47-) English Literature

47- ) English Literature 

Henry Vaughan 

Henry Vaughan (born April 17, 1622, Llansantffraed, Breconshire, Wales—died April 23, 1695, Llansantffraed), Anglo-Welsh poet and mystic remarkable for the range and intensity of his spiritual intuitions.

Educated at Oxford and studying law in London, Vaughan was recalled home in 1642 when the first Civil War broke out, and he remained there the rest of his life.

He was a Welsh metaphysical poet, author and translator writing in English, and a medical physician. His religious poetry appeared in Silex Scintillans in 1650, with a second part in 1655. In 1646 his Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished was published. Meanwhile he had been persuaded by reading the religious poet George Herbert to renounce "idle verse". The prose Mount of Olives and Solitary Devotions (1652) show his authenticity and depth of convictions. Two more volumes of secular verse followed, ostensibly without his sanction, but it is his religious verse that has been acclaimed. He also translated short moral and religious works and two medical works in prose. In the 1650s he began a lifelong medical practice.

Henry Vaughan, the major Welsh poet of the Commonwealth period, has been among the writers benefiting most from the twentieth-century revival of interest in the poetry of John Donne and his followers. Vaughan's early poems, notably those published in the Poems of 1646 and Olor Iscanus of 1651, place him among the "Sons of Ben," in the company of other imitators of Ben Jonson, such as the Cavalier poets Sir William Davenant and Thomas Carew. His poetry from the late 1640s and 1650s, however, published in the two editions of Silex Scintillans (1650, 1655), makes clear his extensive knowledge of the poetry of Donne and, especially, of George Herbert.

Even though Vaughan would publish a final collection of poems with the title Thalia Rediviva in 1678, his reputation rests primarily on the achievement of Silex Scintillans. In the preface to the 1655 edition Vaughan described Herbert as a "blessed man ... whose holy life and verse gained many pious Converts (of whom I am the least)." Vaughan's transition from the influence of the Jacobean neoclassical poets to the Metaphysicals was one manifestation of his reaction to the English Civil War. During the time the Church of England was outlawed and radical Protestantism was in ascendancy, Vaughan kept faith with Herbert's church through his poetic response to Herbert's Temple (1633).

Early life

Henry Vaughan was born at Newton by Usk in the Llansantffraed (St. Bridget's) parish of Brecknockshire, the eldest known child of Thomas Vaughan (c. 1586–1658) of Tretower and Denise Jenkin (born c. 1593), the only daughter and heir of David and Gwenllian Morgan of Llansantffraed. Vaughan had a twin brother, Thomas Vaughan, who became a philosopher and alchemist.

In his letters to Aubrey, Henry Vaughan reported that he was the elder of twin sons born to Thomas and Denise Vaughan of Newton-by-Usk, in Saint Bridget's parish, Brecknockshire, Wales, sometime in 1621. Seven years later, in 1628, a third son, William, was born. William died in 1648, an event that may have contributed to Vaughan's shift from secular to religious topics in his poetry. Henry and his twin, Thomas, grew up on a small estate in the parish of Llanssantffread, Brecknockshire, bequeathed to Vaughan's mother by her father, David Morgan. Denise and Thomas, Sr., were both Welsh; Thomas, Sr.'s home was at Tretower Court, a few miles from Newton, from which he moved to his wife's estate after their marriage in 1611. It is likely that Vaughan grew up bilingual, in English and Welsh."

Vaughan's life and that of his twin brother are intertwined in the historical record. Both grew up on the family estate; both were taught for six years as children by the Reverend Matthew Herbert, deemed by Vaughan in "Ad Posteros" as "the pride of our Latinity." Under Herbert's guidance in his "shaping season" Vaughan remembered that "Method and Love, and mind and hand conspired" to prepare him for university studies. Wood described Herbert as "a noted Schoolmaster of his time," who was serving as the rector of Llangattock, a parish adjacent to the one in which the Vaughan family lived."

Of Vaughan's early years little more is known beyond the information given in his letters to Aubrey and Wood. Images of childhood occur in his mature poetry, but their autobiographical value is unclear. "The Retreate," from the 1650 edition of Silex Scintillans, is representative; here Vaughan's speaker wishes for "backward steps" to return him to "those early dayes" when he "Shin'd in my Angell-infancy." As seen here, Vaughan's references to childhood are typically sweeping in their generalizations and are heavily idealized. Inevitably, they are colored by the speaker's lament for the interruptions in English religious life wrought by the Civil War. From the perspective of Vaughan's late twenties, when the Commonwealth party was in ascendancy and the Church of England abolished, the past of his youth seemed a time closer to God, during which "this fleshly dresse" could sense "Bright shootes of everlastingnesse."

In "Childe-hood," published in the 1655 edition of Silex Scintillans , Vaughan returns to this theme; here childhood is a time of "white designs," a "Dear, harmless age," an "age of mysteries," "the short, swift span, where weeping virtue parts with man; / Where love without lust dwells, and bends / What way we please, without self-ends." Now, in the early 1650s, a time even more dominated by the efforts of the Commonwealth to change habits of government, societal structure, and religion, Vaughan's speaker finds himself separated from the world of his youth, before these changes; "I cannot reach it," he claims, "and my striving eye / Dazles at it, as at eternity."

Vaughan was kin to two powerful Welsh families, one Catholic, one Protestant. His paternal grandfather, William, owned Tretower Court. His paternal grandmother, Frances, was the natural daughter of Thomas Somerset, who spent some 24 years in the Tower of London for adhering to Catholicism. As she survived into Vaughan's boyhood, there may have been some direct Catholic influence on his early nurturing. Vaughan shared ancestry with the Herbert family through the daughter of a famous Welsh knight, Dafydd Gam, slain at Agincourt, the "Davy Gam, esquire" of William Shakespeare's Henry V. He is not known to have claimed kinship with George Herbert, but may have been aware of the tie.

There is evidence that Vaughan's father and mother, although of the Welsh landed gentry, struggled financially. For the first sixteen years of their marriage, Thomas Vaughan, Sr., was frequently in court in an effort to secure his wife's inheritance. The home in which Vaughan grew up was relatively small, as were the homes of many Welsh gentry, and it produced a modest annual income. At Thomas Vaughan, Sr.'s death in 1658, the value of the property that Henry inherited was appraised at five pounds."

Nevertheless, there are other grounds for concluding that Vaughan looked back on his youth with some fondness. Vaughan's family has been aptly described as being of modest means but considerable antiquity, and Vaughan seems to have valued deeply his ancestry. With the world before him, he chose to spend his adult years in Wales, adopting the title "The Silurist," to claim for himself connection with an ancient tribe of Britons, the Silures, supposedly early inhabitants of southeastern Wales."

Vaughan would maintain his Welsh connection; except for his years of study in Oxford and London, he spent his entire adult life in Brecknockshire on the estate where he was born and which he inherited from his parents. In "The Praise and Happinesse of the Countrie-Life" (1651), Vaughan's translation of a Spanish work by Antonio de Grevara, he celebrates the rural as opposed to the courtly or urban life. Without the temptations to vanity and the inherent malice and cruelty of city or court, he argues, the one who dwells on his own estate experiences happiness, contentment, and the confidence that his heirs will grow up in the best of worlds."

This delight in the rural is also manifest in Vaughan's occasional use in his poetry of features of the Welsh landscape--the river Usk and the diversity of wildlife found in the dense woodlands, hills, and mountains of south Wales. Yet Vaughan's praise for the natural setting of Wales in Olor Iscanus is often as much an exercise in convention as it is an attempt at accurate description. Seeking in "To the River Isca" to "redeem" the river Usk from "oblivious night," Vaughan compares it favorably to other literary rivers such as Petrarch's Tiber and Sir Philip Sidney's Thames. Proclaiming the quality of its "green banks," "Mild, dewie nights, and Sun-shine dayes," as well as its "gentle Swains" and "beauteous Nymphs," Vaughan hopes that as a result of his praise "all Bards born after me" will "sing of thee," because the borders of the river form "The Land redeem'd from all disorders!"

As the eldest of the twins, Henry was his father's heir; following the conventional pattern, Henry inherited his father's estate when the elder Vaughan died in 1658. Eventually he would enter a learned profession; although he never earned an M.D., he wrote Aubrey on 15 June 1673 that he had been practicing medicine "for many yeares with good successe." His brother Thomas was ordained a priest of the Church of England sometime in the 1640s and was rector of Saint Bridget's Church, Llansantffread, until he was evicted by the Puritan forces in 1650. Their former teacher Herbert was also evicted from his living at this time yet persisted in functioning as a priest for his former parishioners."

Education

There is no independent record of Henry's university education, but it is known that Thomas Vaughan, Jr., was admitted to Jesus College, Oxford, on 4 May 1638. Matriculating on 14 December 1638, Thomas was in residence there "ten or 12 years," achieving "no less" than an M.A. degree, Henry wrote to Aubrey. Concerning himself, Henry recorded that he "stayed not att Oxford to take any degree, but was sent to London, beinge then designed by my father for the study of Law." As a result most biographers of Vaughan posit him as "going up" to Oxford with his brother Thomas in 1638 but leaving Oxford for London and the Inns of Court about 1640."

 

Thomas Vaughan later remarked that "English is a Language the Author was not born to." Both boys were sent to school under Matthew Herbert, Rector of Llangattock, to whom both wrote tributes. Matthew Herbert may have reinforced a devotion to church and monarchy the boys had learnt at home. Like several of Vaughan's clerical acquaintances, he later proved uncompromising during the interregnum. He was imprisoned, his property was seized, and he narrowly avoided banishment.

The buttery books of Jesus College, Oxford show Thomas Vaughan being admitted in May 1638. It is thought that Henry went up at the same time; Anthony Wood states, "He made his first entry into Jesus College in Michaelmas term 1638, aged 17 years. There is no clear record to establish Henry's residence or matriculation, but the assumption of his association with Oxford, supported by his inclusion in Athenae Oxoniensis, is reasonable enough."

Recent research in the Jesus College archives, however, suggests that Henry did not enter Jesus College before 1641, unless he did so in 1639 without matriculating or paying an admission fee, and left before the record in the surviving buttery books resumes in December of that year. It has been suggested that Henry went to Oxford later, after Thomas, based on poems each wrote for a 1651 edition of the Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with Other Poems of William Cartwright, who had died in 1643. Thomas had clearly attended Cartwright's lectures, which were a draw at the time: "When He did read, how did we flock to hear!" Henry apparently had not, as his poem "Upon the poems and plays of the ever-memorable Mr William Cartwright" begins with the words, "I did but see thee." This and the 1647 poem "Upon Mr Fletcher's plays" are celebrations of Royalist volumes that implied "a reaffirmation of Cavalier ideals and a gesture of defiance against the society which had repudiated them."

As the Civil War developed, Vaughan was recalled home from London, initially to serve as a secretary to Sir Marmaduke Lloyd, a chief justice on the Brecknockshire circuit and staunch royalist. Vaughan is thought to have served briefly in the Royalist army. On his return, he began to practise medicine.

By 1646, Vaughan had married Catherine Wise, with whom he reared a son, Thomas, and three daughters, Lucy, Frances, and Catherine. His courtship with his first wife is reflected in "Upon the Priory Grove", in his first volume of poetry, Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646). After his first wife's death, he married her sister, Elizabeth, probably in 1655.

The easy allusions to "the Towne," amid the "noise / Of Drawers, Prentises, and boyes," in poems such as "To my Ingenuous Friend, R. W." are evidence of Vaughan's time in London. In "A Rhapsodie" he describes meeting friends at the Globe Tavern for "rich Tobacco ... / And royall, witty Sacke." There is no official record of his attendance at an Inn of Court, nor did he ever pursue law as a career. Instead the record suggests he had at this time other inns in mind. In his first published poetry Vaughan clearly seeks to evoke the world of Jonson's tavern society, the subject of much contemporary remembrance. Jonson had died in 1637; "Great BEN," as Vaughan recalled him, was much in the minds and verse of his "Sons" in the late 1630s. In his Poems with the Muses Looking-Glasse (1638) Thomas Randolph remembered his election as a Son of Ben; Carew's Poems (1640) and Sir John Suckling's Fragmenta Aurea (1646) also include evocations of the witty London tavern society to which Vaughan came late, yet with which he still aspired to associate himself throughout Poems."

Yet even in the midst of such celebration of sack and the country life--and of praise for poets such as John Fletcher or William Cartwright, also linked with the memory of Jonson--Vaughan introduces a more sober tone. The London that Vaughan had known in the early 1640s was as much the city of political controversy and gathering clouds of war as the city of taverns and good verses. Olor Iscanus also includes elegies on the deaths of two friends, one in the Royalist defeat at Routon Heath in 1645 and the other at the siege of Pontefract in 1649. Vaughan's return to the country from London, recorded in Olor Iscanus from the perspective of Jonsonian neoclassical celebration, also reflected a Royalist retreat from growing Puritan cultural and political domination."

Secular works

Vaughan took his literary inspiration from his native environment and chose the descriptive name "Silurist", derived from his homage to the Silures, a Celtic tribe of pre-Roman south Wales that strongly resisted the Romans. The name reflects the love Vaughan felt for the Welsh mountains of his home, in what is now part of the Brecon Beacons National Park and the River Usk valley, where he spent most of his early and professional life.

By 1647, Vaughan with his wife and children had chosen life in the countryside. This was the setting in which Vaughan wrote Olor Iscanus (The Swan of Usk). However, it was not published until 1651, over three years after it was written, which presumably reflects some crisis in Vaughan's life. During those years, his grandfather William Vaughan died and he was evicted from his living in Llansantffraed. Vaughan later decried the publication, having "long ago condemned these poems to obscurity."

Olor Iscanus is filled with odd words and similes that beg attention, despite its dark and morbid cognitive appeal. It is founded on crises felt in Vaughan's homeland, Brecknockshire. No major battle was fought there in the Civil War, but the effects of the war were deeply felt by him and his community. The Puritan Parliament visited misfortune, ejecting Anglicans and Royalists. Vaughan also lost his home at that time.

There is a marked difference in the atmosphere Vaughan attempts to convey in this work and in his most famous work, Silex Scintillans. Olor Iscanus represents a specific period in Vaughan's life, which emphasises other secular writers and provides allusions to debt and happy living. A fervent topic of Vaughan throughout the poems is the Civil War, and it reveals Vaughan's somewhat paradoxical thinking, which ultimately fails to show whether he took part or not. Vaughan states complete satisfaction at being clean of "innocent blood", but also provides seemingly eyewitness accounts of battles and his own "soldiery". Although Vaughan is thought to have been a Royalist, these poems express contempt for all current authority and show a lack of zeal for the Royalist cause.: s9, p. 21  His poems generally reflect a sense of severe decline, which may mean he lamented the effects of the war on the monarchy and society. His short poem "The Timber", ostensibly about a dead tree, concludes: "thy strange resentment after death / Means only those who broke – in life – thy peace."

Olor Iscanus includes translations from the Latin of Ovid, Boethius, and the Polish poet Casimir Sarbiewski.

Conversion and sacred poetry

It was not until the writing of Silex Scintillans that Vaughan received significant acclaim. The period shortly preceding the publication of the first volume of the work (1650) marked an important period of his life. Certain indications in the first volume and explicit statements in the preface to the second volume (1655) suggest that Vaughan suffered a prolonged sickness that inflicted much pain. Vaughan interprets this experience as an encounter with death that alerted him to a "misspent youth". Vaughan believed he had been spared to make amends and start a new course not only in his life but in the literature he would produce. He described his previous work as foul and a contribution to "corrupt literature". Perhaps the most notable mark of Vaughan's conversion is how much it is credited to George Herbert. Vaughan claims he is the least of Herbert's many "pious converts". The influence of Herbert's poetry has been widely noted, with many of Vaughan's works based on works by Herbert. It was during this period of Vaughan's life, around 1650, that he adopted the saying "Moriendo, revixi" – by dying, I gain new life.

The first volume of Silex Scintillans was followed by The Mount of Olives, or Solitary Devotions (1652), a prose book of devotions providing prayers for various stages in the day, for prayer in church and for other purposes. It appears as a "companion volume" to the Book of Common Prayer, to which it alludes frequently, although it had been outlawed under the Commonwealth. The work was also influenced by Lancelot Andrewes's Preces Privatae (1615) and John Cosin's Collection of Private Devotions (1627). Flores Solitudinis (1654) contains translations from the Latin of two works by the Spanish Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, one by a 5th-century Bishop of Lyon, Eucherius, and by Paulinus of Nola, of whom Vaughan wrote a prose life.

Vaughan practised medicine, perhaps as early as the 1640s. He attached to the second volume of Silex Scintillans (1655) a translation of Henry Nollius's Hermetical Physick. He went on to produce a translation of Nollius's The Chymists Key in 1657.