{"id":27170,"date":"2010-08-28T08:33:19","date_gmt":"2010-08-28T12:33:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=27170"},"modified":"2024-10-27T08:46:54","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T12:46:54","slug":"the-books-six-centuries-of-great-poetry-a-stunning-collection-of-classic-british-poems-from-chaucer-to-yeats-henry-vaughan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=27170","title":{"rendered":"The Books: Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats<\/i>: Henry Vaughan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry<\/p>\n

Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine<\/p>\n

It’s funny, I was just thinking the other day about how I encountered certain famous writers in my childhood through having them be mentioned in favorite childhood books. A wonderful way to learn and grow, almost by osmosis. Who says a 10 year old can’t “get” Coleridge? Not so. <\/p>\n

For example, I just re-read Jane Langton’s Boyhood of Grace Jones<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, which was a big favorite of mine as a kid. It tells the story of a tomboy named Grace Jones just starting junior high in the year 1939, and how she becomes obsessed, obsessed<\/i>, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge after she has to read “Kubla Khan” in her English class. I was 10, 11 when I first read The Boyhood of Grace Jones<\/i>, and Langton, while she excerpts heavily from the poems throughout, includes both Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner, in their entireties, at the end of the book. And I read the whole thing. Because Grace was obsessed with it, and I was in love with Grace, I read those poems, and tried to see them through Grace’s eyes. Langton manages this without being didactic. She was a big one for that. Her book The Diamond in the Window<\/a>\"\"<\/i> (which ranks as one of my favorite books of all time) introduced me to Thoreau and Emerson and the Transcendentalist movement – because the lead character’s eccentric uncle is obsessed with Thoreau. <\/p>\n

There are many examples of this kind of literary referencing in books made for kids. Lucy Maud Montgomery, in her Anne of Green Gables<\/i> series, introduced me to Tennyson and Sir Walter Scott. I was that kind of reader. Oh, Anne Shirley is obsessed with “Lady of the Lake”? Well, then, I must read it so I can know what is happening in this chapter. I actually read the entirety of Pilgrim’s Progress<\/i> when I was 11 years old because the March sisters were all so into it in Little Women<\/i>. Now that was a struggle. I tried to see what they saw in it, I tried to get its power, and I admit I failed. I found the book turgid, boring, and patronizing. However: I read every word. I’m still that way. A brief mention of something in one book will then lead me on a wild goose-chase through footnotes and bibiliographies to try to find out more. I love those childhood books of mine that introduced me to new things. <\/p>\n

I have read a couple of snotty comments here and there and about on the web<\/a> about the re-issue of Wuthering Heights<\/i> with a Twilight<\/i>-inspired cover, and the tagline: “Bella and Edward’s favorite book”. If you’ve read those books, then you know that Wuthering Heights<\/i> does not just come up in passing. It is an ongoing thematic element, something that Bella thinks of often, references in her own mind – this is what happens when you are a receptive reader of a certain age. You read a book that adults may call a “classic”, but you are too young to give it the proper reverence and distance (which ruin the book, incidentally), and instead it becomes a living breathing text that you enter into, and see yourself in, and etc. etc. So I think the snottiness about the Twilight<\/i>-esque cover of Wuthering Heights<\/i> is ridiculous and way out of touch. If kids who read Twilight<\/i> rush out to pick up Wuthering Heights<\/i>, then I honestly don’t see what’s bad about it. I think it’s awesome, actually. I was doing the same thing back when I was that age. I read a lot of great classics very early, and on my own, due to their being referenced in one of my books that I loved. <\/p>\n

So what does all of this have to do with Henry Vaughan, devotional poet of the 17th century? His most famous poem starts<\/p>\n

I saw Eternity the other night
\nLike a great ring of pure and endless light …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and that, of course, is what inspired the title of one of Madeleine L’Engle’s books, one of the “Austin” series: A Ring of Endless Light<\/a><\/i>, a book I have written about and mentioned<\/a> a lot here on my site. What a comforting beautiful book. The verse from Henry Vaughan is very important to the L’Engle’s book and to Vicky Austin, the main character. Her grandfather is a pastor, and he is dying, and he recites it to her one night, when she is troubled, and after that, it becomes one of her go-to places when things get tough. L’Engle weaves Henry Vaughan’s beautiful verse throughout the whole book. I read Ring of Endless Light<\/i> when I was 15 or 16 and that was my introduction to Henry Vaughan. I didn’t know anything about him, but he was in my Anthology – with this poem, no less – so I suddenly felt connected to him, I felt something else<\/i> about him. L’Engle had discussed him and presented him in a way that the verse cracked open for me. Not that the poem is a difficult one, the language is pretty simple – he wasn’t, say, Milton – but you know how it is when you’re a teenager. It’s hard to be interested in anything that is not directly relevant<\/i>. At least it was hard for me. It took me years to appreciate some of the books I had been forced to read in high school, and I am (obviously) a giant reader. But there were moments, cracks in the armor, when an author I loved showed me another author – and it was at a time in my life when a lot of things were new, when I didn’t have context yet, my brain was more porous – and so I will always know who Henry Vaughan is – merely because it was Madeleine L’Engle who introduced me to him. <\/p>\n

I had basically memorized “Ring of Endless Light” because I read L’Engle’s book so many times. I suppose there are those people who would sniff at this, as though I have somehow “tarnished” the name of Henry Vaughan, but that’s a ridiculous point of view to take. Idjits!<\/p>\n

I don’t know much about Henry Vaughan and am certainly not acquainted with the entirety of his work. He was Welsh. He was hugely influenced by the poet George Herbert, and their names are often linked. Vaughan was open about that influence, and talked about Herbert often. Born in 1622, died in 1695, Vaughan saw a lot of upheaval. He was a doctor, although he started out by studying law. Not particularly well-known in his lifetime, people have been arguing about him ever since. Is he just a George Herbert CLONE? Will we ever know?? I loved to find out, in my research, that Philip K. Dick counts Henry Vaughan as an influence on his writing. Fascinating. I’ll be thinking about that all day.<\/p>\n

One of the things that I get from Vaughan’s work is a sense of clarity and light (he writes about light a lot, much of his stuff is dazzling – literally). He is not connected to the earth at all. He is detached. Entirely. You don’t get the sense of a real guy there, struggling at his desk to put pen to paper, as the birds trill outside, and the teapot comes to a boil, or whatever – things you can sense with other poets. Henry Vaughan is completely ethereal.<\/p>\n

Michael Schmidt writes, in Lives of the Poets<\/a>\"\"<\/i>:<\/p>\n

The most rapt English devotional poet, the most spiritually attentive, he lived in a spectrum between the pure white of infancy and a recovered whiteness of eternity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Vaughan had a conversion experience, and looked upon all that he had written before that with contempt. He has the zeal of the late convert. <\/p>\n

Schmidt goes on:<\/p>\n

The dramatic openings and developments, whether simple allegory, allegorical journey or emblem, relate it to and distinguish it from other Metaphysical work. His revelation is certain. At times he experiences a triumphant sense of election, demanding no proof beyond his own. The conversion came from reading [George] Herbert. Vaughan was surprised by grace … <\/p>\n

Later in life he suffered litigation within the family and squabbles over property. The claims of a secular world clouded the spiritual sky. It was not to be a quiet old age. When he died in 1695, he had written no verse of moment for forty years. His interesting if derivative prose book, The Mount of Olives<\/i>, dates from 1652. His memorable prose and verse belong, at most, to a decade in a life of seventy-odd years. Even that work, by an obscure Welsh doctor buried near the river Usk, was forgotten until the nineteenth century. First for his piety and then for his poetry, he was taken off the shelf and reedited. Since then his reputation has grown…<\/p>\n

Vaughan died on the brink of the eighteenth century, the very last voice contained entirely within what many regard as the great century of English poetry, the crucial century of English history, in which the old order was finally violated, and the Restoration, rather than reestablishing continuities, produced a new dawn.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I very much was drawn to Vaughan’s work as a young teenager. I was pretty devout myself. Not pious. Never pious. Spare us all from the pious (or, as my dad called them, “front pew-ers.”) But I was devout, in my own way. It was wrapped up in my awe of the universe. I loved astronomy, I loved going to church, the two things dovetailed. It was ephemeral and somewhat magical, my beliefs, a sense of universal love, and the endlessness of the universe itself, and what that might have to say about God’s grace, and Vaughan was one of those poets who put it into words for me. <\/p>\n

So. Thanks, Madeleine L’Engle!<\/p>\n

Here is the poem in question.<\/p>\n

The World<\/b><\/h3>\n

I saw Eternity the other night
\nLike a great Ring<\/em> of pure and endless light
\n All calm as it was bright;
\nAnd round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,
\n Driven by the spheres,
\nLike a vast shadow moved, in which the world
\n And all her train were hurled.
\nThe doting Lover in his quaintest strain
\n Did there complain;
\nNear him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,
\n Wit’s sour delights;
\nWith gloves and knots, the silly snares of pleasure;
\n Yet his dear treasure
\nAll scattered lay, while he his eyes did pour
\n Upon a flower.<\/p>\n

The darksome Statesman hung with weights and woe,
\nLike a thick midnight fog, moved there so slow
\n He did nor stay nor go;
\nCondemning thoughts, like sad eclipses, scowl
\n Upon his soul,
\nAnd clouds of crying witnesses without
\n Pursued him with one shout.
\nYet digged the mole, and, lest his ways be found,
\n Worked under ground,
\nWhere he did clutch his prey; but One did see
\n That policy.
\nChurches and altars fed him, perjuries
\n Were gnats and flies;
\nIt rained about him blood and tears, but he
\n Drank them as free.<\/p>\n

The fearful Miser on a heap of rust
\nSat pining all his life there, did scarce trust
\n His own hands with the dust;
\nYet would not place one piece above, but lives
\n In fear of thieves.
\nThousands there were as frantic as himself,
\n And hugged each one his pelf.
\nThe downright Epicure placed heaven in sense
\n And scorned pretence;
\nWhile others, slipped into a wide excess,
\n Said little less;
\nThe weaker sort, slight, trivial wares enslave,
\n Who think them brave;
\nAnd poor despis\u00e8d Truth sat counting by
\n Their victory.<\/p>\n

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,
\nAnd sing and weep, soared up into the Ring<\/em>;
\n But most would use no wing.
\n‘Oh, fools,’ said I, ‘thus to prefer dark night
\n Before true light,
\nTo live in grots and caves, and hate the day
\n Because it shows the way,
\nThe way which from this dead and dark abode
\n Leaps up to God,
\nA way where you might tread the sun, and be
\n More bright than he.’
\nBut as I did their madness so discuss,
\n One whispered thus,
\nThis Ring the Bridegroom did for none provide
\n But for his Bride<\/em>.<\/p>\n