[Kermode is an English critic whose career combines modern critical methods with expert traditional scholarship, particularly in his work on Shakespeare. He characterizes all human knowledge as poetic, or fictive: constructed by humans and affected by the perceptual and emotional limitations of human consciousness. Because perceptions of life and the world change, so does human knowledge and the meaning attached to things and events. Thus, there is no single fixed reality over time. Similarly, true or "classic" literature, to Kermode, is a constantly reinterpreted living text, "complex and indeterminate enough to allow us our necessary pluralities." In the following excerpt, he examines Vaughan's uses of devotional themes in his poetry and prose to suggest that the poet's conversion, widely discussed among critics, "was rather a poetic than a religious experience, and to appraise some of the poems as poetry rather than as prayer."]

Although research has increased the materials available to the critic of Vaughan, certain aspects of his poetry are still obscured by exegetical fallacies which take their origin from unwarranted assumptions about the poet's conversion and his manner of using devotional themes. The object of this essay is to suggest that the conversion was rather a poetic than a religious experience, and to appraise some of the poems as poetry rather than as prayer.

Vaughan was a bookish poet; by this I mean that not only was his poetry often imitative, but that his most authentic and individual inspirations were frequently rooted in words and rhythms, and in imagery conventionalized by earlier use, rather than in visual impressions. The conventional description of Vaughan as a 'nature-mystic' is therefore pointless. Like the reluctance to draw the obvious conclusion from Vaughan's use of Herbert, Felltham, Cartwright, Randolph, and his brother Thomas, it is a feature of the romantic conspiracy to redeem the poet from a period cursed with obsolete learning. Vaughan has in common with Donne the habit of making his poems, whatever their true cause, meditations on an idea which may be trivial or which may be obscure, but which can rarely be described as a genuine aperçu of his own. But Vaughan differs from the earlier poet in that the range of his fancy is much narrower. By far the most important source of his poetry is the poetry of Herbert, for not only does he borrow theme and vocabulary from Herbert, but very often he owes the germ of a poem to this master, in whom we can study Vaughan's idea, either as a phrase or as a rhythm.

There is a fine example of this dependence in Vaughan's poem 'The Morning-Watch':

O Joyes! Infinite sweetnes! with what flowres,
And shoots of glory, my soul breakes, and buds!

The germ of this poem is Herbert's 'The Holy Scriptures' and also his second 'Prayer'. Vaughan's opening lines took shape from a meditation on Herbert's—'Oh Book! infinite sweetnesse! let my heart Suck ev'ry letter….' For a few words the language, and for a few more, the rhythm, of Vaughan's poem runs parallel to Herbert's. Then the idea is totally altered and becomes Vaughan's own, stamped as his by shoots of glory, even before he has broken away from Herbert's rhythmic pattern. He turns, characteristically, from the Book to the Book of Nature. A passage in short lines follows, which is supplied with notions from Vaughan's main reservoir of philosophical imagery, a hermeticism modified to the point where it is scarcely distinguishable from a less doctrinaire microcosmism. But this passage is a bridge to the second idea borrowed from Herbert, which is the main support of the poem. 'O how it Blouds And Spirits all my Earth!' is a transmutation, in the curiously abnormal language of a poet striving for individuality, of the close of Herbert's poem 'Prayer': 'Churchbels beyond the starres heard, the souls blood…'. Vaughan then takes up another line from the same poem: 'A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear.' The musical idea expressed in both these lines gives rise to the central passage in Vaughan's poem:

all is hurl'd
In sacred hymnes, and Order, The great Chime
And Symphony of nature.

The sequel indicates that this idea must come home to the second of Herbert's lines: 'Prayer is The world in tune.' Vaughan has here developed a favourite idea, that of the Musica Mundana; in 'Affliction' he again employs it and again, as Professor Martin has pointed out, the immediate source of the idea is in Herbert. It is not difficult to see that the vast lore of the universal musical correspondences would particularly appeal to Vaughan, committed as he was to a belief in the validity of the specialized microcosmism of hermeticism. In much the same way he saw the potential value of magnetism for poetic imagery. Nevertheless, in both these poems he depends on Herbert for the initial impulse to use the musical metaphor, although he develops it in his own way.

The peculiarity of this mode of imitation indicates, in a somewhat negative way, the authenticity of Vaughan's genius; he owes nothing to Herbert for doctrine or for prose meaning. An original poem has grown out of the sympathetic rhythm of a line from 'The Holy Scriptures' and the artificially disject analogues of 'Prayer'. Having made these his own, Vaughan, persisting in the brusquely opposed long and short lines forced upon him by the nature of the poem's origin, develops the poetic image in his own way, proceeding not from prayer to the universal harmony, but from that harmony to Herbert's 'Prayer', with a verbal reminiscence; thenceforward the poem concerns itself with prayer in language which is once more drawn from other sources than Herbert. It would be difficult to find an example more certain than this of a poem which begins as a rhythm only, and reaches verbal actuality with the aid of ideas of identifiable and bookish origin; yet its dignity and autonomy may be tried upon the pulses.

There is nothing in Vaughan which differentiates him more clearly from Herbert than this curious faculty of adapting words and rhythms to a new and remote idea. It does not, of course, operate constantly; in 'The World', for instance, he develops a given idea much in the manner of his predecessors. But whereas the general misreading of that poem proceeds from the critical error of refusing to treat Vaughan's poetry as poetry so long as it may be treated as prayer, the common complaint that Vaughan is only too often a matter of brilliant moments, 'gleams and fractions'—that he is often disorderly and frequently for long passages unmemorable—has some substance. Only occasionally does the necessary fusion of the alien matter and the personal meditative continuum occur. When it does not, there is left only the shabbiness of plagiarism, the doubtful fascination of ideas unassimilated to poetry expressed in loose and uninteresting verse. Of Vaughan's debt to Herbert, Canon Hutchinson rightly said that 'There is no example in English literature of one poet borrowing so extensively from another'. The imitation of Herbert is sometimes mechanical, as one would expect in these circumstances; but when, as in 'The Morning-Watch', it provides the poet with a characteristic theme, tenuous, independent of metaphysical ratiocination, in a word assimilable to the quietly bizarre qualities of his personality, the result is unique. Wanting such a catalyst, his talent is frequently unpurged and discursive. His poems are systems developed from some central literary point. This is true of his use of occult writings, as well as of his debt to English writers.

Vaughan uses the language of the Hermetica, and of the pseudo-Dionysius, not only in Silex Scintillans but also in little-read poems written before his supposed conversion, and the use of such language does not, of course, guarantee the value of the poem, though the 'mystical' element in the poet depends upon it. W. O. Clough, indeed, has argued that 'Vaughan uses the Hermetic language … when he is less a poet, not more'. But his use of the terminology is so extensive that this is a very arbitrary determinant. The truth is that he is a poet when he uses the language in a poet's way, which is not the way of the philosopher or the mystic. But this question is evidently involved with his status as a mystical author. I believe there is much that might usefully be said on this point, but I must defer it to some other occasion. For the present it is enough to say that perfection of the life and perfection of the work are often, as by Yeats and the Japanese dramatists, and also by Brémond, held to be antinomies; though this is not to say that literature may not conduce to prayer and the contemplative life.

The distinction is relevant to the study of Vaughan, who must have occupied a place in the devotions of many. Very often he uses language which has previously been used by mystical writers, who are always dependent upon symbol and allegory in their attempts to describe the incommunicable; obviously there is nothing to prevent any non-mystic from adopting their terminology. Vaughan, for example, employs the Dionysian concept of the Divine Dark.

The Divine Dark is naught else but that inaccessible light wherein the Lord is said to dwell. Although it is invisible because of its dazzling splendour and unsearchable because of the abundance of its supernatural brightness, nevertheless, whosoever deserves to see and know God rests therein; and by the very fact that he neither sees nor knows, is truly in that which surpasses all truth and all knowledge.

This idea, much developed by the mystics, was in Vaughan's mind when he wrote:

Vaughan is at least not attempting to claim the authority of such a vision. He is working out a conceit which involves the glorification of night—I shall say more of this later—and he is using the theme of the Divine Dark for this purpose, much as another poet might use ideas from scholastic philosophy or Galenist medicine, though in Vaughan the concept acquires a special value from the pattern of ideas, discernible in his poetry, in which it is located. At the moment it is with this purely poetic phenomenon that we are concerned, and it is important not to be misled by the significances of certain of Vaughan's words when used in the context of mystical writing.

Miss Helen White, in her excellent study The Metaphysical Poets (1936), is careful to draw a distinction between poet and mystic, but is wrong, I think, in her view that there are poems which are both poetry and mysticism. It is very doubtful that Vaughan's poetry is any more closely related to his religious experience than Sidney's Astrophel and Stella is to his amorous experience. Like Sidney, Vaughan uses a specialized language which is neither original nor to be taken at its face-value; it is, as it were, a cheque drawn on the bank of Hermes Trismegistus. Vaughan's poem 'The World' has been much admired for what seem to be quite the wrong reasons. It has sometimes been printed as if it were only seven lines long; those lines are taken to be a genuine description of what, without irreverence, may be described as a mystical peep. Vaughan certainly employs imagery which is used by the mystics. The circle is a frequently recurring image of this sort, and so is the Dionysian 'ray of darkness'. The circle, or ring, may, as W. O. Clough suggests, combine the function of Hermetic symbol and of the Milky Way and a number of other things. (It will be remembered that Herbert uses the galaxy as a type of prayer.) Vaughan may have borrowed the idea from Felltham, or from Hermes himself. What is certain is that he uses the idea in several other poems, including 'Vanity of Spirit', 'Ascension-Hymn', and 'The Queer'. What is more, he uses it in one of the poems which certainly antedate any conversion, 'To Amoret Walking in a Starry Evening'. In The Mount of Olives Vaughan gives a prose equivalent for his poem in 'Meditation at the setting of the Sun, or the Souls Elevation to the true light'.

The path of the Just (O my God) is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto a perfect day of eternity, Prov. 4. But the wicked neither know, nor understand, they walk in darknesse, and from the inward darknesse of their minds passe at last into the outward, eternal darknesse.

The matter of the poem is devotional; the imagery constantly in use, and derivative. The famous opening lines establish the terms of the rhetorical formula in which the extended conceit is to be worked out. No one is inclined to take literally Vaughan's statement that

     I (Alas!)
Was shown one day in a strange glass
That busie commerce kept between
God and his Creatures, though unseen.

Yet this is a very similar observation. Vaughan simply does not supply the form of words proper to the announcement of such a theme. If he had been as straightforward in this matter as Donne, there would be no difficulty.

Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is.

This is a statement of the same order as Vaughan's at the opening of 'The World'; so, for that matter, is 'If all the sky were paper'.

Eternity as a ring is an old notion; Vaughan equates it with the region of the fixed stars, where the blessed dwell—a world out of time, beneath which the corrupt world of nature spins. He ends the poem by expressing the relationship between this ring and God in language which can be paralleled in Suso and Ruysbroeck. The inhabitants of the shadow world, some of whom may soar into the bright ring, are described with a pleasant conventionality; the Lover, doting on the wrong Treasure, the Politician, the Miser, the Epicure who 'plac'd heav'n in sense', all those who flout the truth by prizing the ungodly above the godly; and the few who, by contemplation of the superior orders of existence, transport their souls to a knowledge of the true God, as by

… the scale of nature set
From center to circumference, whereon
In contemplation of created things
By steps we may ascend to God.

This poem is, indeed, an admirable example of that species of poetic architecture which is notoriously more common in Herbert than in Vaughan. Vaughan is here imitating Herbert, though less obviously than in the poem analysed above. The rapid ballad-like setting of the scene is an old trick of Herbert's which Vaughan imitates in many poems—'And do they so?', 'Peace, peace, it is not so', and many others. Characteristically he establishes his pattern with imagery drawn from the mystics. Miss White is the only critic I know who has pointed out that the poem is a planned whole, and not a simple case of inspiration and collapse; but even she appears to miss the point, implying that in spite of all, the opening lines have a truly mystic splendour, while the rest is no more than pleasant.

Vaughan attempted in his verse to emulate Boehme and his own brother, who used the same vocabulary for certain purposes which may safely be described as non-poetic. This is not to say that Vaughan had not a professional interest in the subject; he adds to his translation of Nollius a justification of Hermeticism as scientific, and would have shared his brother's attitude to More's sneer that the Doctrine of Signatures was 'fansifull' and 'Poeticall'. 'True Philosophy', he wrote in an interpolated comment, 'is nothing else but a Physicall practise or triall, communicating daily to industrious and learned operators, most usefull and various conclusions and medicines.' It would appear that Vaughan was somewhat concerned to justify studies in the hermetic tradition in a manner which was, for good or ill, becoming fashionable; the philosophy had to be shown to be capable of dealing with what were regarded as facts, and with the realities of matter and human experience. But as a poet he was nearly always too wise to allow himself expressions whose force depended upon a technical signification outside the poem.

Miss Holmes discusses the manner in which the vocabulary of Hermeticism is converted for the purposes of Christian allegory, and Canon Hutchinson suggests that Vaughan 'passed the Hermetic ideas and terms so integrally into the common language of Christian tradition that they do not disconcert the reader…. The poet has as similated the Hermetic ideas until they harmonise with general Christian thought'. I think these views are substantially correct.

I have already pointed out that the use of Hermetic language is not confined to the religious verse. In the early poem 'To Amoret, Walking in a Starry Evening', he uses the familiar idea of sympathetic relationships existing between stars and sublunary organisms. In 'To Amoret gone from him,' he writes of 'the loose tye of influence' binding 'Creatures … that have no sence'. Similarly, in poems belonging to the pre-devotional period, but published in Thalia Redivira (1678), there is fairly elaborate use of the Hermetic vocabulary pressed into amorous service. The translations of Boethius, printed early and late, also bear the marks of the special terminology. It affects the prose collection of devotions, The Mount of Olives; without previous knowledge of Vaughan, such a phrase as 'Ray thy selfe into my soule…' would pass unnoticed. The Night of Dionysius, and the synteresis of the mystics are similarly used in contexts which carry no suggestion of mystical theology. There is no lack of evidence that Vaughan had, early and late, the knack of using the hermetic terminology in this denatured manner. It is scarcely necessary to say that Suso and Boehme used it very differently, as did Vaughan himself in more technical contexts, for example in the Hermetical Physick. He believed the tradition had a contribution to make to truth, and this belief no doubt gives his poetic use of it a force which helps to differentiate it from the merely conceited; so does the extraordinarily high incidence of this special imagery in his poetry, which gives it as a whole an unmetaphysical tone by comparison with the drag-net fancies of some contemporaries. But it is nevertheless very far from mysticism.

In an age when it was becoming increasingly difficult to write in the manner of Donne, for the reason (among others) that the same wide fields of reference were no longer valid for imagery, Vaughan found and extensively worked this new territory. One of the habits which make him recognizably of his time is this way of converting to the purposes of his poetic argument material which is not germane to it. The cause of his poem may be devotional or amorous; the language of hermeticism, which, with constant use, acquires a range of tone personal to the poet, is indiscriminately employed. The object of the poet is hardly ever to make the hermetic or Dionysian idea the central one; it is always illustrative, lighting and enriching the tenuous, often Herbert-inspired, argument of the poem. Sometimes this is obvious enough from the mélange of imagery and faintly specialized language from hermetic and other sources which are found together in the same poem; a good example of this is 'The Lampe', which is an emblematic poem of the Herbert type, with just this personal colouring from the vocabulary which Vaughan in this curious and very literary fashion made his own.

There are occasions when, by its prevalence, this special vocabulary causes obscurity. 'Cockcrowing' is an example of this, though its lyric argument is simple enough. The cock, by virtue of its eager annunciation of daylight, becomes an emblem of that spark in the soul which has an affinity with the light of the deity. The moralization is conventional. If the cock can watch for the light, how should not man, made in God's image, and bearing within him the remnant at least of natural law and goodness—synteresis, or as applied to particular cases, conscience—pray in the dark? The formerly easy commerce between the soul, with its 'seed' of light, and the source of light—easy in the absence of sin—has been forfeited; but grace can tear the veil which obscures the light. This is a crude paraphrase, but it reveals the logic of the poem. The hermetic element which obscures it is at times very close to traditional theology, and at times to the interests of more orthodox science. The reference to magnetism, for example, which is repeated in the following poem, 'The Starre', proceeds naturally enough from the hermetic interest in 'tyes' and 'influences'. The idea of an unbroken mystical communion existing, according to the Hermetics, between nature—an unfallen nature, presumably, such as M. Saurai argues to have passed from Cabbalistic sources into Renaissance currency—gives rise to a 'mystical' (in the sense of sacramental) significance in the relationship of star to herb, star to stone, and 'the tye of bodies' generally. Magnetism is, then, simply a physical index of these sympathies, which are constantly mentioned by Vaughan, e. g. in 'Rules and Lessons', 'The Constellation', 'Christs Nativity', and in the untitled poems 'And do they so?' and 'I walked the other day….' A similar use is made of the idea in the early poem 'In Amicum Faeneratorem'. But it could have been made by a poet with no special interest in hermetic literature, as a useful devotional image; indeed Quarles twice uses magnetic imagery in his Emblemes, where many of Vaughan's most characteristic ideas are foreshadowed. Nor would the invocations 'Father of lights!' and 'O thou immortal light and heat!' seem far out of the way if found in isolation in some other poet, though it might be remarked that this is language borrowed from mystical writing; there are parallels, for example, in Richard Rolle. But it is known that there are also parallels in Thomas Vaughan, who can justly be described as an exponent not of mystik so much as of mystizismus.

The concept of synteresis is common in Vaughan. It occurs in 'The Check', 'The Favour', 'Resurrection and Immortality' (a poem which may have its roots in the Hermetica) in 'The World Contemned', 'The Mount of Olives', Mans Fall and Recovery', where it is clearly an aspect of natural and not mystical theology, as it is here also, in spite of the misleading context, and in 'The Sap', where, in a Herbertian cryptoemblematic setting, it is related to the Redemption. It provides a good example of the difficulty in Vaughan of drawing the line between specialized language used in a manner akin to that for which it was evolved and the same language, with the personal colouring it acquires from constant use in varying contexts by the same poet, or with the generally acceptable nonmystical meanings the vocabulary has acquired in general use. How imperceptibly the characteristic language sometimes merges into the general devotional theme may be seen in 'The Incarnation and Passion'.

To put on Clouds instead of light,
And cloath the morning-starre with dust,
Was a translation of such height
As, but in thee, was ne'r exprest….

The first line here could be taken as an alternative mode of expressing the idea of the second, the perennial conceit of the

maker pent up in a grave,
Life lockt in death, heav'n in a shell;

but we know that there is in that line, since Vaughan wrote it, a second significance; an implication that the Incarnation meant that God forfeited his own light and assumed the human veil, which is pierced only by 'gleams and fractions'. There is a slight, but substantial, ambiguity. That Vaughan was conscious of it is suggested by his ability, in what are perhaps very early poems, but nevertheless the product of a normal maturity, to exercise his imagemaking talent in a perfectly conventional way. 'The Eagle', for example, uses much Donne-like imagery in a rather impersonal way:

Sometimes he frights the starrie Swan, and now
Orion's fearful Hare and then the Crow.
Then with the Orbe it self he moves, to see
Which is more swift, th' Intelligence or He.

Yet even here, it is fair to add, the celestial heaven has, unobtrusively, 'pure and peaceful air'—a foretaste of 'The World'. Another example of this kind of poetry is 'In Zodiacum Marcelli Palingenii', and 'The Importunate Fortune', in spite of its almost certain connexion with the Hermetica, has a quite conventional empyrean-flight and plays with the idea of the fortunatus, which really belongs to earlier poetry. Vaughan is from the beginning a poet with his roots in poetry rather than in religious experience; his interest in theological and philosophical thought is governed by the limitations imposed upon such thought by its poetic conventionalization, and it follows both that the germs of his poems are to be found within that pale, and that his own use of what we may call extra-poetic speculation will generally be to conventionalize it in the same way before he employs it.

'Cockcrowing' and certain other poems do seem to contain elements of speculative thought which have not under-gone this process. Some of them become less obtrusive with the realization that the cock is after all emblematic, and that his divine powers are not, in terms of the poem, ends in themselves. But there remains in suspension an unresolved extra-poetic element. (I believe that this no longer exists if the work of the poet is studied as a whole; an unresolved idea may acquire a positive poetic value on repetition in intelligibly related contexts, as Mr. T. S. Eliot's poetry shows.) Vaughan has been careful in some ways; he rarely, for example, allows the hermetic language to carry any alchemical overtone; but in this poem his seed is something the reader might strain at if he has not already swallowed the hermetical camel of related poems, or seen the private value accorded the expression by its use in 'Disorder and Frailty'—a poem which is in many respects a useful 'key' to what I have called the private continuum of Vaughan's mind.

Here, once more under the aegis of Herbert, the expression reveals its exact relationship to the rest of Vaughan's devotional material. Whatever its significance in alchemy or hermetics, it is here a conceited summary of the residual light-veil-cloud constellation which we have seen expressed so many times before. It is equally clear in 'Repentance':

But the constellation has more stars than this. In examining this single expression we stumble upon one of the most unusual and least understood features of Vaughan's poetry, the particular values he gives to the concept of sin by the idiosyncrasy of his literary habit. In his treatment of the Fall Vaughan is very close to his brother. 'I look on this life as the Progress of an Essence Royall: The Soul but quits her court to see the countrey', writes Thomas. Release from the veil-body meant the restoration of life and light. 'Ignorance gave this release the name of Death, but properly it is the Soules Birth. ' In Henry Vaughan these ideas certainly have an unorthodox tone, though they have implications which will not be quite unfamiliar to the student of Spenser; whatever their origin (Mr. Wardle and Professor Martin have suggested that it may be hermetic) they strongly colour his poetry whenever childhood, sin, prayer, and death are its theme. Miss Holmes writes very interestingly on various occult interpretations of the Fall which were current in Vaughan's time, and with which he is likely to have been familiar. But at best he took only a hint from somewhere; the idea becomes precisely his own, and it is used to give a new and personal force to meditations which have their origin in much more commonplace reflections.

The poetry of the period contains a curious genre of which the distinctive characteristic is the exploitation in garden-poetry of a pastoral-allegorical vein. Marvell offers the most conspicuous examples of the genre in his Mower poems, 'To Little T. C,' 'The Nymph Complaining', and in 'The Garden' itself. The lesser poets with whom Marvell is associated also dabble in the convention, and the allegorical node is clearly exposed in Beaumont's 'The Garden', and in Shirley's poem of the same title. A second biblical garden is associated with the theme—the garden of the Song of Solomon, the relevant lines of which are quoted by Vaughan at the end of 'Regeneration', in which poem he employs the imagery of the Canticles in a manner resembling that of St. John of the Cross. The garden was, therefore, a poetic symbol of a more or less general significance, which was a good deal more complicated in its suggestiveness than might be supposed. It stands for unfallen and asexual life (this may have added to Milton's difficulties in his treatment of prelapsarian sexuality) and it is also associated with the idea of a blessed locality in which the breath of inspiration may be felt; an idea derived from a love-poem which was constantly interpreted as relating allegorically to the mystical life. It is from an Eden conceived as a garden in which man, like the rest of the creation, is in constant mystical intercourse with God, that Vaughan's simple soul sets out. Eden is used in this sense in the poem 'Corruption'. In that poem the unfallen and fallen states are contrasted. In his early days, like Adam, man

saw Heaven o'r his head, and knew from whence
He came (condemned) hither.

As he moved away from Paradise, he retained, for a time, his pristine powers. But he quarrelled with nature (compare Marvell, 'The Mower on Gardens') which he had ruined by his fall. Nevertheless, there were still occasions when his surroundings could seem paradisal. Now, it appears, even his sighs for the lost Eden are a thing of the past; the soul (says Vaughan with a return to this dominant image) is veiled in a thick cloud, to be pierced only by the grace of God.

'The Retreat' is a poem on almost the same subject. Its connexion with the earlier translation from Boethius, Felix prior aetas qua paucis homines contenti, indicates, in a manner reinforced by its similarities with 'Corruption', that the 'I' represents the speaker as the type of Man, and one infers that in his personal fall from grace he is merely repeating in little the general history of mankind. There was, historically speaking, a 'white age' in which mankind was in the position of the child who has not yet begun to obscure the element of natural law implanted in him at birth by God—the seed. (It was not necessarily Pelagian to hold such a doctrine.) At a short distance from this personal Eden, man can still 'spy some shadows of eternity' in a flower, because he has not begun the process of attempting, through sin, entirely to ruin this original gift of God, and to obscure the natural light. Before the veil is drawn by sin he continues to feel

Through all this fleshly dress
Bright shootes of everlastingnesse.

The desire of the penitent soul is to return to this Eden of perfect luxuriance—the fantastic gardens of Marvell and Milton become, in Vaughan's poem, 'That shady City of Palme trees'. But this is impossible; all that the poet can wish for is to achieve at death a condition of primitive simplicity, unveiled and paradisal. The parallel to 'Corruption' which Professor Martin quotes from Thomas Vaughan in the note in his edition is a parallel also to 'The Retreat'. 'He was excluded from a glorious Paradyse, and confin'd to a base world, whose sickly infected Elements conspiring with his own Nature, did assist and hasten that Death, which already began to reign in his Body….' All poetry conventionalizes the philosophic material; there may be occult elements in these poems, but they are all reduced to poetry.

In 'Mans Fall and Recovery' there is ample confirmation of the use of 'I' to signify 'Man' in general. Here the theme is much the same as that of the other two poems; the 'Everlasting hills' are Eden, which Man has left to live under Clouds, where his divine element (here represented by a flower) droops and sleeps. He is now a slave to passion, and has lost the true light (with a suggestion that the fixed stars are its symbol) retaining only the ineradicable conscience. After two thousand years came the old Law, which by its dominantly prohibitive nature exacerbated rather than controlled his state of sin; until the Incarnation gave him in its place a law of love by faith in which he can be justified. The poem ends with an elaborate and somewhat frigid conceit of a kind not often found in Vaughan but it is nevertheless a good example of the nature of the convention I am seeking to illustrate.

With the untitled poem which begins 'They are all gone into the world of light!' it is possible to see what happens to this poetic habit of mind when it is applied to the idea of death. The illuminating memory of the dead suggests starlight in darkness; since these memories are within the poet's breast, they seem to be a substitute for the light which once inhabited it, but which has been clouded; the effect again relates them to stars, which are elsewhere used as symbols of the divine light. The dead are then spoken of as if they were stars; the luminaries of the incorruptible heaven which 'trample on' the corrupted world in which he lives under his veil. He expresses gratitude for this indication of the issue of death, suggesting that this indication of the destiny of the dead is equivalent to an angelic visitation in a dream, giving unnatural signs of a glorious hereafter. The element of divinity in man has been confined to a tomb; when God himself releases that element it will once more be seen for what it is. With this idea, Vaughan resumes the star image.

If a star were confin'd into a Tomb
Her captive flames must need burn there;
But when the hand that lockt her up, gives room,
She'l shine through all the sphaere.

This enables him not only to make his usual equivalence between the synteresis and light, but also to continue the idea of the dead as stars. He ends the poem with a stanza which lapses into more commonplace language, asking God to take up his spirit from a 'world of thrall' into the heavenly world of liberty; followed by a stanza which characteristically reverts to his favourite cloud-complex, asking that the mists which obscure his 'perspective' should be dispelled, or that he should be removed to the paradisal hill where these mists do not exist. The final version in this poem of the star image is closely paralleled in the 'Ascension-Hymn', a poem which reiterates the theme of 'Corruption'. The soul must put off corruptibility; itis, however—to paraphrase 'Regeneration'—possible, by grace and merit, to 'die' in this way before one's death.

This suggests the whole complex of ideas concerning the union of the veiled and the true light which is represented by the stars; and introduces the idea of the soul as a star clad in mortality.

From this point there is a natural progression to the Edenidea; in his prior aetas man could shine 'naked, innocent and bright'; he soiled this brightness, and so remained until the Redemption, which gave him the power to 'ascend', presumably to the stars. The whole Eden-corruption-death-star idea is very complex but essentially poetic; it is never worked out like a theorem, but is constantly insinuating itself into, and taking control of, commonplace devotional themes. It is almost certainly affected by advanced contemporary interpretations of the Fall as a psychological as well as an historical phenomenon; it may have pure hermetic elements; it may owe something to Cornelius Agrippa or to Nieremberg and the others discussed by Miss Holmes; but it has become Vaughan's own, and it would be less confusing to call it an image than to call it an idea.

Once the poetic nature of this idea-cluster has been grasped, it will be seen RV'S that it is the very basis of Vaughan's best work, the force which gives relevance to the mass of unassimilated thought which I have called the personal continuum—that which takes on new and suggestive configurations whenever the need to write is sharpened by some irritant, a phrase from Herbert, an aspect of devotion, whether liturgical or meditative. 'The Night' shows how darkness is associated with this leading idea. It has its origin in the story of Nicodemus, who went to Jesus by night. In doing so he came to resemble a plant (the continuity of the plant's intercourse with the light being unbroken). This resemblance is somewhat obscurely stated in the third stanza, but clearly in the fourth. The poem then becomes: eulogy of night, wherein the willing soul can, like the plants and unlike the Jews, commune with the symbolic starlight; it is 'the day of Spirits'. This theme is developed with a number of Herbertian analogues.

The second and third lines here provide an extraordinary example of the way in which Vaughan could fuse into his dominant image material from another source. This quotation from the Canticles, which superficially aligns him with certain mystical writers, is assimilated to the characteristic starlight symbol; 'the clear drops of night' are stars. The significance of the lines depends primarily upon Vaughan's own idea-cluster, though they are enriched by the mystical connotations of the passage in its original context. The conceit is very daring; the sky is God's hair, and the stars are the drops of night dew sprinkled upon it.

Vaughan continues with a lament that his life cannot resemble this peaceful beauty, for the light of the sun returns, by which contemplation is impossible. He ends with an explicit reference to the Dionysian darkness, carefully establishing the distance between this quasi-technical notion and his own image by the qualifying clause, '(some say)'. 'The Night' is not a poem about the Dionysian darkness, but a meditation or night-thought of which the logical prose content is to be found in The Mount of Olives, where Vaughan cites an Italian proverb which says that night is the mother of thoughts, continuing:

And I shall add, that those thoughts are Stars, the Scintillations and lightnings of the soul struggling with darknesse. This Antipathy in her is radical, for being descended from the house of light, she hates a contrary principle, and being at that time a prisoner in some measure to an enemy, she becomes pensive, and full of thoughts. Two great extremes there are, which she equally abhors, Darkness and Death…. The Contemplation of death is an obscure, melancholy walk an Expiation in shadows & solitude, but it leads unto life, & he that sets out at midnight, will sooner meet the Sunne, than he that sleeps it out betwixt his curtains….

But the full meaning of the poem does not yield itself to the reader who is unable to supply the context of this night-idea; a context in which it is associated with the theme of paradisal origins, corruption, and the interrupted communion, and the symbolic starlight. Like 'The Lampe' and 'Regeneration', this poem could be described as a blend of Herbertian, Biblical, and hermetic ideas; but it is far truer to say that although the original impulse may have been Biblical, the imagery of the poem belongs to a highly personal synthesis of Vaughan's own making.

Vaughan's use of the night as a devotional symbol is therefore by no means commonplace. Without doubt it is affected by these words of Dionysius:

… by … unceasing and absolute renunciation of thyself and all things, thou shalt in pureness cast all things aside, and be released from all, and so shalt be led upwards to the Ray of that Divine Darkness which exceedeth all existence.

But, as the idea occurs in Vaughan it simply cannot be equated with any extra-poetic statement; it exists in terms of the image-convention which he himself has devised, and grows naturally out of its données. The same may be said for his use of the idea of the dead as stars. This is very explicit in the untitled poem beginning 'Joy of my Life!', where he addresses some dead friend and exclaims upon the way in which the friend's influence continues to guide him.

Even in this comparatively simple example Vaughan suggests the whole private context with the conceit of a sword-guarded Eden in this last stanza. The logic is superficially obvious; the star-ray, which is guiding man towards salvation, suggests the flash of the archangelic swords at the gates of Eden. But in the alogical context of the poetic image, the interest resides in the fact that the end-product of the process I have been describing inevitably suggests its origins; the idea of the dead as stars, in the course of its expounding, draws into its context the idea of the lost psychological paradise. Although Vaughan was probably familiar with the Greek star-heroes it is unnecessary to pursue the question of his indebtedness to such classical notions. The whole poetic organism has acquired autonomy, and is to be understood in its own terms.

It may be too much to suggest that only when Vaughan is in some way (almost always by a literary stimulus) induced to allow this poetic organism to be modified by some external force which alters its environment does he produce a poem wholly characteristic and convincing, though sometimes tenuous in argument—a consequence of the material and method. There are times when the notion of the sympathetic communion of nature with heaven becomes indistinguishable from a simpler microcosmism, or from more commonplace exercises on the theme of 'the book of nature' such as may be found in many contemporary poets, including Donne, Beaumont, and Habington. There are poems like 'Religion', which, though it looks back along the road from Paradise, treats its subject in terms of a metaphor drawn from the popular cosmology of the time, enriched with a reference to the miracle at Cana, and based on a line from the Canticles. This complexity is characteristic enough, but it has no evident relationship to the process I am postulating. Vaughan, as we have seen, also makes effective use of the concept of world-harmony, though this is only distantly related to his dominant images. To claim that this pattern can be discerned in all his poetry which is worth reading would be to force the issue; it is enough to say that it is dominant, and that a recognition of this fact is essential to a true understanding of the poet.

Part of the intention of this paper was to vindicate Vaughan as a poet pure and simple. He is in no sense at all a mystic; he makes a poet's use of the mystic's language. He has almost entirely converted it to his own purposes, and he has profoundly altered the value of its various terms by organizing them into a pattern which has its effect upon their individual significations.

There is, among students of Vaughan, some doubt as to the nature and date of Vaughan's conversion. The evidence for it is indeed very slight, and there is, on the evidence of his poetry, no case for it sufficiently substantial to warrant further search. What cannot be too strongly stated is the absolute uselessness of attempts to discuss the poetry as if its value were determined by his religious life, and of seeking in the poetry evidence, to be interpreted in philosophical or theological terms, of a religious experience or a series of such experiences. Vaughan was a poet of predominantly literary inspiration, who, for a few years, achieved a remarkable mental condition in which much thought, reading, and conversation coalesced to form a unique corpus of homogeneous poetic material, available whenever some external stimulus called it into creative action for the development of any suitable theme in poetry. Therein lies the singularity of Silex Scintillans; the elements of the great image-pattern were already present in earlier years, but they were disjunct and powerless. Something happened, something to do with poetry, and not with prayer; a trumpet sounded and the bones lived. The return to disjection, the moment that ended this imaginative cohesion, was, more directly than any event in the external world, the signal for Vaughan's poetic death; and it can no more be explained than the force which brought him to birth as a poet, or the grim truth that many other creative artists have, like Vaughan, survived by a generation their potent, delicate gift.