctrine” (190). Though I did not know it, David Masson had made the same point in his note to the hymn to marriage. He writes: “ ‘Present, or past, as saints and patriarchs used.’ I am not sure but here Milton introduces a touch of his peculiar views of marriage. He seems to mean ‘whether in our present form of the institution, or in that known to saints and patriarchs in the old dispensation’ ” (Life of John Milton [London: Macmillan, 1859–94], 3:452). I am indebted to John Leonard for drawing my attention to this; as he wrote to me, Masson’s note fell on deaf ears. 46. “Upon the Most Ingenious Pair of Twins, Eugenius Philalethes, and the Author of these Poems,” ll. 1–6. 47. Works of Thomas Vaughan, 7–8. 48. Chesterfield wrote to his son (27 March 1747) that “A Man of Pleasure, in the vulgar acceptation of that phrase, means only, a beastly drunkard, an abandoned whoremaster, and a profligate swearer” (OED, 2nd ed., under “whoremaster”). 49. Hutchinson, Life, 95.

Lark, Wild Thyme, Crowing Cock, and Waterfall: The Natural, the Moral, and the Political in Blake’s Milton and Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans June Sturrock

“NATURAL OBJECTS ALWAYS DID & NOW DO WEAKEN, DEADEN & obliterate Imagination in Me.”1 The writer of these indignant words was a lifelong Londoner and a self-educated artisan, contemptuous of “Priest & King.”2 William Blake would seem to have little or nothing in common with the so-called “poet of nature,” Henry Vaughan, the Oxford-educated Royalist and Anglican who announced himself on his title pages as “Henry Vaughan, Gent” and “Henry Vaughan, Silurist” and who died sixty-two years before Blake was born.3 But for all the many significant differences between the poets themselves, the similarities between Blake’s Milton and Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans are complex and lie near the heart of what makes each text—and poet—unique and remarkable. They illuminate each other. What drives this essay is both a desire to explore these similarities and curiosity about possible explanations for such resemblances. True enough, despite the 150 years between these texts, they were written in similar circumstances, as I will show. Yet this fact is only the beginning of an explanation: after all, why should such circumstances produce such remarkable work? The following brief introductory paragraphs outline the results of my explorations and questionings; the rest of the essay develops them more fully. Among the writings of Blake and Vaughan, Milton and Silex Scintillans are exceptional in many ways. Certainly they are exceptional in their concern for the natural world, a concern that involves both pleasure and precise observation.4 To turn to the title of this essay, the lark-like movement of Blake’s lark is necessary to its meaning within Milton; the watery flow of the waterfall is essential to Vaughan’s poem of that name. For both poets, charac329

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teristic movement is what matters, for they are concerned with the dynamic, with action and process in the natural world as in the spiritual and imaginative, and, indeed, the literary world. Natural objects in these poems have spiritual or imaginative functions and work as part of a metamorphosis into a fuller humanity. In their refusal to separate the natural and the human, Blake and Vaughan in these two texts weave together the natural and the cultural to an unusual extent: lark and waterfall alike are explicitly part of a long tradition. Both writers are, in fact, extraordinarily close both to the Bible and to one great predecessor: for Vaughan, Herbert, and for Blake, Milton. Moreover, both texts are exceptionally personal. They are concerned with direct and intense personal experience, which is also an experience heightened by the natural and the cultural. In their concern with religious life as spiritual experience, both men divorce themselves from the more commonplace religious concern with vice and virtue. This rejection in itself has political implications, and indeed these two writers, despite their divergent political opinions, both had good political reasons for attacking a “Puritan” insistence on morality. Indeed, I will argue that although other works by both these writers are far more directly concerned with the social and political world, these texts are also politically significant. Both Silex Scintillans and Milton are, however, the product of times when their authors were unusually isolated—and further isolated by illness5 —and when they were out of sympathy with the dominant political climate. Blake was living outside London for the first and only time in his life, in the village of Felpham in Sussex, in a period of virulent anti-Jacobin propaganda. Vaughan, though he was at home in Wales, at Newton-by-Usk, was nevertheless isolated in that he was cut off from the church as community during the Interregnum. Writing from the margins, as these poets do in these two texts, their assertions about what is valuable challenge the assumptions of their periods and make significant political statements.

I To begin with Blake, Milton is remarkable among his works for its abundant concern with natural life, which appears and is celebrated there as in no other of his works. Blake was a Londoner, and most of his writing focuses on human culture and

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human community. But Milton, the product of his three years in the Sussex countryside at Felpham,6 is different, full of natural movement and natural processes—planetary, as well as animal and vegetable. “The Constellations in the deep and wondrous Night,” in their “immortal courses”; “the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summer”; “the Trees on mountains,” stirred by the wind; all these are celebrated in the poem as “the sons of Los! . . . the visions of Eternity!”—Los being the embodiment of the human imagination.7 We are, however, reminded that these natural forms provide only a glimpse, only a partial experience: “We see only as it were the hem of their garment / When with our vegetable eyes we view these wond’rous Visions” (25.66–26.10). The summer flies are celebrated again: Seest thou the little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand? It has a heart like thee; a brain open to heaven & hell, Withinside wondrous & expansive; its gates are not clos’d, I hope thine are not; hence it clothes itself in rich array; Hence thou art cloth’d with human beauty O thou mortal man Seek not thy heavenly father then beyond the skies: There chaos dwells & ancient Night & Og & Anak old. (20.27–33)

Elsewhere, less generally pleasing natural phenomena, too, take their place in this text, where Blake catalogs with apparent relish the ground-dwelling creatures, the insects and stinging plants that most people either fear and dislike or ignore: The Earth-worm, the gold Beetle; the wise Emmet; . . . the Centipede is there: The ground Spider with many Eyes: the Mole clothed in velvet The ambitious Spider in his sullen web; the lucky golden Spinner; The Earwig armd: the tender Maggot emblem of immortality: The Flea: Louse: Bug: the Tape-Worm: all the Armies of Disease: Visible or invisible to the slothful vegetating Man. The slow Slug: the Grasshopper that sings & laughs & drinks: Winter comes, he folds his slender bones without a murmur. The cruel Scorpion is there: the Gnat: Wasp: Hornet & the Honey Bee: The Toad & venomous Newt; the Serpent clothd in gems & gold: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There is the Nettle that stings with soft down; and there The indignant Thistle: whose bitterness is bred in his milk Who feeds on contempt of his neighbour: there all the idle weeds That creep around the obscure places (27.12–28)

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I quote these passages at some length partly because the sheer amount of natural reference in Milton is so often ignored in critical accounts of the poem. Preconceptions of Blake, as the one “Romantic” poet who does not care for the natural world, seem often to have left critics blind to these references. Though Milton, like Blake’s other prophetic books, certainly focuses on his complex mythical narrative, it differs from them in its inclusion of the natural world. Blake’s similes in Milton concern natural objects too: Milton at one point, like his own Mulciber, falls “in the Zenith like a falling star / Descending perpendicular swift as the swallow or swift” (15.47– 48). Los and Enitharmon (the emanation of Los) hear the lamentations of Ololon (the emanation of Milton—both his poems and the women in his life) “as the poor bird within the shell / Hears its impatient parent bird” (21.28– 29). In addition, in Blake’s designs for Milton, the margins are full of birds and little creatures (as for instance on plate 27). This, however, is not especially significant for such marginal life is common enough in Blake’s designs: Jerusalem plate 98, one instance among many possibilities, shows a toad, a snail, a spider, and a worm or two. More than anything else in the natural world, it is the scent of the wild thyme, and, even more, the song of the lark, that run through the whole poem. Bird and plant become signals of the moment of inspiration. The “mundane shell”—the sky to our ordinary perception—“finishes where the lark mounts” (17.27) and the lark’s rising song and the rising scent of the thyme herald the apocalyptic moment that concludes the poem: Immediately the Lark mounted with a loud trill from Felphams Vale And the Wild Thyme from Wimbletons green & impurpled Hills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . terrific Lions & Tygers sport & play All Animals upon the earth, are prepard in all their strength To go forth to the Great Harvest & Vintage of the Nations. (42. 29– 43.1)

Lark and thyme are treated at greatest length in matching passages of eighteen lines each,8 as visions of “the Lamentation of Beulah over Ololon.” I will quote only the passage about the lark: Thou hearest the Nightingale begin the Song of Spring; The Lark sitting upon his earthy bed: just as the morn Appears; listens silent; then springing from the waving Corn-field! loud He leads the Choir of Day! Trill, trill, trill, trill,

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Mounting upon the wings of light into the Great Expanse: Reecchoing against the lovely blue & shining heavenly Shell: His little throat labours with inspiration; every feather On throat & breast & wings vibrates with the effluence Divine All Nature listens silent to him & the awful Sun Stands still upon the Mountain looking on this little Bird With eyes of soft humility, & wonder love & awe. Then loud from their green covert all the Birds begin their Song The Thrush, the Linnet & the Goldfinch, Robin & the Wren Awake the Sun from his sweet reverie upon the Mountain: The Nightingale again assays his Song, & thro the day, And thro the night warbles luxuriant; every Bird of Song Attending his loud harmony with admiration & love. This is a Vision of the lamentation of Beulah over Ololon. (31.28– 45)

These “stanzas,” standing a little apart from the rest of the text by their repeated structure, have a certain formality; they also have the force of the direct address to the reader—“Thou hearest,” and (in the case of the wild thyme) “Thou percievest” [sic].9 Such a direct address is entirely appropriate, for his readers would indeed have heard and perceived. Blake represents these visions in terms of common experiences of a common little bird and a common little plant—common throughout much of England and certainly present in abundance around Blake’s Felpham.10 Both live near the ground—the lark is ground-nesting and the wild thyme is low-growing. Yet both are recognized and celebrated for the way they rise—the lark singing as it soars into invisibility above its nest and the wild thyme exuding its powerful scent as it is warmed by sunlight or crushed underfoot. Blake observes precisely, correctly. The lark does have an “earthy bed,” often in a “waving cornfield.” “Trill trill trill trill” expresses the lark’s repetitive song, adequately if not eloquently, and the lark does while still visible seem to vibrate as it flies and sings, because of the incessant beating of its wings. Susan Fox suggests that “the instant of these lines is the apocalyptic instant of the whole poem, the instant when the sun. . . is awakened by the chorus of inspiration. It is through the natural creatures, the thyme and the lark that Blake communicates the moment of transformation.”11 In Milton, lark and thyme preserve their own qualities, but they are seen not as mere facts, ornithological or botanical, but as something that transforms and is transformed—as visionary. And the visionary is communicated not just through the natural but also through the cultural. Blake’s adherence to his own

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observation is combined with an absorption in literary construct. Blake’s editors believe that he has in mind in this passage Milton’s own lark in Paradise Regained (2.279–81): Thus wore out night, and now the herald lark Left his ground-nest, high tow’ring to descry The morn’s approach12

The Miltonic lark that immediately occurs to me in this connection is that of L’Allegro. But Blake’s is surely also a Shakespearean lark, the lark that “at Heaven’s gate sings,”13 for “Just at the place to where the Lark mounts, is a Crystal Gate / It is the enterance of the First Heaven” (35.61–62). Blake’s lark is Shakespeare as much as Milton as much as the skylark itself; all are transformed into the heightened experience that is the subject of this poem. Blake’s treatment of the wild thyme is similar. As I have said, it is significant in itself as a low-growing herb with a powerful scent. But, like the lark, it is also Shakespearean—Titania, of course, sleeps on “a bank where the wild thyme blows.”14 The thyme is also the first of a flower list: the Pink, the Jessamine, the Wall-flower, the Carnation The Jonquil, the mild Lilly . . . every Tree And Flower & Herb (31.59–61)

Such a list is both a celebration of the spring and a celebration of art, like the flower lists of Milton, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, or of Moschus’s Lament for Bion15 —and these “lamentations of Beulah over Ololon” are the springtime lamentations of the pastoral elegy. The natural world in Milton is both full of life and part of the long process of human imaginative history. Like Blake in Milton, Vaughan in Silex Scintillans turns to the natural world, as he does nowhere else in his writings. Yet Vaughan is no more concerned with mere objective appearances than Blake is. He cares rather for the active and the dynamic. For this reason his close observation is perhaps most evident in a poem concerned entirely with movement and with process, “The Waterfall”: With what deep murmurs through time’s silent stealth Doth thy transparent, cool and watery wealth Here flowing fall,

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And chide and call As his liquid loose retinue stayed Ling’ring and were of this steep place afraid The common pass Where, clear as glass All must descend Not to an end But quickened by this deep and rocky grave Rise to a longer course more bright and brave (1–10)

Jonathan Post comments that in this poem “Vaughan has heard and recirculated the ‘deep murmurs’ as well as the chiding ‘call’ of water—its alluring force and energy.”16 Stevie Davies, too, comments on the ring of direct experience in this poem, which she describes “an eyewitness report by a most noticing man.”17 She goes on to claim that “in the end Vaughan abandons the natural for the divine.” However, from the beginning, which is quoted above, this poem has concerns beyond the natural. Placed as it is near the end of Silex II in between Death (“The Obsequies”) and Life (“Quickness”), inevitably it deals with the human and the eschatological. It is, in content as in position, a passage between death and life. Such concerns are immediately apparent, as the singular of the first six lines, referring merely to the water, is replaced with the plural of “all must descend,” as water takes on a human significance, falling down “the common pass” to a new “quickness”—to new life. In “The Water-fall” Vaughan writes of a recognition—an experience—in the natural of the human and the divine. Vaughan’s delight in the movement and sound of words and water are plain in his careful observation and expression of the apparent hesitations and renewed currents, with the fine enjambment of “stayed / Lingering,” and the rush of the following four lines. However, again as with Blake, natural experience is blended here with human culture. As always in Vaughan’s poems, echoes of the Bible can be heard (to Revelation, Genesis, and the Epistle to the Romans in the case of “The Water-fall”),18 but, as Donald Dickson notes, the poem also calls on an ancient typological tradition: In addition to the familiar sacramental and Christological implication of the waters of life, “The Waterfall” extends its frame of reference to a more encompassing typological dimension. Not only the typical Christian life but all sacred history can be imaged in terms of water returning to its source—the creation out of the waters of the

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deep, the purification of the waters through Christ’s intercession in time and the perfection of the waters in the fulness of time. The source of the solitary figure’s comfort as he meditates beside the falls, lies in his full understanding of the way the crucial events in his life are closely mirrored in Christ’s.19

In “The Book” especially, Vaughan’s fusion of the natural and the cultural is evident. Writing of the book as being once grass (its paper), tree (the wood of its cover), and beast (its leather binding), he concludes: O knowing, glorious spirit! When Thou shalt restore trees, beasts, and men, When thou shalt make all new again Destroying only death and pain Give him among thy works a place Who in them loved and sought thy face (25–30)

God’s “works”—beast, tree, grass, man as well as the book that incorporates beast, tree, grass, and man—are all loved by the poet, all an intrinsic part of his poetic vision. It is through this love that he prays to be made new in the restitution of all things.20 Consistently both Silex Scintillans and Milton are accepted as remarkable in their connection with other texts—with the Bible and with one admired predecessor. Both are saturated with biblical references and allusions.21 M. A. Mahood writes of Vaughan that “probably there is no poet of the period whose work reveals a more intimate knowledge of the Bible.”22 Vaughan represents a natural world that is shot through with the biblical world: the sight of a rainbow prompts him to imagine “How bright wert thou when Shem’s admiring eye / Thy burnished, flaming Arch did first decry!” (3– 4). As for Blake, Essick and Viscomi note “how thoroughly and consciously Milton intersects with its most important pre-text,” which is, of course, the Bible.23 Certainly the startling combination of Hebrew and British place names makes this apparent to Blake’s most casual reader—if Blake has any casual readers. Similarly both books in quite different ways are exceptionally close to the work of one much-loved predecessor, each a star in the chosen genre. As a writer of religious lyrics, Vaughan is devoted to George Herbert; as a narrative poet and radical, Blake honors Milton. F. E. Hutchinson asserts plausibly of Vaughan’s closeness to George Herbert that “there is no example in English

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literature of one poet borrowing so extensively from another.”24 In tribute to Herbert, Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans recycles Herbert’s subtitle for The Temple, “Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations.” In the preface to the 1655 Silex, Vaughan again pays his respects: “The first, that with any effectual success attempted a diversion of this foul and overflowing stream [of secular verse], was the blessed man, Mr. George Herbert, whose holy life and verse gained many pious converts, (of whom I am the least).”25 In “The Match” Vaughan addresses Herbert as Dear friend! Whose holy, ever-living lines Have done much good To many, and have checked my blood My fierce, wild blood (1– 4)

But if Silex Scintillans compels a comparison with The Temple it provides a contrasting, though not incompatible, view of the religious life, one in which the personal, the natural, and the cultural are combined in an entirely different way. As for Blake, his enterprise in Milton is to take on and transform his great and honored predecessor. The transformation is both critique and tribute, for Milton appears in the poem as an essential part of Blake’s own poetic and intellectual processes (as indeed he was). As Vaughan adopts Herbert’s subtitle, so Blake takes as his epigraph Milton’s line “To justify the ways of God to men,” which suggests immediately that Blake’s poem as a further justification is revisionary. Milton reads Milton, both as poet and as man, critically, as it does the Bible, and assumes the freedom to criticize and reimagine, and to reject the status of both life and works as sacred codes. Milton liberates the poet from his eighteenth-century readers in its insistence that he must be read not like the Law but like the Prophets. “Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets”: the preface to Milton ends with this quotation from Numbers 2:29. Lucy Newlyn writes of Blake’s “active undoing of the effects of Milton’s canonization.”26 This undoing, this “decanonization,” as Newlyn calls it, demands an active engagement between reader and text in a living process that “rouzes the faculties to act,” as Blake felt all art must do.27 Blake had always cared deeply for Milton’s work,28 but during his Felpham years this love was given a new life. His patron at Felpham was William Hayley, the author of an influential Milton biography, who was at that time employed in editing William Cowper’s translations of Milton’s Latin and Italian poems. Be-

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tween 1801 and 1809, years when he was engaged in the long task of producing Milton, Blake also produced watercolor illustrations to three of Milton’s major poems, illustrations that like Milton set out to “rescue Milton’s vision from the conventional misreadings imposed upon it . . . by impercipient critics.”29 Irene Tayler sees his Comus designs (completed at Felpham) and the careful rereading of the poem that they involved as being crucial in the development of Milton. She argues convincingly that “he saw the masque freshly as a kind of synopsis of Miltonic vision and error. His work on the designs, in turn, led him to recognize the need for a far more powerful, broader, and more deeply personal confrontation with the older poet—in short, that these designs moved him to undertake his great prophecy Milton.”30 For both Blake and Vaughan, exploring their own function as poet in a new and painful state of isolation and alienation, a serious engagement, a negotiation, with an older poet, enabled a rethinking of their writing at the highest level. And certainly both poets were directly and profoundly concerned in these texts with their work and their role as writers, a point I will develop nearer the end of this essay. Yet these texts are certainly not only directed at the poetic life alone. Each is exceptional among its author’s works in its concern with the personal, Blake’s narrative as much as Vaughan’s lyrics. While elsewhere both writers are more directly and overtly concerned with the social and the political, here they turn to their own experience, their own consciousness. As Essick and Viscomi claim, Milton is “one of Blake’s most personal poems.”31 It is personal in its narrative structure: The Bard’s Song, which instigates Milton’s journey to “Self-Annihilation,” is in part a mythologized expression of Blake’s unhappiness at William Hayley’s attempts to exercise artistic control. Milton is personal, too, in the visible presence within the engraved text both of Blake himself and of Robert, his long-dead and greatly mourned brother in full-page designs that mirror each other, as well as in the appearance on plate 36 of “Blake’s cottage at Felpham,” looking rather like a child’s drawing of “my house.” Throughout the text, Blake reminds his readers of his physical presence—his “cold hand of clay,” his nerves, brain, foot, and “gross tongue.”32 Vaughan, too, includes within his text his own dead brother, William, in the pilcrowed poems of mourning, some of which also concern Vaughan’s relationship with his first wife, according to Alan Rudrum’s essay in this volume. The personal tone of these “Sacred Poems and Pious Ejaculations” is intensified by the repeated

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use of the first and second person. “I” and “Thou,” Vaughan and God: these are the terms of Silex Scintillans. Both poets are concerned with a heightened experience that is directly personal and that communicates itself through transformed apprehension of the natural world and through interaction with the most powerful literary expressions in their own respective genres. Transformed apprehension and interaction are central concerns to both men, insisting as they do on the dynamic and the active in all forms of life. As I have said elsewhere, “Henry Vaughan rarely considers the immediate effect of natural objects on the senses. He cares chiefly for their dynamism and for their characteristic activity: ‘fountains flow / Birds sing, beasts feed, and the earth stands fast’ (“Rules and Lessons,” 87–88). He sees in the natural world mainly process and movement: the growth and decay of trees and flowers, water continually seeking its level.”33 For Blake, too, movement, both physical and intellectual, is what matters. His most negative image is therefore of fixture— the inanimate, the rock, the stone. Accordingly, the unchanging, unregenerate part of Milton’s life is represented in terms of seven great rocks in the desert—Milton and his sixfold emanation (three wives and three daughters, or six major poems): They sat rangd round him as the rocks of Horeb round the land Of Canaan: and they wrote in thunder smoke & fire His dictate; and his body was the Rock Sinai; that body, Which was on earth born to corruption: & the six Females Are Hor and Peor & Bashan & Abarim & Lebanon & Hermon Seven rocky masses terrible in the Desarts of Midian. (17.11–17)

For Blake, as for Vaughan, “that’s best / Which is not fixed but flies, and flows” (“Affliction,” 25–26). Human life is a matter of experience and response, not of inflexible codes. His view of the natural world is colored in the same way, which explains the frequent negative references to “Nature,” such as the one with which this essay begins. He rejects any understanding of natural objects that sees them as fixed, subject to measure and categorization, lacking the illumination of the imagination. Therefore, false poets are those “who pretend to Poetry that they may destroy Imagination / By imitations of Nature’s Images drawn from Remembrance” (41.24 –24). For him, visionary experience does not, cannot, merely reproduce. It transforms the natural world into the human world. He wrote to his friend, Thomas Butts, from Felpham:

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To my Friend Butts I write My first Vision of Light On the yellow sands sitting . . . . . . . . . . Each grain of Sand Every Stone on the Land Each rock & each hill Each fountain & rill Each herb & each tree Mountain hill Earth & Sea Cloud Meteor & Star Are Men Seen Afar.34

And later, Jerusalem would end with “all Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone. all / Human Forms identified” (99.1–2). So that when Blake illustrated Milton’s lines in “L’Allegro”—“To hear the Lark begin his flight, / And singing startle the dull night”—he shows lark, night, dawn and earth in human forms. He writes of this design: “The Lark is an Angel on the Wing. Dull Night starts from his Watch Tower on a Cloud. The Dawn with her dappled Horses arises above the Earth. The Earth beneath awakes at the Larks Voice.”35 These poets’ concern with transformation and process is evident, too, in the pervasive image of the dawn in both texts, often working as a metaphor for the Second Coming, as it is in Vaughan’s “The Dawning.” There the Second Coming is that time when “the whole Creation shakes off night / And for thy shadow looks the light” (17–18), so that dawn would seem the right time of day for that event. (And Christ himself is repeatedly called the dayspring or the morning star in Silex Scintillans.)36 In “The Morning-Watch,” though, daybreak is rather the time for universal rejoicing: The rising winds, And falling springs Birds, beasts, all things Adore him in their kinds Thus all is hurled In sacred hymns and order, the great chime And symphony of Nature. (12–18)

All moves, all praises: there are no fixed barriers between the natural, the human, and the divine. As for Blake, Milton could be described as a poem about dawn: Milton at the beginning of his

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journey announces “I will go down to the sepulcher to see if morning breaks” (14.20) and by the end of the poem, the lark’s song and the scent of the wild thyme show that morning has indeed broken with the instant of inspiration. The world has changed. For both poets, this concern with process and interaction may well relate to a knowledge of the writings of the Silesian mystic, Jacob Boehme.37 I cannot develop such a complex subject here, and will merely quote Alan Rudrum’s helpful comments on Vaughan and Boehme: Behmen wrote that at the Fall, paradise had not been destroyed, but had merely, so to say, withdrawn behind the appearances of the natural world which we perceive with our everyday consciousness. This withdrawn, secret or hidden paradise, Behmen believed, is still available to the senses of the regenerate man. . . . Or, as Blake was to put it later if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. Behmen’s explanation of the transformed experiences which are available to the regenerate man suits very well many poems of Vaughan’s.38

It also “suits very well” the lark and the wild thyme in Milton. Certainly it is relevant to the similarity perceived by Stevie Davies in one of the few notes of comparison between Blake and Vaughan that I have seen: The sense of wonder in the ordinary which both Thomas [Vaughan] and Henry express is akin to Blake’s reverence for the universe. The world is: “A World of Imagination & Vision. . . . The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing which stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule & Deformity, & by these I shall not regulate my proportions; & some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of a Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers”39

Both Vaughan and Blake, caring so intensely for visionary or imaginative experience, experience in which the divine, the natural, and the human may be fused, describe spiritual life in these terms rather than in the more conventional language of Christian morality, of sins and virtues. Vaughan, indeed, continually accuses himself of sin, and his 1655 preface to Silex Scintillans, as well as such poems as “Isaac’s Marriage” or “The World,” displays a marked austerity and a strong distaste for worldliness.40 Yet his real concern is with religious experience and not with conduct, as is evident in comparing his “Rules and Lessons”

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with Herbert’s “The Church Porch.”41 Both are long poems of exhortation to the good life, but while Herbert’s poem is full of direct moral precepts—“Fly idleness,” “Never exceed thy income,” “By no means run in debt,” and so on42 —Vaughan’s emphasis is on love and praise: 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 bush And oak doth know I AM ; canst thou not sing? O Leave thy cares, and follies! Go this way And thou art sure to prosper all the day. (13–18)

His primary concern in the twenty-four stanzas of this poem is “let the heart / Be God’s alone” (35–36). Similarly, his own sin interests him not in itself but in that it intervenes between him and God. As A. J. Smith says, writing of Vaughan’s representation of his moral life, “he sees himself more as inadequate lover [of God] than as agonist” and fears “every distraction from regenerative love.”43 Vaughan continually expresses his longing to be “all pure love” (“Love-Sick,” 4). So Silex Scintillans is permeated by cries, by pleas, for this love. Lyric after lyric moves toward these imperatives—“O brook it not,” “O hear and heal thy servant,” “O take it off,” “Oh my God, hear my cry / Or let me Die”—all directed to greater closeness with his God.44 Sin is merely a part of “this veil which thou hast broke / And must be broken yet in me”—the veil between poet and God (“CockCrowing,” 37–38). In Milton the contrast between visionary and anti-visionary is even sharper than it is in Silex Scintillans. The central experience of this poem is expressed not in terms of nearness to God but rather in terms of the poet’s union with the poetic spirit as Milton and Los merge with Blake; in Milton such a union is arguably also an experience of union with, or transformation into, the divine. The whole poem is focused on that “Pulsation of the Artery” (29.3), the moment of insight and inspiration, when “Generation is swallowd up in Regeneration” (41.28). The enemy is, quite explicitly, the compulsion to “Moral Virtue (40.21) and to Asserting the Self-righteousness against the Universal Saviour Mocking the Confessors & Martyrs, claiming Self-righteousness With cruel Virtue (22.42– 44)

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In Milton, it is not sin that merits damnation; it is rather “our Virtues & Cruel Goodnesses, [that] have deservd Eternal Death (13.34). With a similar distaste for self-righteousness, Vaughan, alluding in “St. Mary Magdalen” to the self-satisfied language of the ruling Puritans, asserts that “who saint themselves they are no saints” (72). The significance of this word “saint” is highlighted by its position in the final line of the poem and its slightly obtrusive presence in the title, insisting on the sanctity of the forgiven Magdalen. Alan Rudrum, commenting on this line, notes that “nothing seems to have shocked and angered Vaughan more than the Puritans styling themselves saints,” and he quotes as an example Vaughan’s description of the Puritans in The Mount of Olives as “the hypocritical factious pretenders to sanctity.”45 This shared aversion to a concept of the spiritual life that focuses on sin and judgment politicizes both texts. Their insistence on religion as direct spiritual experience allows these poets, both of whom perceived themselves as marginalized politically at the periods at which these texts were produced, to strike out against the dominant ideologies of their times. They both align themselves with Grace as opposed to the Law, with the New Testament rather than the Old, with Christ rather than with Moses. In so doing, of course, they align their opponents with a discarded and inadequate theology. Placing himself thus, Vaughan implies a distinction between the true spiritual life and a self-righteous insistence on moral virtue, which he regards as characteristic of the Commonwealth. Through a similar opposition, Blake too condemns the sterility of the increasingly moralistic dominant religious attitudes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and the establishment that they support.46 In the years that produced Milton, the burgeoning middle classes were entrenching their class identity through an insistence on an ideal femininity, distinguished by chastity and an unblemished reputation. Both poets oppose, on both religious and political grounds, what they perceive as a predominant spiritual complacency and censoriousness. For both Vaughan and Blake this distaste for self-righteousness meant a concern with its opposite, forgiveness. Forgiveness, after all, is a matter of interaction and process, as opposed to the fixities of judgment. Vaughan, for instance, takes Mary Magdalen as the subject of a poem because her story is one of love and forgiveness. Similarly, in Jerusalem, Blake would retell the story of Mary, the mother of Jesus, as a sort of Magdalen, pregnant, unmarried, and rejoicing in the need of forgiveness, both human and divine. Indeed Jerusalem is entirely centered on forgive-

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ness—personal, spiritual, and political. In Vaughan’s case, Silex Scintillans culminates in a plea for religious and political accord. In “L’Envoy,” the final poem of that work, what Vaughan asks for his political opponents is not punishment but a change of heart, so that there can be one loving Christian community again in Britain. He employs the Puritans’ own catchphrases (“saints,” “zeal”) against their position. Yet in this final poem, in contrast to “St. Mary Magdalen” and other poems, he uses this vocabulary, not in anger or bitterness, but in an attempt at Christian unity. He prays: Dry up their arms who vex thy spouse And take the glory of thy house To deck their own; then give thy saints That faithful zeal which neither faints Nor wildly burns, but meekly still Dares own the truth, and show the ill. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dear Lord, do this! And then let grace Descend and hallow all the place. Incline each hard heart to do good And cement us with thy son’s blood, That, like true sheep, all in one fold We may be fed, and one mind hold. (33– 48)

In the same way Blake at the end of Jerusalem would write of an England reawakened and humanized “through the Forgiveness of sins in the Covenant of Jehovah” (98.45). In Milton, judgment and condemnation have no part in “the Divine Humanity and mercy.” It is Satan who claims to be “God the judge of all, the living & the dead,” to “hold the Balances of Right & Just” as well as the sword. He asserts: I alone am God & I alone in Heavn & Earth Of all that live dare utter this, others tremble & bow Till All Things become One Great Satan, in Holiness Oppos’d to Mercy, & the Divine Delusion Jesus be no more. (38.51–39.2)

“Heavens builded on cruelty” (32.3) have no part in Blake’s cosmology. Forgiveness is obviously a social rather than a private act and these poems too are social acts—social acts not in spite of their insistence on personal experience, but because of this insistence.

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For years Silex Scintillans was read as a purely religious collection, occasionally flawed by ill-considered allusions to the political situation. While critics now increasingly acknowledge the political implications of Silex Scintillans, Milton is still often condemned by Blake scholars as being a retreat from the overt radicalism of the early 1790s.47 I would argue that both texts are deeply engaged in similar ways with the difficult political situations in which their writers lived. Both poets compel an awareness of the possibility and the desirability of intense spiritual experience, an experience that includes the greatest goods they know, fusing the world of human culture with their imaginative interaction with the natural world. (And, evidently and significantly, these great goods also received lip service at least from both their societies at large, as, say, “The Book of Revelation” and “The Book of Nature.”) They oppose this spiritual experience to the dominant religious attitudes of their cultures, implying that these dominant attitudes preclude such valuable experience. This counterpositioning works strategically as well as aesthetically: that is, it works strategically as it works aesthetically, offering the heightened experience that, for a time at least, acts to neutralize self-righteousness and censoriousness. In addition, both these texts insist on their own power to act, to cause change. In them Blake and Vaughan represent their writing as the most serious of activities. Silex Scintillans is dedicated to “MY MOST MERCIFUL, MY MOST LOVING, AND DEARLY LOVED REDEEMER, THE ONLY HOLY AND JUST ONE, JESUS CHRIST, THE SON OF THE LIVING GOD, AND THE SACRED VIRGIN MARY,” a dedication that in itself proclaims the seriousness of the task in hand, the seriousness of writing and publishing. In addition, the dedicatory verses represent the book as Christ’s own work: “No, nor can I say, this is mine, / For, dearest Jesus, ’tis all thine” (21–22), a high claim indeed for his work. Blake, too, sees Christ as making up for the poet’s own inadequacies O how can I with my gross tongue that cleaveth to the dust Tell of the Four-fold Man, in starry numbers fitly orderd Or how can I with my cold hand of clay! But thou O Lord Do with me as thou wilt! For I am nothing, and vanity. If thou chuse to elect a worm, it shall remove the mountains. (20.15–19)

The contexts of these texts as a whole disallow any interpretation of such passages as directed only at the private spiritual life. They are clearly directed to the life of the nation as well as to the

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life of the individual—it is Blake’s Albion who must be awakened. Moreover both poets assert clearly that poetry is powerful, that poetry does indeed, pace W. H Auden, make things happen. The omnipresence of such potent predecessors as Herbert in Vaughan’s poems and of Milton in Blake’s poem repeatedly makes this claim. Vaughan expresses in his 1655 preface his hope to make his poetic talent “as useful now in the public, as it hath been to me in private.”48 Such concerns about the power of poetry are reiterated in Silex Scintillans by Vaughan’s anxiety about the secular poetry from which he wished to dissociate himself, the “quaint follies, sugared sin” of which he writes in “Idle Verse” (1), the “evil disease” he condemns at length in his 1655 preface. The agonized seriousness of his dedication to religious poetry is represented in the most extreme terms in “Anguish”: O! ’tis an easy thing To write and sing; But to write true, unfeigned verse Is very hard! O God, disperse These weights, and give my spirit leave To act as well as to conceive! O my God, hear my cry; Or let me die!— (13–20)

This assertion of the seriousness of poetry is also surely an important part of “Cock-Crowing.” The parallel between the cock’s relationship to the sun and the poet’s relationship to God is evidently the basis of the poem. The final implication of this parallel, though, is of the extraordinary power of the poet. The bird has within it a “sunny seed,” which keeps it watching for the sun, but it is also active in calling up the sun, “their little grain expelling night” (8). The parallel between bird and poet suggests that the “love-sick soul” (34), the poet, calling on God with the repeated imperatives of the last stanza, as the cockcrow summons the sun, has eventually the power to prevail on God. The poet himself is the “Cock-Crowing.” Milton, self-evidently, represents poetry as potent, even as dangerous. “Miltons Religion is the Cause” (22.39) of all the social and intellectual horrors the poem addresses, from deism to war; Milton’s journey to “Self-Annihilation” is the epitome of regeneration. And, as David Punter notes, the entire action of Milton is represented as the result of poetry. Punter quotes the beginning of the poem:

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What at length mov’d Milton to this unexampled deed? A Bard’s prophetic Song! For sitting at eternal tables Terrific among the Sons of Albion in chorus solemn & loud A Bard broke forth! All sat attentive to the awful man (2.21–24)

He goes on to comment that “The point of this structure is to show that human action is not merely reflected in but actually inspired by the fictions of the poet.”49 Jerusalem is to be built not above but “here / In England’s green and pleasant land.” These poems, although they are conceived in periods of pain and seclusion, are not poems of retreat. They use the advantages of seclusion—the new force given to human energies by channeling them, the intensification of the most important natural and cultural experiences—in poems that direct themselves beyond solitary experience. The resemblances between these two texts result from the force with which two Christian poets, widely informed about both orthodox and less orthodox religious debate, exploit the advantages of their solitude.

II Throughout this essay I have frequently referred to the work of Alan Rudrum—his editions, his commentary, his criticism. If I were to footnote all my intellectual debt to him the apparatus would be as long as the essay. For almost forty years we have been talking about Blake and Vaughan—and other writers—almost as much as about the various perfections and imperfections of each other and of our children, (and more recently the unqualified perfections of our grandchildren). This part of his Festschrift celebrates him by giving him back many of his own thoughts— transformed, I hope, in a way both Blake and Vaughan might approve.

NOTES 1. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, edited by David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor, 1988), 665. All further references to Blake allude to this edition. References to the poems give first the plate and then the line. References to Blake’s prose writings and his letters, including the poems in the letters, refer to this edition as Erdman followed by a page number. 2. “The Chimney Sweeper,” Songs of Experience, l.11. 3. For commentary on Vaughan’s title pages see Alan Rudrum, “Paradoxical Persona: Henry Vaughan’s Self-Fashioning,” Huntington Library Quarterly 62 (1999): 351–68.

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4. Peter Ackroyd speaks of the closeness to nature of The Four Zoas but judging from his examples and my own readings, the references to the natural world in that poem are sparse compared to those in Milton. See Blake (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995), 238. 5. Vaughan’s preface claims that when he wrote the last poems in Silex he was “nigh unto death.” See Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 142. All references to Vaughan’s poems allude to this edition and are made in parentheses in the body of the text. Blake seems to have been suffering from acute melancholy in his Felpham years. He wrote to William Hayley in 1805: “You Dear Sir are one who has my Particular Gratitude having conducted me thro Three that would have been the Darkest Years that ever Mortal Sufferd. which were renderd through your means a Mild & Pleasant Slumber. I speak of Spiritual Things, Not of Natural” (E 767). 6. The dating of Milton is a complex issue. The title page is dated 1804— after the Felpham years, 1800–1803—but he was at work on the poem for many years after that date. See Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), for a fuller discussion. However, the poem is entirely concerned with the Felpham years: the moment of inspiration is placed in the garden of Blake’s cottage at Felpham (shown in one of the designs) and the Bard’s Song alludes to Blake’s relationship with his patron at Felpham, William Hayley. 7. A full account of the personages and places of Blake’s narrative would not be appropriate here. The brief explanations I provide are intended for readers who may be comparatively unfamiliar with Blake. Alicia Ostriker, in her edition of Blake’s poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), provides useful notes and glosses. 8. Susan Fox describes these passages as matching eighteen line stanzas. See Poetic Form in Blake’s Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 133. 9. Blake’s spelling and punctuation are, of course, idiosyncratic. 10. Both lark and wild thyme are sadly far less common now. 11. Susan Fox believes that the lark’s song represents “the instant when spring and fall are united,” supposing that a “waving cornfield” is only to be seen in the autumn (136). However, Blake’s is an English cornfield—a field, that is, of a cereal crop, such as wheat or oats—that is green and waving in the spring. 12. William Blake, Milton, A Poem, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 185. 13. Cymbeline 2.3.21. 14. A Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.249. 15. “Lycidas” 142–51; The Winter’s Tale (4.4.116–28) ; Moschus, “Lament for Bion” 5–7; Shepheardes Calender April, 60–63, 136– 44. 16. “Henry Vaughan” in The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 260. 17. Henry Vaughan (Bridgend, Wales: Seren, 1995), 146. 18. Vaughan, Complete Poems, 638–39. 19. Donald R. Dickson, The Fountain of Living Waters: The Typology of the Waters of Life in Henry Vaughan and Thomas Traherne (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 160–61.

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20. Alan Rudrum, “For then the Earth shall be all Paradise,” Scintilla 4 (2000): 39–52. 21. See Holly Faith Nelson’s essay in this volume. 22. In Poetry and Humanism (London, 1950) reprinted in Essential Articles for the Study of Henry Vaughan, ed. Alan Rudrum (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1987), 7. 23. William Blake, Milton, Robert Essick and Joseph Viscomi, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 13. 24. Henry Vaughan, A Life and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947), 102–3. 25. Vaughan, Complete Poems, 142. 26. Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 259. On Blake and Milton, see also Florence Sandler, “The Iconoclastic Enterprise: Blake’s Critique of Milton’s Religion,” Blake Studies 5 (1972):16; Joseph A. Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse: Blake’s Idea of Milton (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975); David Riede, “Blake’s Milton: On Membership in the Church Paul” in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and the Traditions, Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson, ed. (New York: Methuen, 1988), 257–77; Jackie DiSalvo, War of Titans: Blake’s Critique of Milton and the Politics of Religion (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983); Stephen C. Behrendt, The Moment of Explosion: Blake and the Illustrations of Milton (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); John B. Pierce, “Re-writing Milton: Orality and Writing in Blake’s Milton,” Studies in Romanticism 39 (2000): 449–70. 27. Letter to Trusler, Erdman, 702. 28. “Milton loved me in childhood & shewd me his face,” Erdman, 707. 29. Behrendt, 1. He adds that Blake felt that “the poetry inherently invited” such misgivings. 30. “Say What First Mov’d Blake? Blake’s Comus Designs and Milton,” in Blake’s Sublime Allegory: Essays on the Four Zoas, Milton, Jerusalem, Stuart Curran and Joseph A. Wittreich, ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973), 234. 31. Blake, Milton, 14 32. See, for instance, Erdman 114: 20.15–24 and Erdman 96: 2.5–8. 33. “Cock-Crowing,” Scintilla 5 (2001): 152. 34. In a letter to Thomas Butts, Erdman, 712. 35. E 682. 36. See, for instance, “Jesus Weeping,” 13 and “The Jews,” 22. 37. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Erdman 39. 38. Alan Rudrum, Henry Vaughan, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1981), 36–37. 39. Davies, 129–30. 40. Alan Rudrum speaks of the “baroque voluptuousness” that is present verbally in “Isaac’s Marriage” (in conversation). 41. Patrick Grant says Silex Scintillans attempts “to synthesize Vaughan’s guilt-culture Augustinian heritage with the innovative enlightenment philosophy of the Hermetists.” He compares Herbert’s “Giddiness” to Vaughan’s “Man.” See Patrick Grant, The Transformation of Sin: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974), 134, 136. 42. George Herbert, Complete Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941), 6–24.

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43. In The Metaphysics of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), reprinted in Essential Articles, 302, 309. 44. “And Do They So,” 47; “The Match,” 34; “Cock-Crowing,” 43, 47; “Anguish,” 19, 20. 45. See Vaughan, Complete Poems, 618–19. 46. See June Sturrock, “Maenads, Young Ladies, and the Lovely Daughters of Albion,” in Blake, History, Politics, Jackie DiSalvo and G. A. Rosso, ed. (New York: Garland, 1998), 339– 49. 47. For Vaughan, see Hutchinson, 180. For Blake, see, for instance, Eric V. Chandler, “The Anxiety of Production: Blake’s Shift from Collective Hope to Writing Self,” in Blake, Politics, History, 53–79. 48. Vaughan, Complete Poems, 142. 49. David Punter, “Blake: Social Relations of Poetic Form,” Literature and History 8 (1982) 202). Pierce, “Re-writing Milton,” discusses the way in which the whole nature of the work “presupposes a significant value in the written word, its transformations and its transformative power” (449).

Principal Publications of Alan Rudrum BOOKS “Johnson” in Poems of Johnson and Goldsmith (editor with Peter Dixon). London: Edward Arnold, 1966. A Critical Commentary on Paradise Lost. London: Macmillan, 1966. A Critical Commentary on “Comus” & Shorter Poems. London: Macmillan, 1967. Modern Judgements on Milton (editor). London: Macmillan, 1968. A Critical Commentary on “Samson Agonistes.” London: Macmillan, 1969. The Complete Poems of Henry Vaughan (editor). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976; reprinted with revisions, 1983; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981; reprinted as Penguin Classic in 1995. Writers of Wales: Henry Vaughan. University of Wales Press and the Welsh Arts Council, 1981. The Works of Thomas Vaughan (editor). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Essential Articles on Henry Vaughan (editor). Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1986. The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth Century Verse and Prose (editor with Holly Faith Nelson and Joseph Black). Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000.

ARTICLES

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NOTES

“Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Book’: A Hermetic Poem.” AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 16 (1961): 161– 65. “Henry Vaughan and the Theme of Transfiguration.” Southern Review (Adelaide) 1 (1963): 54 –68. “Coleridge’s ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.’ ” Southern Review (Adelaide) 2 (1964): 30– 42. “Some Errors in A. E. Waite’s Transcription of Thomas Vaughan’s MS Notebook.” Notes & Queries, n.s., 13, no. 7 (July 1966): 258–59. “English Teaching in Our Universities.” The Listener, 28 April 1966, 616–17. “Vaughan’s ‘The Night’: Some Hermetic Notes.” Modern Language Review 64, no. 1 (1969): 11–19. “Polygamy in Paradise Lost.” Essays in Criticism 20, no. 1 (1970): 18–23. “The Influence of Alchemy in the Poems of Henry Vaughan.” Philological Quarterly 49 (1970): 469–80.

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“The Kent State Shootings.” The Listener, 8 October 1970, 472–73. “On the Teaching of Poetry.” Rendezvous: Journal of Arts and Letters 6 (1971): 45–50. “Vaughan’s Welshness: the Verb trample.” English Language Notes 9, no. 2 (1971): 115–18. “Philosophical Implication in Lawrence’s Women in Love.” The Dalhousie Review 51, no. 2 (1971): 240–50. “Vaughan’s ‘The Tempest’: A Source in Cornelius Agrippa.” Notes & Queries 19, no. 1 (1972): 19. “An Emendation in Vaughan.” Notes & Queries 20, no. 5 (1973): 165. “An Aspect of Vaughan’s Hermeticism: The Doctrine of Cosmic Sympathy.” Studies in English Literature 14 (1974): 129–38. “Some Remarks on Henry Vaughan’s Secular Poems.” Poetry Wales 2, no. 2 (1975): 36–54. “A Crux in Henry Vaughan’s Waterfall: OED Defended.” The Anglo-Welsh Review 20, no. 55 (1975): 83–86. “Thomas Vaughan’s Lumen de Lumine: An Interpretation of Thalia.” In Literature and the Occult: Essays in Comparative Literature. Edited by Luanne Frank, 234 – 43. Arlington: University of Texas at Arlington Press, 1977. “The Penguin Edition of Henry Vaughan’s Complete Poems: Corrigenda.” Notes & Queries 24 (1977): 556. “Henry Vaughan.” Times Literary Supplement, 25 February 1983, 190. “Theology and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England.” The Clark Newsletter: Bulletin of the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies 15 (Fall 1988): 5–7. “Henry Vaughan, the Liberation of the Creatures, and Seventeenth Century English Calvinism.” The Seventeenth Century 4 (1989): 33–54. A letter headed “Charles Burney” in The Times Literary Supplement (no. 4682), 25 December 1992, 13. “A Nautical Metaphor in Henry Vaughan’s ‘Cock-Crowing.’ ” English Language Notes 33, no. 3 (March 1996): 12–14. “T. S. Eliot on Lancelot Andrewes’s ‘word within a word.’ ” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 9, no. 4 (Fall 1996): 43– 44. “The Problem of Sexual Reference in George Herbert’s verse.” George Herbert Journal 21 (1997–1998): 19–32. “Discerning the Spirit in Samson Agonistes : The Dalila Episode.” In “All in All”: Unity, Diversity and the Miltonic Perspective. Edited by Charles W. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt, 245–58. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, London: Associated University Presses, 1999. “Paradoxical Persona: Henry Vaughan’s Self-Fashioning.” Huntington Library Quarterly 62 (1999): 351–68. “Resistance, Collaboration and Silence: Henry Vaughan and Breconshire Royalism.” In The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination. Edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, 102–18. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. “For then the Earth shall be all Paradise: Milton, Vaughan and the NeoCalvinists on the Ecology of the Hereafter.” Scintilla: The Journal of the Usk Valley Vaughan Association 4 (2000): 39–52.

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“Henry Vaughan and Rowland Watkyns, neighbours but not friends: a biographical puzzle reconsidered.” Scintilla: The Journal of the Usk Valley Vaughan Association 5 (2001): 61–71. “Royalist Lyric.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the English Civil War. Edited by N. H. Keeble, 181–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. “Thomas Vaughan.” In The Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism. Edited by R. van den Broek, J.P. Brach, A. Faivre, and W. Hanegraaff. Leiden: Brill, 2002. “Narrative, Typology and Politics in Henry Vaughan’s ‘Isaac’s Marriage.’ ” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 11, no. 1 (2001–2002): 78–90. “Ethical Vegetarianism in Seventeenth-Century Britain: Its Roots in SixteenthCentury European Theological Debate.” The Seventeenth Century 18 (2003): 76–92. “Milton Scholarship and the agon over Samson Agonistes,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65, nos. 3 and 4 (2003), 465– 88. Life of Henry Vaughan, for The New Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press (in press). Life of Rowland Watkyns, for The New Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press (in press). Life of William Richards, for The New Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press (in press). Bibliographies for Thomas and Henry Vaughan, for the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, (in press).

REVIEWS Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances. In The Gong (University of Nottingham) (Autumn 1957): 37–39. D. Traversi, Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V. In Enquiry (University of Nottingham) (February 1959): 66–68. R. Garner, Henry Vaughan: Experience and the Tradition. In AUMLA (1960): 71–73. E. C. Pettet, Of Paradise and Light: A Study of Vaughan’s “Silex Scintillans.” In AUMLA 15 (1961): 90–93. S. L. Goldberg, The Classical Temper, A Study of James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” In Australian Book Review 1, no. 1 (1961): 13–14. E. D. Hirsch Jr., Wordsworth and Schelling: A Typological Study of Romanticism. In AUMLA 16 (1961): 209–11. Alan Price, Synge and Anglo-Irish Drama. In AUMLA 17 (1962): 116–17. E. L. Marilla (ed.): The Secular Poems of Henry Vaughan. In AUMLA 18 (1962): 261–63. V. de S. Pinto, Enthusiast in Wit: A Portrait of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester 1647–1680. In AUMLA 19 (1963): 144 – 45. Morris West, The Shoes of the Fisherman. In Australian Book Review 2, no. 9 (July 1963): 142– 43. R. A. Durr, On the Mystical Poetry of Henry Vaughan. In AUMLA 20 (1963): 369–71.

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Waldo F. McNeir (ed.): Studies in English Renaissance Literature. In AUMLA 21 (1964): 103–5. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. In AUMLA 22 (1964): 302–3. Desiree Hirst, Hidden Riches: Traditional Symbolism from the Renaissance to Blake. In AUMLA (1964): 304 –5. K. W. Salter, Thomas Traherne, Mystic and Poet. In AUMLA 24 (1965): 301–2. Louis L. Martz, The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton. In Southern Review (Adelaide) 1, no. 4 (1965): 84 –86. E. L. McAdam and George Milne (eds.): The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (Volume 6: Poems). In English Language Notes 3, no. 2 (1965): 139– 42. The Complete Plays of D. H. Lawrence. In The Listener 85, no. 1924 (February 1966): 214 –15. H. T. Moore, D. H. Lawrence and His World; Keith Sagar, The Art of D. H. Lawrence; H. M. Daleski, The Forked Flame; and David J. Gordon, D. H. Lawrence as a Literary Critic. In The Listener (1 September 1966): 326. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin; Barbara Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic; and Wayne Shumaker, Unpremeditated Verse. In Southern Review (Adelaide) 3, no. 2 (1968): 184 –88. Colin Clarke, River of Dissolution: D. H. Lawrence and English Romanticism; Harry T. Moore (ed.): D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Survey. In Queen’s Quarterly 77, no. 3 (1970): 454 –55. “This Same Hermetic Dark Moist Cloud,” a review of Kathleen Raine, Blake and Tradition. In Southern Review (Adelaide) 4, no. 2 (1970): 172–75. Marcia R. Pointon, Milton and English Art. In West Coast Review 6 (1971): 56– 57. “Vaughan’s Each,” a review of Imilda Tuttle, A Concordance to Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans. In Essays in Criticism 21, no. 1 (1971): 86–91. I. F. Stone, The Killings at Kent State. In The Listener, 13 May 1971, 623–24. Kenneth Friedenreich, Henry Vaughan. In West Coast Review 14, no. 2 (1979): 62–64. Anthony Low, Love’s Architecture: Devotional Modes in Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. In Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981): 251–52. David Trotter, The Poetry of Abraham Cowley. In Notes & Queries 28, no. 4 (1981): 337–39. Louis L. Martz, Poet of Exile: A Study of Milton’s Poetry. In English Language Notes 19 (1982): 284 –86. Heather A. R. Asals, Equivocal Predication: George Herbert’s Way to God. In University of Toronto Quarterly 51 (1982): 417–19. Jonathan F. S. Post, Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision. In The Times Literary Supplement, 24 June 1983, 681. “The Novels of Barbara Pym.” In The Reader (Vancouver, B.C.) 2, no. 3 (1983): 10–12. Thomas O. Calhoun, Henry Vaughan: The Achievement of “Silex Scintillans.” In The Review of English Studies, n.s., 35, no. 139 (1984): 381–83. Anthony Raspa, The Emotive Image: Jesuit Poetics in the English Renaissance. In The University of Toronto Quarterly 53 (1984): 421–22.

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Edward Shils, The Academic Ethic. In CAUT Bulletin 31, no. 8 (December 1984): 10. D. M. Rosenberg, Oaten Reeds and Trumpets (co-written with June Sturrock.) In The Yearbook of English Studies 15 (1985): 289–90. Roman R. Dubinski, ed., Alexander Brome, Poems. In English Studies in Canada 11 (1985): 91–93. Robert Wilcher, Andrew Marvell. In Times Literary Supplement, 28 February 1986, 228. Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers. In The Reader 5, no. 2 (1986): 21–22. George Parfitt, English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century; and Graham Parry, Seventeenth-Century Poetry: The Social Context. In The Review of English Studies, n.s., 37, no. 148 (1986): 567–68. John R. Roberts, John Donne: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism, 1968–1978. In The Yearbook of English Studies 17 (1987): 272–73. John R. Roberts, Richard Crashaw: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism. 1632–1980. In The Review of English Studies, n.s., 38, no. 150 (1987): 250– 51. Noel K. Thomas, Henry Vaughan, Poet of Revelation; Louis L. Martz, ed., George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. In The Times Literary Supplement, 27 March 1987, 316. Ronald R. Bond, ed., Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570). In The University of Toronto Quarterly 58 (1988): 106–7. Harold Toliver, Lyric Provinces in the English Renaissance. In ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature19, no. 2 (1988): 87–90. Stephen L. Collins, From Divine Cosmos to Sovereign State: An Intellectual History of Consciousness and the Idea of Order in Renaissance England. In The Times Literary Supplement, 22–28 September 1989, 1036. Thomas O. Calhoun, Laurence Heyworth, Allan Pritchard, eds., The Collected Works of Abraham Cowley, Volume I. In The Times Literary Supplement, 7–13 September 1990, 953. John R. Roberts, ed., New Perspectives on the Life and Art of Richard Crashaw. In Analytical & Enumerative Bibliography 4 (1990): 217–24. Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature 1641–1660; and Raymond A. Anselment, Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War. In The Review of English Studies, n.s., 42 (1991): 261–62. Michael Wilding, Dragon’s Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution. In Renaissance Studies 6 (1992): 101–6. Arthur L. Clements, Poetry of Contemplation: John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and the Modern Period; and Sidney Gottlieb, ed., Approaches to Teaching the Metaphysical Poets. In The Review of English Studies, n.s., 43 (1992): 425–27. Jonathan Sawday and Thomas Healy, eds., Literature and the English Civil War. In The Review of English Studies 43, no. 172 (1992): 563–65. Stephen M. Fallon, Milton Among the Philosophers. In Renaissance Studies 7, no. 1 (1993): 121–25. A. B. Chambers, Andrew Marvell and Edmund Waller: Seventeenth-Century Praise and Restoration Satire. In The Review of English Studies 45, no. 178 (1994): 252–53.

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Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature 1640–1660. In Renaissance Studies 7, no. 4 (1993): 447–51. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power. George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship, Thomas Heffernan, Art and Emblem: Early Seventeenth-Century English Poetry of Devotion. In The Review of English Studies 45, no. 179 (1994): 419–20. Ernest W. Sullivan III, The Influence of John Donne. His Uncollected Seventeenth-Century Printed Verse. In Analytical and Enumerative Bibliography, n.s., 8 (1994): 70–75. Nicholas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher (1555–1626). In The Review of English Studies 45, no. 180 (November 1994): 556–57. Diane Kelsey McColley, A Gust for Paradise. Milton’s Eden and the Visual Arts, In Renaissance Studies 8 (1994): 326–30. Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. In Renaissance Studies 8, no. 1 (1994): 110–14. Mario di Cesare, ed., George Herbert. The Temple. A Diplomatic Edition of the Bodleian Manuscript (Tanner 307). In Seventeenth-Century News 56 (1998): 100–102. Albert C. Labriola and Michael Lieb, eds., Milton Studies 33. The Miltonic Samson. In Milton Review 12 (a six-page review in electronic format). David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660. In Seventeenth-Century News 58 (2000): 58–63. Peter Davidson, ed., Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse, 1625–1660. In Seventeenth-Century News 58 (2000): 81–85. Joanna Moody, ed., The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1559–1605. In Seventeenth-Century News 58 (2000), 251–56. Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660. In Seventeenth-Century News 60 (2002): 21–23.

Consolidated Bibliography A Directory for the Publique Worship of God. London, 1645. Abbot, George. Brief Notes upon the Whole Book of Psalms. London, 1651. Abraham, Lyndy. A Dictionary of Alchemical Terminology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a Morethan-Human World. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996. Ackroyd, Peter. Blake. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1995. Allen, Brigid. “The Vaughans at Jesus College, Oxford, 1638– 48.” Scintilla 4 (2000): 1–10. Allen, Don Cameron. “Henry Vaughan’s ‘Salome on Ice.’ ” Philological Quarterly 23 (1944): 84 –85. Allestree, Richard. Sermon Preached at Hampton-Court on . . . the Anniversary of His Sacred Majesty’s Most Happy Return. London, 1662. Alter, Robert. The World of Biblical Literature. New York: Basic, 1992. Andreae, Johann Valentin. Christianopolis. Edited by Edward H. Thompson. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999. Appian. Roman History. Translated by “W. B.” London, 1578. Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 3 vols. New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947. Aries, Phillipe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981. ———. Western Attitudes Toward Death. Translated by Patricia M. Ranum. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Armitage, David, et al., eds. Milton and Republicanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Arndt, William F., and F. Wilbur Gingrich. Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature. Translated and adapted from the German of Walter Bauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. Ashworth, W. B., Jr. “Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance.” In Cultures of Natural History. Edited by Nicholas Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, 17–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Augustine, City of God. In A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Edited by Philip Schaff. 1st series, 14 vols. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978–1979. ———. Confessiones: Lateinisch und Deutsch. Edited by Joseph Bernhart. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984. Bacon, Francis. Sylva Sylvarum, or, A Natural History. London, 1664.

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———. The Works of Francis Bacon. Edited by James Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath. 14 vols. 1857–1874. Reprint, Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag, 1963. Barbour, Reid. English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,1998. Beacon, Thomas. The Sicke Mans Salve. London, 1582. Bell, Ilona. “Herbert and Harvey: In the Shadow of the Temple.” In Like Season’d Timber: New Essays on George Herbert. Edited by Edmund Miller and Robert Di Yanni, 255–80. New York: Peter Lang, 1987. Belon, Pierre. Portraits d’oyeaux, animaux, serpens, herbes, arbres, homes et femmes d’Arabie & Egypte. Paris, 1557. Behrendt, Stephen C. The Moment of Explosion: Blake and the Illustrations of Milton. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. Typology and Early American Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972. Biester, James. Lyric Wonder: Rhetoric and Wit in Renaissance English Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Blake, N. F. A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Edited by David V. Erdman. New York: Anchor, 1988. Blake, William. Milton, A Poem. Edited by Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Blessington, Francis C. “Paradise Lost” and the Classical Epic. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979. Boehrer, Bruce. “Milton and the Reasoning of Animals: Variations on a Theme by Plutarch.” Milton Studies 39 (2000): 50–73. Bock, Gisela, et al., eds. Machiavelli and Republicanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Boethius. The Theological Tractates: The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by H. F. Stewart and E. K. Rand. London: Heinemann, 1967. Booty, John E. The Book of Common Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976. ———. “George Herbert: The Temple and The Book of Common Prayer.” Mosaic 12 (1979): 75–90. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Edited by John B. Thompson. 1991. Reprint, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. Boyde, Patrick. Dante, Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Bradford, William. Of Plymouth Plantation. Edited by Samuel Eliot Morrison. New York: Knopf, 1952. Bradstreet, Anne. The Works. Edited by Jeannine Hensley. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. Browne, Thomas. Sir Thomas Browne’s Works. Edited by Simon Wilkin. 4 vols. London, 1826–35. ———. Pseudodoxia Epidemica. Edited by Robin Robbins. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.

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Contributors MATTHIAS BAUER, professor of English Literature at the University of the Saarland, is the author of Das Leben als Geschichte: Poetische Reflexion in Dickens’ David Copperfield (1991) and Mystical Linguistics: George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan (forthcoming). He worked as an editor of Handbuch der historischen Buchbestande. ¨ He is a co-founder and editor of Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate. DONALD R. DICKSON, professor of English at Texas A&M University, is the author of The Tessera of Antilia: Utopian Brotherhoods & Secret Societies in the Early Seventeenth Century (1998) and The Fountain of Living Waters: The Typology of the Waters of Life in Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne (1987). He has edited and translated Thomas and Rebecca Vaughan’s Aqua Vitæ: Non Vitis: Or, The radical Humiditie of Nature: Mechanically, and Magically dissected By the Conduct of Fire, and Ferment (2001) and was a contributing editor of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne: The Anniversaries, Epicedes and Obsequies (1995). He has published articles in such journals as Renaissance Quarterly, The Seventeenth Century, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, Renaissance and Reformation, John Donne Journal, and George Herbert Journal, among others. KAREN L. EDWARDS, lecturer in English at Exeter University, is the author of Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in Paradise Lost (1999). She wrote such articles on Milton as “Wasting Spirit and Redeeming Time” in Milton and the Ends of Time; “Resisting Representation: All about Milton’s Eve” in Exemplaria, “Susannas Apologie and the Politics of Privity” in Literature and History; and “Comenius, Milton, and the Temptation to Ease” in Milton Studies. She is working on A Milton Bestiary. N. H. KEEBLE, professor of English at Stirling University, is the author of Richard Baxter, Puritan Man of Letters (1982) and The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century 377

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England (1987); he has edited The Autobiography of Richard Baxter (1974); Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1984); Handbook of English and Celtic Studies in the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland (1988); John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus: Tercentenary Essays (1988); Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (1991); Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson (1995, 2000); and The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (2001). He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. JOHN LEONARD, professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, is the author of Naming in Paradise (1990) and editor of Milton’s Complete Poems (1998) and Paradise Lost (2000). Chapters in books include the first and second editions of The Cambridge Companion to Milton (1989, 1999) and the forthcoming Blackwell’s Companion to Milton (2001). He has published articles on Marlowe, Milton, and Lanyer in such journals as English Literary Renaissance, Essays in Criticism, Milton Studies, Milton, Philological Quarterly, Renaissance and Reformation, and the Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Among his honors and distinctions is the James Holly Hanford Prize, 1990. DIANE KELSEY MCCOLLEY, professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author of Milton’s Eve (1983); A Gust for Paradise: Milton’s Eden and the Visual Arts (1993), which won the James Holly Hanford Award for distinguished scholarship in Milton studies; and Poetry and Music in Seventeenth-Century England (1997). She is the author of numerous articles, including “The Copious Matter of My Song,” in Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context (1994); “Beneficent Hierarchies: Reading Milton Greenly,” in Spokesperson Milton: Voices in Contemporary Criticism (1994); and “Milton and the Sexes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Milton (1992). JONATHAN NAUMAN is secretary of the Usk Valley Vaughan Association. His articles include “The Publication of Thalia Rediviva and the Literary Reputation of Katherine Philips” in Huntington Library Quarterly, “A New Poem Is New Evidence: Henry Vaughan and James Howell Reconsidered” in Notes & Queries, “Herbert the Hermetist: Vaughan’s Reading of The Temple” in George Herbert Journal, and other essays in such journals as Philological Quarterly and Yeats Eliot Review.

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HOLLY FAITH NELSON, assistant professor of English at Trinity Western University, is the co-editor of the Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Prose and Verse (2000), and author of “ ‘Worms in the dull earth of ignorance’: Female Authorship and Zoosemiotics in the Works of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle” in English Language Notes; “Marginal Voices and Transgressive Borders in Hogg’s Epic Queen Hynde” in Studies in Hogg and his World (with Sharon Alker); and “Gender and Politics in the Writings of Henry Vaughan” in Scintilla. She is currently co-editing an edition of Eikon Bakilike with selections from Eikonoklastes. JONATHAN F. S. POST, professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, is the author of three books of criticism: Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (1982), Sir Thomas Browne (1987), and English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century (Routledge, 1999; rpt. 2002). He has also co-edited, with Sid Gottlieb, George Herbert in the Nineties: Reflections and Reassessments (George Herbert Journal: Special Studies and Monographs, 1995), and is the editor of Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by Contemporary Poets on the Early Modern Lyric (2002). GLYN PURSGLOVE is reader in English at the University of Wales, Swansea. His publications include editions (chiefly from manuscript) of several seventeenth-century poets: Henry Reynolds, Tasso’s “Aminta” and Other Poems (1991), Richard Niccols: Selected Poems (1992), The Poetry of Henry Hughes (1997)), I poeti ferraresi nel Rinascimento inglese (1992), Francis Warner and Tradition (1981), Francis Warner’s Poetry: A Critical Assessment (1988), and A Bibliography of the Writings of Peter Russell (1995). He has published essays on, among others, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bunyan, William Strode, Ernest Dowson, and Basil Bunting (with Parvin Loloi). He is review editor of Acumen and general editor of The Swansea Review. ALAN RUDRUM is professor emeritus of English at Simon Fraser University. His books include: A Critical Commentary on Paradise Lost (1966); A Critical Commentary on Comus & Shorter Poems (1967); Modern Judgements on Milton (1968); A Critical Commentary on Samson Agonistes (1969); The Complete Poems of Henry Vaughan (1976, 1981); Writers of Wales: Henry Vaughan (1981); The Works of Thomas Vaughan (1984); Essential Articles

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on Henry Vaughan (1986); and The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth Century Verse and Prose (2000). NIGEL SMITH, professor of English at Princeton University, is the author of Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (1989); and Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (1994). He has edited the Ranter Pamphlets (1983), George Fox’s Journal (1998), and is currently completing an edition of the poetry of Andrew Marvell. JUNE STURROCK, professor of English at Simon Fraser University and associate director of their graduate Liberal Studies Programma, is the editor of Mansfield Park (2001) and author of “Heaven and Home”: Charlotte Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate over Women (1995). She has published articles in such journals as English Language Notes, Blake Quarterly, Literature and Theology, Victorian Review, Dictionary of Literary Biography, English Studies, and Essays in Criticism. PETER THOMAS, senior lecturer in English at the University of Wales, Cardiff, is the author of Sir John Berkenhead 1617–1679: A Royalist Career in Politics and Polemics (1969). He was on the editorial board of The English Revolution reprint series, editing Berkenhead’s Mercurius Aulicus, 1643– 45 and Marchamont Nedham’s Mercurius Politicus, 1650–59 for the Newsbook section (1971). Most recently he has published on Henry Vaughan, and is general editor of Scintilla, the annual journal of the Usk Valley Vaughan Association. ROBERT WILCHER, senior lecturer in English at Birmingham University, is the author of Andrew Marvell (1985), The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660 (2001), and Understanding Arnold Wesker (1991). He has edited Andrew Marvell: Selected Poetry and Prose (1986). He has contributed chapters to several books and published articles in various periodicals on seventeenth-century poets (Milton, Marvell, Vaughan, Quarles), Shakespeare (Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear), and modern dramatists (Samuel Beckett, Howard Barker, Arnold Wesker, David Rudkin, Tom Stoppard), including three entries (on Seamus Finnegan, David Storey, and Billy Roche) in two recent volumes on British and Irish Dramatists Since World War II in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. He has also contributed five articles on seventeenth-century poets and printers to the New Dictionary of National Biography (forthcoming).

Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abbot, George (archbishop of Canterbury), 101, 183 Abram, David, 274, 286 Ackroyd, Peter, 348 n. 4 Act for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, 205, 325 Alciati, Andrea, 265 Allestree, Richard: Sermon Preached at Hampton-Court, 151 allusion: definitions of, 71, 79, 83, 95, 97; vs. intertextuality, 83; vs. topos, 72–75 Alter, Robert, 187 n. 19 Anacreon, 265 Andreae, J. V., 248 nn. 35 and 36 Andrewes, Lancelot (bishop of Chichester and Ely), 83 Anselm, Saint: Man in Glory, 215 Apollo, 218, 275, 318 Aries, Phillipe, 310–11 Ariosto, Lodovico, 16 Aristotle, 114 Armony of Birds, The, 256 Ashmole, Elias: Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, 236 Ashton, Robert, 86 Ashworth, W. B., Jr., 140 n. 32 Aubrey, John, 238, 244, 266 Auden, W. H., 346 Augustine, Saint, 306 n. 8; City of God, 146; Confessions, 304, 308 n. 35 Ausonius, 218, 228, 233 Aviarum, 255 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 294, 306 n. 8 Bacon, Francis, 103, 115, 117, 270; The Advancement of Learning, 124; Sylva Sylvarum, 271, 286 Barbour, Reid, 121 n. 57

Barclay, John, 121 n. 64, 121–22 n. 66; Icon Animorum, 115 Barthes, Roland, 42, 44, 129 Bauer, Matthias, 22 Baxter, Richard: The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, 149, 215 Bayly, Lewis: The Practice of Piety, 209 Beaumont, Francis, 230 Becatelli (archbishop of Ragusa), 105–6 Becon, Thomas: The Flower of Godly Prayers, 209; The Sicke mannes Salve, 311, 326 n. 10 Behrendt, Stephen C., 349 n. 29 Belon, Pierre: Histoire de la Nature des Oyseaux, 266; Portraits d’oyseaux, 126 Bentley, Richard, 91, 123 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 160 n. 11 Beza, Theodore, 40 Blake, Robert, 338 Blake, William, 23, 329– 47; admiration for Milton of, 23, 329, 334, 336–38, 346; critical preconceptions of, 332; exiled from London to Felpham, Sussex, 330–31, 337, 338, 339, 347, 348 nn. 5 and 6; and Hayley, 337, 338, 348 nn. 5 and 6; and human culture, 330–31, 333– 34, 335; illness of, 330, 348 n. 5; illustrations for Milton’s works of, 338, 340; prophetic works of, 332; and religion, 343– 44. Works: The Four Zoas, 348 n. 4; Jerusalem, 332, 340, 343– 44. See also Milton Blessington, Francis C., 72, 97–98 n. 1 Bloch, Chana, 184 Blunden, Humphrey, 236 Bodley, Thomas, 247 n. 20

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382

INDEX

Boehme, Jacob, 341 Boehrer, Bruce, 138 n. 2, 285 Boethius: Consolatio Philosophiae, 20, 192–99, 200 n. 10, 225, 228, 233, 251 Bolton, Robert: Last and Learned Worke of the Four Last Things, 213 Book of Common Prayer, 20–21, 54, 57, 63, 66, 202–5, 208–9, 211–13, 215, 216 n. 7, 320 Booty, John, 208 Bourdieu, Pierre, 172 Boyle, Robert, 277 Bradford, William, 148 Bradstreet, Anne, 148 Brady, Nicholas, 280 Brent, Nathaniel, 101–3, 116 Bridgewater, Earl of (John Egerton), 280 Brodsky, Joseph, 172 Browne, Sir Thomas, 274, 297–98; Pseudodoxia Epidemica, 123–24, 127, 139 n. 6 Browner, Jessica A., 86 Brueggemann, W., 190 n. 64 Bucer, Martin, 311 Bull, Henry: Christian Prayers and Holy Meditations, 213 Bunyan, John, 163 n. 55; Grace Abounding, 148– 49; The Heavenly Foot-man, 158–59; The Pilgrim’s Progress, 148, 157, 159, 181; Seasonable Counsel, 157 Bush, Douglas, 97–98 n. 1, 266 Butts, Thomas, 339– 40 Calhoun, Thomas, 15, 59, 166, 186 n. 8 Calvin, John, 153; Institutes of the Christian Religion, 187 n. 19 Calvinism, 13, 153, 287 Cambridge University, 51, 61, 86, 271 Campbell, Gordon, 131, 135 Carberry, Lord (Richard Vaughan), 204 Carew, Thomas, 58, 223 Carey, John, 162 n. 43 Cartwright, William, 230–31 Casimir, 58, 69 n. 34, 192, 228, 233 Causabon, Isaac, 210, 213 Cavendish, Margaret, 22, 285; “Dialogue between an Oake, and a Man cutting him downe,

282–83; Earth’s Complaint, 287; Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 282 Chambers, E. K., 25–26, 51 Chapman, George, 100 n. 39 Charles I, 31, 102, 168, 194, 195–96, 198–99, 202, 209, 242, 282–83 Charles II, 36, 151–52, 154, 155, 231 Chaucer, Geoffrey: House of Fame, 263 Cicero: Epistles, 23–24 n. 8; Offices, 23–24 n. 8 Civil Wars, 14, 20, 21, 46, 55, 118, 150, 193, 197, 206, 209, 218, 217, 234, 276, 315, 319 Clarendon, Earl of (Edward Hyde), 151 Clark, Ira, 172 Claudian: De Raptu Proserpinae, 80– 83; “The Phoenix,” 260, 265 Clement VIII (pope), 107 Coffey, John, 163 n. 54 Colet, John, 311 Colie, Rosalie, 186 n. 11 Colman, Henry: Divine Meditations, 67 n. 5 Combrink, H. B. Bernard, 186–87 n. 17 Cond´e, Jean de: La Messe des Oiseaux, 256 Conrad, Joseph, 242, 249 n. 49 Conti, Natale: Mythologiae, 88, 90 Convention Parliament, 151 Corbet, John: The Episptle Congratulatorie of Lysimachus Nicanor, 115 Corns, Thomasn., 163 n. 55 Cosin, John: A Collection of Private Devotions, 209 Council of Trent, 104, 105, 107–9 Court of High Commission, 107 Cowley, Abraham, 271 Cowper, William, 337 Crane, Mary Thomas, 165 Cranmer, Thomas, 208 Crashaw, Richard, 17; Carmen Deo Nostro, 67 n. 9; Steps to the Temple, 17–18, 26, 51–53, 55, 58, 67 nn. 6 and 9 Cromwell, Oliver, 204, 231 Cudworth, Ralph, 271 Cyprian: Of Mortality, 311

INDEX

Dante Alighieri, 16, 73, 118, 268 n. 26; Inferno, 196, 263; Paradiso, 21, 250, 259, 262 Darnforth, Samuel: Errand into the Wilderness, 148 Davanzati Bostichi, Bernardo: Scisma d’Inghilterra, 111 Davenant, William: Gondibert, 231, 240 Davies, Stevie, 11, 15, 23, 192, 305 n. 6, 324, 327 n. 25, 335, 341 Daye, John: A Booke of Christian Prayers, 209, 213 De Dominis, Marcantonio, 102, 114, 115, 119 n. 4 Dee, John, 236, 238 Democritus, 23–24 n. 8 Denne, Henry: Grace, Mercy and Peace, 216 n. 9 Derby, Countess of (Alice Spencer), 283 Descartes, Ren´e, 270 Deschamps, Eustace: “Ballade to Chaucer,” 263 Desport, Marie, 249 n. 54 Di Cesare, Mario, 97–98 n. 1 Dickson, Donald R., 20–21, 181, 248 n. 35, 289 n. 2, 297 Dignity of Kingship, The (G. S.), 151 Directory for the Publique Worship of God, A, 48 n. 18, 57, 203 Diodati, Charles, 19, 118, 124, 129– 38, 139 n. 10, 140 nn. 28 and 29, 140– 41 n. 36 Dionysius, 23–24 n. 8 Dixon, Peter, 11 Donne, John, 183, 194, 199 Dorian, Donald, 139 n. 10 Drummond, William, 93, 265 Dryden, John, 282; Astrea Redux, 152, 155 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste, 16 Dunbar, William: “The Goldyn Targe,” 267 n. 12 Dundas, Judith, 60 DuPree, Don, 248 n. 38 Durr, R. A., 186 n. 13 dyfalu, 59 Dzelzainis, Martin, 122 n. 73 ecocriticism, 138 n. 2, 270 Edward VI, 86

383

Edwards, Karen L., 18–19, 138 n. 2 Egerton, Charles, 202 Ellwood, Thomas, 153, 156 Empson, William, 80–81, 98–99 n. 19, 99 n. 22 Enlightenment, 102 Erasmus, 108–9, 311, 312 Essick, Robert, 336, 338 Euripides, 23–24 n. 8 Eusebius: Historia Ecclesiastica, 116–17 Evans, Katherine, 189 n. 49 Evelyn, John: Diary, 205, 216 n. 7; Sylva, 271 Fairfax, Edward, 74 Fallon, Stephen, 24 n. 12, 138 n. 2, 270 Felltham, Owen: Resolves, 198–99, 201 n. 16 Ferber, Michael, 248 n. 39 Ficino, Marsilio, 235, 248 n. 42, 248– 49 n. 46 Finch, Anne, Countess of Winchelsea, 22; “The Tree,” 283 Finey, John H., 84 –85 Fitter, Chris, 47 n. 8, 48 n. 16 Five Mile Act, 151 Fixler, Michael, 163 n. 54 Flannagan, Roy, 88 Fleck, Jade, 176, 189 n. 49 Fletcher, Angus, 248– 49 n. 46, 249 nn. 47 and 54 Fletcher, John, 223, 230 Fludd, Robert, 238 Fogle, French, 12 Forey, Madeline, 49 n. 27, 189–90 n. 53 Foucault, Michel, 129, 184, 187– 88 n. 28 Fowler, Alastair, 71, 75, 78, 80, 88, 89, 91, 98 n. 18, 136, 140 n. 34, 141 n. 37 Fox, George, 154; Declaration, 156 Fox, Susan, 333, 348 nn. 8 and 11 Foxe, John, 116 Fragnito, Gigliola, 120 n. 31 Franz, Wilhelm, 306 n. 16 Frye, Northrop, 167, 181 Galdon, Joseph A., 160 n. 11 Galileo, 112, 121 n. 44 Garner, Ross, 249 n. 56

384

INDEX

Gassendi, Pierre, 22, 282 Genette, G´erard, 165, 190 n. 62 Geneva Bible, 125, 149, 152, 153 Gentilis, Robert, 105 Gesner, Konrad: De avium natura, 266 Girard, Bernard de, Seigneur de Haillan: L’Histoire de France, 103 Goldsmith, Oliver, 11 Gombauld, Jean Ogier de: Endimion, 228 Gombrich, Ernst, 12 Goodman, Cardell: Beawty in Raggs, 67 n. 5 Gouge, Thomas: The Young Man’s Guide, 149 Graf, Fritz, 248 n. 36, 249 n. 53 Grant, Patrick, 349 n. 41 Great Migration, 148 Greaves, Richard L., 163 n. 52 Green, Miranda J., 246 n. 7 Greene, Thomas, 124 Grew, Nathaniel: Anatomy of Vegetables, 281, 282 Guibbory, Achsah, 175 Guiney, Louise Imogen, 193, 200 n. 7, 321 Habington, William, 58, 199, 218 Hakewill, George, 123 Hall, James, 249 n. 47 Hall, John (of Durham), 248 n. 36 Hall, Joseph (bishop of Exeter), 83, 113; Contemplations, 213 Hammond, Gerald, 69 n. 37 Hammond, Henry: A Paraphrase, and Annotations upon the Book of Psalms, 187 nn. 20 and 25; The View of the New Directory, 203 Harding, Davis P., 71, 72, 75 Hardy, Thomas: “The Darkling Thrush,” 253 Harrington, James, 115 Harvey, Christopher, 17; The Synagogue, 17–18, 25, 51 –52, 55–58, 60–67, 69 nn. 42 and 44, 70 n. 50 Harvey, William, 275 Hawker, R. S., 266 Hayley, William, 337, 338, 348 nn. 5 and 6 Heaney, Seamus: “The Redress of Poetry,” 44 – 46

Henry, Matthew, 152; An Exposition of the New Testament, 158 Henshaw, Thomas, 236, 248 n. 35 Herbert, George, 15, 17, 23, 25, 26, 27, 37, 44 – 46, 49 n. 28, 50–55, 58– 67, 67 nn. 5, 6, and 7, 68 n. 22, 68– 69 n. 26, 69 n. 37, 70 nn. 48 and 51, 199, 240, 303, 330, 336–37, 346. Works: “Affliction (I),” 41, 68 n. 16; “The Agonie,” 62, 63; “The Altar,” 62, 68 n. 22; “The Banquet,” 70 n. 48; “The British Church,” 70 n. 51; “The Church,” 54 –56, 62, 67, 68 n. 14; “The Church-floor,” 56, 63; “Church-lock and key,” 68 n. 22; “Church-monuments,” 68 n. 22, 322; “Church-musick,” 68 n. 22; “The Church-porch,” 26–27, 55– 56, 342; “Christmas,” 62; “The Collar,” 300; “Content,” 305 n. 3; “The Dawning,” 64, 70 n. 48; “Easter,” 62, 70 n. 48; “The Forerunners,” 34; “The Glimpse,” 306 n. 8; “Good Friday,” 62, 63; “H. Baptisme,” 62; “The H. Communion,” 70 n. 48; “The H. Scriptures.I,” 322–23, 327–28 n. 43; “Jordan,” 34; “Obedience,” 53–54; “The Offering,” 70 n. 48; “Paradise,” 299; “Perirrhanterium,” 54, 55; “Praise (II),” 70 n. 48; “Prayer (I),” 39, 59, 60; “The Rose,” 294, 300; “The Sacrifice,” 56, 62; “Sion,” 68 n. 14; “Sunday,” 59; “Superliminare,” 56; The Temple, 17, 50–53, 55–67, 67 nn. 6 and 9, 69 n. 42, 165, 166, 185, 186 n. 11, 337; “The Windows,” 68 n. 22 Herbert, Matthew, 205, 223, 234, 235, 237 Herrick, Robert, 31, 48 n. 13; Hesperides, 31; Noble Numbers, 31, 51; “The Pearl,” 32; “The Quip,” 32 Hesiod, 23–24 n. 8, 287 Heywood, Oliver, 149 Hill, Christopher, 216 n. 9 Hill, Geoffrey, 33 Hiltner, Ken, 138 n. 2 Hobbes, Thomas, 36, 103, 115, 231; Leviathan, 103 Holland, Philemon, 126

INDEX

Homer, 16, 23–24 n. 8, 100 n. 42; Iliad, 72, 76, 89–90, 94 –97, 100 n. 39; Odyssey, 73, 75 Horace, 23–24 n. 8; Epistulae, 84 – 87; Odes, 78, 80, 98 n. 18, 233 Howe, John: The Blessedness of the Righteous, 157 Hughes, Merritt Y., 75, 88 Hume, Patrick, 97–98 n. 1 Humphrey, Belinda, 42 Huss, John, 116 Hutchinson, F. E., 59, 68 n. 19, 320, 321, 325, 336 Index Expurgatorius, 109–10 Index of Prohibited Books, 18, 101, 104 –11, 115 Inquisition, 106–8 Interregnum, 21, 168, 174, 185, 204, 223, 330 Isaiah, 80, 98 n. 7, 125, 146, 156, 159, 269 Isidore of Seville, 255 Isocrates, 23–24 n. 8 James I, 115 Janeway, John, 153–54 Jerome, Saint, 117 Joannides, Paul, 47 n. 9 John, King, 104 Johnson, A. M., 68 n. 19 Johnson, Oliver, 213 Johnson, Samuel, 11, 103 Johnson, W. R., 185 n. 4 Jones, Theophilus, 246 n. 5 Jonson, Ben, 165, 183, 219, 271, 311, 312 Julius III (pope), 106 Juvenal, 23–24 n. 8, 192, 230 Kallistos, Nikephoros, 28 Keach, Benjamin: Tropologia, 147 Kean, Margaret, 164 nn. 68 and 71 Keeble, N. H., 19, 162 n. 45, 163 nn. 51, 52, 55, and 56 Kermode, Frank, 15, 312 Kerrigan, William, 92–93, 139 n. 10 King, Edward, 313 King, Henry: “Exequy,” 309 Knevet, Ralph: A Gallery to the Temple, 67 n. 5

385

Knoppers, Laura Lunger, 155, 158, 162 n. 42 Knott, John R., Jr., 163 n. 51 Kodera, Sergius, 248– 49 n. 46 Korshin, Paul J., 160 n. 11, 171 Kyd, Thomas, 28 Lang-Graumann, Christiane, 306 n. 8 Lattimore, Richard, 94 Lawes, Henry, 118 Laud, William (archbishop of Canterbury), 203 Le Comte, Edward, 96 Leimberg, Inge, 305 n. 5, 307 n. 23 Leonard, John, 18, 75–76, 99 n. 22, 278, 290–91 n. 23, 327 n. 45 Levellers, 278 Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer, 16, 23 n. 8, 93, 158, 160–61 n. 12, 161 n. 13, 164 n. 61, 166, 167, 172, 178, 180, 181, 182, 189–90 n. 53, 190 n. 57 Lewes, Thomas, 205 Lewis, D. B. Wyndham: The Stuffed Owl, 322 Livy, 78–80, 97, 98 n. 18 Lloyd, Sir Marmaduke, 207 Loewenstein, David, 162 nn. 34 and 41, 163 nn. 48, 54, and 57 Long Parliament, 55, 203 Low, Anthony, 293–94, 301, 305 n. 6, 307 n. 26 Lowance, Mason I., 160 n. 11 Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, 121 n. 57 Luxon, Thomas H., 160 Lydgate, John: The Devotion of the Birds, 256 Mackail, J. W., 72 MacLean, Gerald M., 172, 173 Mahood, M. M., 35, 324, 336 Marcus, Leah, 175 Marilla, E. L., 221, 227, 248 n. 44 Marino, Giambattista, 53 Marjara, Harinder S., 138 n. 2, 277 Marks, Herbert, 187 n. 19 Martial, 23–24 n. 8 Martin, L. C., 12, 51 Martindale, Charles, 71–73, 78, 83– 84, 89–90, 95, 97–98 n. 1 Martz, Louis, 242, 293–95, 301, 302, 306 n. 10, 307 n. 26, 308 n. 36

386

INDEX

Marvell, Andrew, 45, 165; “The Garden,” 251; “Upon Appleton House,” 278, 283 Mary, Queen, 104 Masson, David, 328 n. 45 Mather, Cotton, 148 Mather, Samuel: The Figures or Types of the Old Testament, 147, 171 Maurus, Rabanus, 261 McColley, Diane, 22, 138 n. 2 Meltzer, Francoise, 47 n. 11 Menander, 326 n. 15 Micanzio, Fulgenzio, 103 Miller, Leo, 324, 328 n. 45 Miller, Perry, 161 n. 18 Milner, Andrew, 163 n. 54 Milton (Blake): and the Bible, 330, 336, 337; catalogs in, 331; dating of, 348 n. 6; dawn images in, 340– 41; dynamic movement in, 329– 30, 333, 339, 341; lark in, 329–30, 332–33, 341, 348 n. 11; and the natural world, 329–34, 339, 348 n. 4, 348 n. 11; as personal text, 330, 338–39, 348 n. 6; place names in, 336; plates in, 332, 338; and political significance, 330, 343– 45; and religious attitudes, 343– 45; as revision of Milton, 337–38; similes in, 332; and the visionary, 333, 339, 342; and writing’s importance, 345– 47, 350 n. 49 Milton, John: and allusion or transformative imitation, 15–17, 18–19, 71–97, 97–98 n. 1, 103–5, 111, 113, 116–17, 143– 44, 147, 152–53, 155–59; as anti-Calvinist, 13; Arthurian epic plans of, 134, 140 n. 30; and biblical texts, 19, 80, 98 n. 7, 125, 143– 47, 152–53, 155–59, 160–61 n. 12; Blake and, 23, 329, 334, 336, 337, 346; and Bunyan, 163 n. 55; and censorship and the Index of Prohibited Books, 18, 101, 104 –12; Commonplace Book of, 16, 103, 104; and Diodati, 19, 118, 124, 129–38, 139 n. 10, 140 nn. 28 and 29, 140– 41 n. 36; and ecology and the nonhuman world, 13, 22, 136, 266, 269–71, 277–80, 285, 287–88; education of, 16, 23–24 n. 8; at Horton, 116; and the “I” of

Paradise Lost, 136–38; Italian tour of, 107, 110, 117; and knowledge of Homer, 23–24 n. 8, 100 n. 42; and language shifts, 44; and politics, 19, 36, 117–18, 134, 144, 150–52, 155, 157, 159, 163 n. 54; on prose, 53; as Puritan, 16, 147– 48; and reading as chaos, 116–17; and Sarpi’s Istoria, 18, 101–18, 120 n. 15; and textual authority, 16, 114; and tyranny, 104, 111, 112; and vernacular expression, 108–9, 112; and the visual, 35; on the wars, 223, 239 —Works: Animadversions, 114, 115, 120 n. 22; An Apology against a Pamphlet, 113; Arcades, 283–84; Areopagitica, 18, 105–6, 110, 116– 18, 120 n. 40, 121 n. 60, 153; Comus, 75–78, 280, 338; De doctrina christiana, 147, 149, 158, 328 n. 45; Defensio Secunda, 99 n. 31; The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 85, 87, 104, 117; Eikonoklastes, 104; “Elegy 3,” 83; “Elegy 5,” 92; “Elegy 6,” 118; Epitaphium Damonis, 19, 129–36, 138; History of Britain, 324; The Judgment of Martin Bucer, 108–9; “L’Allegro,” 92, 334, 340; The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, 104; “Lycidas,” 117, 226, 228, 283, 291 n. 33, 309, 312–13; “Mansus,” 118; Of Reformation, 103; “The Passion,” 91, 92; Poems (1645), 102; “Prolusion 7,” 285; Readie and Easie Way, 151, 159, 162 n. 34; The Reason of Church Government, 112–15; Samson Agonistes, 128–29, 143, 157; “Sonnet 2,” 140 n. 27; “Sonnet 5,” 92; “Sonnet 11,” 84 –87; Tetrachordon, 86–87, 90, 91, 93, 104. See also Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained Miner, Earl, 160 n. 11, 165–66, 185 n. 4 Mohl, Ruth, 104, 120 nn. 14 and 20 More, Henry, 315 Morgan, Gwenllian, 200 n. 7, 246 n. 5, 321 Morton, Nathaniel: New England’s Memorial, 148

INDEX

Moschus, 334 Moseley, Humphrey, 221, 230 Mount of Olives, The, 66; “Admonitions,” 294; and the Book of Common Prayer or the preservation of worship, 20–21, 202–3, 208, 209, 211–13, 215; dedication of, 202; figurative use of Mount of Olives in, 210–11, 215; Jesus as pilgrim in, 294; Man in Darkness, 202, 214; Man in Glory, 202, 214 –15; and political/spiritual resistance, 202–3, 210, 213–15; and the Primer (Book of Hours), 202, 208, 209; private mode of, 202, 208, 209, 213; publication of, 207; Puritans in, 343; and Silex Scintillans as companion to, 208; Solitary Devotions, 202, 208, 211– 13; and time, 209–11; and the vigil, 211 Mueller, Janel, 122 n. 73 Mulder, John R., 306–7 n. 20 Nabokov, Vladimir, 129 Naess, Arne, 289 natural history, 123, 138 n. 2, 271 Nashe, Thomas, 86 Nauman, Jonathan, 20, 48 n. 16 Nelson, Holly Faith, 19–20 New Criticism, 124 Newton, Lucy, 337 Newton, Thomas, 73 Nonconformists, 149, 150, 157, 163 n. 52 Norbrook, David, 122 n. 73 Odo of Tusculum, 254 Ohly, Friedrich, 307 n. 24 Oldenburgh, Henry, 22, 281 Olor Iscanus: “Ad Echum,” 234, 238– 40; “Ad fluvium Iscam,” 234, 235, 238, 239; “Ad Posteros,” 234, 235, 237; and Ausonius, 228, 233; autobiographical elements of, 234 – 40; birds in, 234, 236–38, 265; and Boethius’s Consolatio, 192–99, 200 nn. 10 and 14, 225, 228; and Casimir, 228, 233, 235; “The Charnel-House,” 223, 226–29, 310; commendatory poems of, 230–31; “Daphnis,” 218, 237, 244; design

387

of, 227–28, 234 – 40; “An Elegy on the Death of Mr. R.W.,” 228–29, 312–13, 315, 319; and Felltham’s Resolves, 198–99, 201 n. 16; and Fortune, 196–97; motto of, 221; “Mr. R. Hall, Slain at Pontrefact, 1648,” 228, 247 n. 23, 312–13, 315, 319; and Orpheus/poet, 218– 40, 247 nn. 20 and 27, 248 nn. 39 and 42, 248– 49 n. 46, 249 n. 47; and Ovid, 226, 228, 232, 239; Powell’s verses in, 325; “Praestantissimo Viro, Thomae Poello,” 234, 238; publication of, 69 n. 34, 199, 207, 221, 225, 247– 48 n. 34; as Royalist response, 193–99, 221, 239– 40; as secular work, 58, 312; title page/ frontispiece of, 220, 221, 234, 236; “To the River Isca,” 218–19, 223– 27, 234, 235, 243, 244, 275–76; “To Sir William Davenant, Upon His Gondibert,” 231, 240; “Upon a Cloak Lent Him by Mr J. Ridsley,” 221, 229; “Upon Mr Fletcher’s Plays, Published, 1647,” 230; use of “healthy” in, 322; Vaughan’s repudiation of, 201 n. 16; “Venerabili Viro . . . Mathaeo Herbert,” 234, 237; and Virgil, 221, 226, 229, 236, 239 Ostriker, Alicia, 348 n. 7 Ovid, 16, 73, 105, 192, 226, 228, 23, 282, 287; Amores, 83; De Ponto, 307 n. 23; Metamorphoses, 76, 82– 83, 114, 200 n. 14, 219, 239; Tristia, 248 n. 39 Oxford University, 102, 206–7, 329 Palmer, Herbert: The Glasse of Gods Providence, 85 Palmer, Samuel, 35 Panofsky, Erwin, 47 n. 9 Paracelsus, 273, 274, 277 Paradise Lost: Adam in, 19, 81–83, 87, 90–97, 99–100 n. 35, 130, 132– 38, 140 n. 30, 147, 150, 153, 155, 157, 279, 285; astronomical debate in, 135; Belial in, 74, 77–79; Chaos in, 114 –16; and Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae, 80–83; and Conti’s Mythologiae, 88, 90; Creation/nature in, 39, 134, 135,

388

INDEX

Paradise Lost: (continued) 141 n. 37, 271, 277–80, 284; and the debate in Hell, 72, 77–79; denigration of romance in, 143; Eve in, 81–82, 87, 90–97, 99– 100 n. 35, 132–36, 279, 284 –85; and the Expulsion, 284; and the Fall, 90, 141 n. 37; Fowler’s editions of, 71, 78, 140 n. 34, 141 n. 37; and the historical John Milton, 136–38; and Homer’s Iliad, 72, 89–90, 94 –97; and Homer’s Odyssey, 73, 75; and Horace’s Odes, 78, 80, 98 n. 18; invocations of, 137, 141 n. 37; and Isaiah, 80, 98 n. 7, 125; knowledge as food in, 133–34; last books of, 36, 117, 160–61 n. 12; and Livy, 78–80, 97, 98 n. 18; love lyric in, 93, 96; Mammon in, 287; marriage in, 140 n. 30, 324, 328 n. 45; Michael in, 137, 141 n. 37, 147, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 160–61 n. 12, 284, 288; Moloch in, 74, 77, 79; and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 82–83; Pandaemonium in, 73–74, 75; and Paradise Regained, 142, 156–58; and pastoralism, 134 –36; phoenix/bird of paradise image in, 19, 123–31, 137; Raphael in, 19, 115, 123–38, 140 nn. 28 and 30, 141 n. 37, 277– 78; rejection of war in, 155–56; Satan in, 72–75, 78–81, 90, 98 n. 18, 98–99 n. 19, 99 n. 22, 115–16, 123, 134; and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, 74 –75; and typology, 147, 160–61 n. 12; and Virgil’s Aeneid, 72–75, 98 n. 7; and Virgil’s Georgics, 88–90; the War in Heaven in, 134, 137 Paradise Regained: Bethabara in, 144 – 45; and dissenting Protestants, 152, 155–59; and Hercules, 158; idea for, 156; Ixion allusion in, 91; and Job, 158, 164 nn. 60 and 61; John in, 143, 144; lark in, 334; and Paradise Lost, 142, 156– 58; rejection of war in 155–56, 163 n. 54; Satan in, 142, 144 – 45, 152–55, 157, 159, 164 n. 71; the Son in, 142– 45, 150, 152–59, 303– 4; time in, 308 n. 33; wilderness

topos in, 19, 143– 45, 150, 152–55, 159, 160 n. 3, 163 n. 56, 164 nn. 68 and 71, 303 Parfitt, George, 290 n. 20 Parker, Henry: A Discourse Concerning Puritans, 103 Parker, Matthew, 311 Parker, William R., 161–62 n. 28 Parliamentarians, 172, 176, 177, 195, 221 Parry, Graham, 285–86 Patterson, Annabel, 165–66 patronage, 21 Paul, Saint, 146, 168–70, 181, 187 nn. 19, 23, and 25, 292–94, 302, 318 Peacham, Henry, 183 Pebworth, Ted-Larry, 216–17 n. 27 Penington, Isaac, 153 Penn, William, 154 Pepys, Samuel, 155, 316 Perkins, William: The Combat betweene Christ and the Diuell Displayed, 158, 161 n. 13 Persius, 23–24 n. 8 Petrarch, 218 Pettet, E. C., 35–36, 59, 64, 307 n. 23 Phillip II (of Spain), 104, 105 Phillips, Katherine, 231 Physiologus, 255 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni Francesco, 238 Pierce, John B., 350 n. 49 Pigman, G. W., III, 326 n. 15 Pilgrims, 148 Pindar, 23–24 n. 8, 263, 265 Plato, 113, 248 n. 39; Phaedo, 265; Phaedrus, 250 Pliny: Natural History, 126, 139 n. 15 Plutarch: Moral Essays, 23–24 n. 8 Pocock, J. G. A., 122 n. 73 Polybius, 95 Pope, Alexander, 100 n. 39 Pope, Elizabeth Marie, 161 n. 13 Porter, William M., 71–73, 78, 79, 83, 97, 97–98 n. 1 Post, Jonathan F. S., 15, 17, 59, 63, 67 n. 2, 69 n. 37, 167, 176, 178, 186 n. 14, 189 n. 47, 207, 231, 276, 290, 322, 335 Potts, Abbie Findlay, 317

INDEX

Powell, Thomas, 205, 231, 235, 237– 38, 325; Elements of Optics, 238; Humane Industry, 238; “A Short Account,” 237–38 Preller, Ludwig, 81 Presbyterians, 85, 103, 115, 149, 152, 157 Price, William, 206 Propagators, 205 Punter, David, 346 Purcell, Henry, 280 Puritans, 16, 19, 20, 31, 52, 57, 62, 103, 107, 146– 49, 153, 161 n. 13, 171, 195, 205, 210, 212–15, 313, 330, 343 Purkiss, Diane, 120 n. 40 Pursglove, Glyn, 21 Quakers, 153, 154, 156, 157, 163 n. 48, 189 n. 49 Quarles, Francis, 17, 25–26, 51, 67 n. 4; Emblems, 51; Hieroglyphics of the Life of Man, 51 Questier, Michael, 116 Raleigh, Sir Walter (poet), 213 Raleigh, Sir Walter (professor), 81 Randolph, Thomas, 58, 199 Ray, John: The Ornithology of Francis Willughby, 126–27, 139 n. 18 Ray, Robert H., 68–69 n. 26 Raylor, Timothy, 138 n. 2 Reformation, 108, 111, 114, 117, 146, 160 n. 9, 168, 180, 209 Reni, Guido: Salome with the Head of the Baptist, 28, 30, 47 n. 10 Restoration, 144, 150–52, 154, 156, 157, 159, 206, 207 Revard, Stella, 76–78 Richard of St. Victor, 250, 266 Richards, I. A., 139 n. 7 Richardson, Jonathan, 100 n. 42 Ricoeur, Paul, 139 n. 7 Robinson, John, 148 Rogers, John, 138 n. 2, 275 Rosenblatt, Jason Philip, 160–61 n. 12 Ross, Alexander, 249 n. 48 Royalists, 16, 19, 20–21, 36, 68–69 n. 26, 151–52, 159, 168, 172, 173, 176, 177, 185, 193–98, 202, 204, 213, 231, 313–14

389

Royal Society, 270, 281 Rudrum, Alan, 27, 33, 51, 68 n. 19, 138 n. 2, 166, 180, 187–88 n. 28, 189 n. 52, 200 n. 7, 205–6, 270, 272–74, 287–88, 290 n. 20, 292, 293, 295, 306 n. 19, 307 n. 22, 327 n. 19, 338, 343, 347, 347 n. 3, 349 n. 40; as Milton scholar, 11– 15; and the profession in Canada, 14; report to Kent State University of, 14; as Vaughan scholar, 11–14, 22–23 Rump Parliament, 104 Rumrich, John, 75–76, 99–100 n. 35 Ruskin, John, 289 Sacks, Peter M., 317, 318 Said, Edward, 172 Sallust, 23–24 n. 8 Salzman, Paul, 121–22 n. 66 Sandys, Edwin, 115; Relation of the State of Religion, 121 n. 63 Sandys, George: Divine Poems, 51, 291 n. 35; Psalms of David, 51; Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, 76 Sarpi, Paolo, 121 nn. 44 and 63; Istoria del Concilio Tridentio, 18, 101–18, 119 nn. 4 and 5, 120 n. 15; Pensieri, 102 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 326 n. 15 Schullenberger, William, 111 Scrooby (Nottinghamshire), 148 Segal, Charles, 248 n. 45 Selden, John, 103 Schaar, Claes, 97–98 n. 1 Scipio (Publius Scipio Aemilianus), 95–96 Sectarians, 38 Seelig, Sharon Cadman, 166, 182 Separatists, 148 Sewell, Elizabeth, 225 Shakespeare, William, 131, 265, 334; Hamlet, 21, 310; “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” 21, 254 –55, 260 Shawcross, John T., 139 n. 10 Shuger, Debora Kuller, 185 Sheldon, Gilbert, 161–62 n. 28 Sibbes, Richard: Divine Meditations and Holy Contemplations, 215 Sidney, Philip, 218, 223, 275

390

INDEX

Siegl-Mocavini, Susanne, 121–22 n. 66 Silex Scintillans: “Abel’s Blood,” 35; “Affliction,” 34, 37, 339; “The Agreement,” 239; “And do they so?,” 257, 288; “Anguish,” 346; “Ascension-Day,” 66, 189 n. 46; “Ascension-Hymn,” 33, 48 n. 14, 66, 184; autobiography in, 240, 242– 44, 319–25, 330, 338–39; “Begging (I),” 317; “Begging (II),” 173; and biblical narrative, 167– 72, 175, 179–81; birds in, 21, 242; “The Book,” 13, 272–74, 281, 323; “The British Church,” 31, 69 n. 44, 70 n. 44, 178, 184; “Burial,” 182, 189 n. 46; “The Check,” 304; “Christ’s Nativity,” 62, 64, 257; “Church-Service,” 62–63, 182; circularity in, 305 n. 4; cleaving/ separation theme in, 39– 44, 47; clothing in, 32–34, 37–38; “CockCrowing,” 32, 259, 260, 261, 342, 346; “The Constellation,” 31, 69 n. 44; “Corruption,” 69 n. 44, 176–77, 189 n. 46; and Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple, 17–18, 26, 51–53, 58, 67 n. 9; “The Daughter of Herodias,” 28, 243; “The Dawning,” 340; “Day of Judgment (I),” 179; “Day of Judgment (II),” 189 n. 46; “Death. A Dialogue,” 179; dialogues of, 179, 182, 185 n. 4; “Dressing,” 63; dynamic movement in, 330, 334, 341; “Easter-Day,” 63–65; “Easter-Hymn,” 63, 169– 70, 174; and elegy, 22–23, 309, 312, 314 –25, 338; emblem/title page for 1650 edition of, 48– 49 n. 26, 240, 241; “L’Envoy,” 32, 34, 43, 214, 243, 344; “The Evening Watch,” 182; “Fair and young light!,” 23, 258, 266, 319–25; “Faith,” 170–71; “The Favour,” 261; “The Feast,” 67; “force” vs. “fashion” in, 17, 25–28, 38, 39, 45, 46, 50, 60; and Genesis, 172–75, 178, 180, 189 n. 52, 335; and Harvey’s The Synagogue, 17–18, 25, 51–52, 58, 60–67, 69 n. 44; and Herbert’s The Temple, 17–18, 50– 53, 58–67, 68 nn. 14 and 16, 69 n.

37, 70 n. 48, 166, 199, 240, 322–23, 327–28 n. 43, 337, 342; “The Hidden Treasure,” 327 n. 39; “The Holy Communion,” 63; “Holy Scriptures,” 257–58; “Idle Verse,” 346; “The Incarnation and Passion,” 62; “Isaac’s Marriage,” 173– 75, 183, 257, 341, 349 n. 40; “Jacob’s Pillow, and Pillar,” 175; “Joy of my life!,” 316, 318, 327 n. 25; “The Knot,” 182; “The Lamp,” 184; light imagery in, 316–17, 319–20; “Love-Sick,” 342; “Man,” 32, 39, 40– 42; “Man’s Fall, and Recovery,” 184; “The Match,” 53– 54, 63, 66, 182, 337; “The Men of War,” 177; “Midnight,” 32–33; “The Morning-Watch,” 182, 274 –75, 340; and The Mount of Olives as companion to, 208; “Mount of Olives (II),” 34, 217 n. 28; and the natural world, 23, 210, 329–30, 334 –36, 339; “The Night,” 32, 44, 45, 186 n. 14, 327 n. 39; “The Obsequies,” 335; “The Ornament,” 28, 182; paradox of faith in, 22; “The Passion,” 63; and pastoralism, 172–74, 178, 181, 318; “Peace,” 34; “The Pilgrimage,” 251; and politics, 168, 172–78, 185, 327 n. 19, 343– 45; preface to second edition of, 17, 25, 27, 46, 50–51, 53, 55, 66, 67 n. 2, 68 n. 16, 244, 324, 337, 346, 348 n. 5; “The Proffer,” 31, 55, 68 n. 18, 178; prophetic elements in, 48 n. 12, 183; and the Psalms, 20, 63, 168, 183–85; publication of, 207; “Quickness,” 335; “The Rainbow,” 35–36, 48 n. 16; recurring themes or motifs in, 166–67, 182, 184, 186 nn. 11 and 13, 191 n. 67, 315; “Regeneration,” 45– 47, 186 n. 14, 298; “The Relapse,” 182; “Religion,” 32, 173–75, 277; repentance of poetic fancies in, 230, 346; “The Resolve,” 54, 63, 66, 182; “Resurrection and Immortality,” 32, 179, 189 n. 46; “The Retreat,” 175, 296; and Revelation, 175–78, 180–81, 189 nn. 47 and 52, 335; “Rules and Lessons,” 54 –55, 182, 339, 341– 42; “The Search,” 22, 32,

INDEX

184, 292–305, 306 nn. 10, 18, and 19, 307 nn. 22, 23, 25, and 30, 308 nn. 32 and 36; “The Seed Growing Secretly,” 39; and sin, 341– 43; “The Shepherds,” 173; “Son-days,” 59, 60; speakers/ personae in, 169–71, 175–79, 181– 82, 185 n. 4, 189 n. 46, 190 n. 57, 191 n. 67, 293–95, 299, 304, 305 n. 5, 317–18, 233–34, 339; “static” poems of, 49 n. 27; “St. Mary Magdalen,” 34 –35, 182, 343, 344; “The Stone,” 286; structural unity or narrative of, 19–20, 166–68, 175, 179–81, 186 n. 8, 327 n. 19; subtitle of, 31, 50, 66, 337; suggestion and hiddenness in, 196, 315; “They are all gone into the world of light!,” 35, 66, 251, 266, 316, 319, 320; “Thou that know’st for whom I mourn,” 312; “The Timber,” 281– 82; and time, 168, 172–78, 180, 318; title of, 285; “To the Holy Bible,” 243, 246; unfashionableness of, 231; “Vanity of Spirit,” 33, 294, 303, 304; “The Water-fall,” 276, 329–30, 334 –35; “White Sunday,” 38, 66, 184; “The World (I),” 34, 69 n. 44, 341; and writing’s importance, 345– 46; and vigils, 211 Simmonds, James D., 67 n. 2, 68 n. 17, 183, 322 Simpson, Ken, 163 n. 56 Sirluck, Ernest, 105, 116, 120 n. 17 Skelton, John: Phyllyp Sparowe, 256 Smith, A. J., 342 Smith, Nigel, 18 Socrates, 265 Socrates Scholasticus: Historia Ecclesiastica, 116 Solemn League and Covenant, 36 Spear, Richard E., 47 n. 10 Speed, John: History of Great Britain, 221, 222, 246 n. 6 Spenser, Edmund, 16, 221, 334; “Epithalamion,” 267 n. 12 Srigley, Michael, 248 n. 35 Stanwood, Paul, 209 Star Chamber, 107 Starkey, George, 161–62 n. 28 Stationers Company, 107 Statius, 73

391

Steadman, John M., 163 n. 51 Stein, Arnold, 310, 326 n. 3 Stevens, Philemon, 61 Stevens, Wallace, 46, 49 n. 28; “The Poems of Our Climate,” 46 Sturrock, June, 23 Suckling, Sir John, 58 Summers, Claude J., 182, 216–17 n. 27 Sweet, John, 189 n. 49 Tasso, Torquato, 16; Gerusalemme Liberata, 74 –75 Tayler, Irene, 338 Taylor, Edward: Upon the Types of the Old Testament, 147 Taylor, Jeremy, 20, 204; An Apology for Authorised and Set Forms of Liturgies, 203 Taylor, Thomas: An Exposition of Christ’s Temptations, 158; Christ Revealed, 146– 47 Tertullian: De carne Christi, 298 Thalia Rediviva, 190, 244, 309, 312; bird imagery in, 21, 259–66; “The Eagle,” 259–64; and elegy for Charles Walbeoffe, 313–15, 319, 327 n. 22; “Looking Back,” 322; “To Etesia (for Timander,) the First Sight,” 260–61; and translation of Claudian’s “The Phoenix,” 260, 265; “The World (II),” 252 Theocritus, 23–24 n. 8 Thomas, M. Wynn, 205, 207 Thomas, Noel, 167 Thomas, Peter, 21 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 161 n. 15, 274 Thou, Jacques de: Historia Sui Temporis, 103 Titian: Salome, 28, 29, 47 n. 9 Todd, Henry John, 73 Toland, John, 100 n. 42, 113 Trench, R. C., 48 n. 16 Trimegistus, Hermes, 235 Turner, William: Avium praecipuarum, 266 Tuttle, Imilda, 317 Tuve, Rosemond, 56 typology, 145–50, 155, 158, 160 nn. 11 and 12, 167–79, 185, 187 nn. 19 and 23, 187–88 n. 28, 211, 296–97, 302, 306, 310, 335–36

392

INDEX

Valerius Flaccus, 73 Van Aizema, Leo, 99 n. 31 Van Helmot, Jan, 277 Vaughan, Catherine, 23, 194, 202, 258, 319–21, 338 Vaughan, Henry: anti-Calvinism of, 13, 40; antimaterialism of, 34 –35, 46; as anti-Puritan, 31, 62, 208, 214 –15, 313, 330, 343– 44; anxiety of influence and, 17; and beauty, 34; and biblical texts, 14, 19–20, 22, 26, 28, 31, 33, 35–36, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 48 n. 14, 63, 167–85, 189 nn. 47 and 52, 199, 244, 246, 249 n. 56, 255, 261, 277, 286, 287– 88, 292–93, 296–97, 299, 301–2, 304 –5, 306 nn. 10 and 18, 316, 318, 322, 330, 336; and bird imagery and traditions, 21, 250–66, 267 n. 12, 268 n. 22; and Breconshire, Wales, 21, 35, 36, 39, 51, 52, 68 n. 19, 194, 203, 205, 206, 212, 218, 221, 223–25, 237, 243, 252–53, 275, 314 –15, 330; and censorship, 26; Civil War impact on family of, 204 –7, 315, 319; as classicist, 192–93, 207, 221; and the coteries, 193; departure from London of, 218, 224; and direct quotation, 15, 179–80, 292, 304 –5, 322; early verse of, 192, 194; and ecology and the nonhuman world, 13, 22, 40– 41, 266, 269–89, 329– 30; and elegiac tradition, 22, 309– 25; as exile, 172, 185, 331, 338, 343, 347; as fighter in the war, 206; and Herbert, 15, 17, 23, 25– 28, 32, 34, 37, 44 – 46, 50–55, 58– 67, 68 nn. 14 and 16, 69 n. 37, 70 n. 48, 300, 322–23, 330, 336–37, 346; and hermetic ideas, 12–13, 14, 22, 187–88 n. 28, 199, 235–39, 243, 248 n. 38, 273, 274, 349 n. 41; illness of, 330, 348 n. 5; intertextuality of, 14 –17, 20–23, 59, 67– 85, 189 nn. 47 and 52, 192–99, 202–3, 208–15, 261, 336; loss of livelihood by, 207; and Newton Farm, 218, 244; as physician, 323; and poetic identity, 21, 218– 46; poetics of, 21, 42; as political writer, 12–21, 28, 31, 36–37, 44,

46, 168, 172–78, 185, 193–99, 202–8, 214 –15, 221, 227, 230, 239– 40, 242, 313, 327 n. 19, 330, 343– 45; productive years of, 46; puns of, 33; and purity, 26, 321; religious verse of, 17, 27, 31– 45, 53–55, 59–67, 68 n. 17, 166–85, 190 n. 57, 193, 206, 260, 312, 318, 324, 336; and rhyme, 27; selffashioning of, 21, 221, 317–18; as Silurist, 207, 221, 234, 235, 329; spiritual crisis of, 206; as the swan of Usk, 265–66; and textual authority, 15, 20, 193; theology of, 20–21, 31, 182, 190 n. 59, 202– 8, 343; tombstone of, 244, 245, 246; translations of, 20, 192–99, 214, 225, 228, 230, 232–34, 236, 260, 265; and twinning/doubling, 15, 23 n. 5, 232, 249 n. 54, 324 – 25 —Works: “The Bee,” 256; “The Bird,” 252–56; The Chymists Key, 236; Flores Solitudinis, 66, 206; Hermetical Physick, 236; Life of Paulinus (in Flores Solitudinis), 216 n. 12; Poems, with the Tenth Satyre of Juvenal Englished, 26, 27, 58, 190 n. 57, 201 n. 16, 218, 225, 230, 258; “To My Ingenuous Friend, R.W.” (in Poems), 228, 258, 266; “Upon the Priory Grove, His Usual Retirement” (in Poems), 254 –55. See also Mount of Olives, The; Olor Iscanus; Silex Scintillans; Thalia Rediviva Vaughan, Rebecca, 209 Vaughan, Thomas (senior), 207 Vaughan, Thomas (junior, Henry’s twin), 23 n. 5, 325; allusions of, 12, 14; and biblical texts, 14; chemical research of, 207; as drunkard, 325; as fighter in the war, 206; Henry’s loss of, 232, 244, 247– 48 n. 34; and Henshaw, 236, 248 n. 25; and hermetic ideas, 12, 14, 238, 273, 274, 285; at Jesus College, Oxford, 206–7; loss of parish by, 204 –5, 206–7, 325; and More, 315; as occultist, 11, 12; and politics, 13; publication work of, 236; and vitalism, 22, 271; and wife’s death, 209.

INDEX

Works: Anima Magica Abscondita, 238; Anthroposophia Theomagica, 247– 48 n. 34; Aula Lucis, 236; Magia Adamica, 236 Vaughan, William, 206, 315, 318, 319, 338 Vendler, Helen, 46, 49 n. 28 Venner, Thomas, 156 Vida, 73 Virgil, 16, 226, 236, 239, 265, 275, 287; Aeneid, 23–24 n. 8, 27, 52, 72, 73, 74, 75, 98 n. 7, 229, 255; Eclogues, 23–24 n. 8; Georgics, 23– 24 n. 8, 88–90, 221, 282 Viscomi, Joseph, 336, 338 vitalism, 22, 270–74, 277, 281–82, 285 Walbeoffe, Charles, 313–15, 319, 327 n. 22 Walker, John: Sufferings of the Clergy, 205 Walker, Julia M., 75–76, 97–98 n. 1 Wall, Johnn., 52, 59, 63, 182, 190 n. 57, 212 Wanley, Nathaniel, 47 n. 6 Warden, John, 248 n. 42 Washbourne, Thomas: Divine Poems, 51 Watson, Graeme, 213, 216–17 n. 27

393

West, Philip, 47 n. 6, 48 n. 14 Westerman, C., 190 n. 64 Westminster Assembly, 55 Whatley, William: Prototypes, 174 Whitney, Geffrey, 265 Wiese, Gunther, ¨ 213 Wilcher, Robert, 17, 69 nn. 34 and 37, 232 Wilding, Michael, 163 n. 54 Wilkins, John, 281 Williams, John: “To My Worthy Friend, Mr Henry Vaughan the Silurist,” 264 –65 Williams, Nathaniel: “To the Ingenious Author of Thalia Rediviva,” 264 –65 Winstanley, Gerrard, 176 Wise, Catherine. See Vaughan, Catherine Wither, George, 26, 35 Wood, Michael, 129, 130 Woodhouse, A. S. P., 140 n. 29 Worden, Blair, 122 n. 73 Wordsworth, William, 48 n. 16 Wotton, Sir Henry, 101–3 Wren, Dean, 124, 139 n. 6 Wroth, Lady Mary, 183 Wycliffe, John, 116 Zouch, Richard, 247 n. 20