(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
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A Great Ring of Pure and Endless Light: Selected Poems (British Poets)
(Henry Vaughan: A Great Ring of Pure and Endless Light: Se...)
Henry Vaughan: A Great Ring of Pure and Endless Light: Selected Poems A cluster of the very best of Henry Vaughan's Metaphysical poems, which are filled with a 'deep, but dazzling darkness'. Lesser known Vaughan works, including some love poems, are collected here beside the famous pieces such as 'The Morning Watch', 'The World' and 'The Night'. Henry Vaughan is the Metaphysical poet from the Welsh borders (he was born at Newton-upon-Usk, Breconshire, in 1621). He went up to Oxford, studied law in London, wrote some astounding religious poetry, and died in 1695. The dazzling night pervades Henry Vaughan's poetry. It is a cosmic night, a night of regeneration. Many of the Vaughan poems collected here pivot around an experience of the cosmic, religious night, from 'The World', with its famous, much-anthologized opening lines: 'I saw Eternity the other night | Like a great Ring of pure and endless light'. It is a night of rebirth, the night as a dark womb, in which the world is reborn. Cosmic rebirth is one of the major themes in Vaughan's poetry, and especially in his collection or series of sacred poems, Silex Scintillans. Henry Vaughan is one of the most radiant of British poets. Like other Metaphysical poets (poets such as George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Andrew Marvell and John Donne), the deep darkness of the alchemical ferment in Vaughan's poetry is balanced by a radiance, a light shining out of the darkness. It is a divine light, as found in the Mystical Theology of the influential Christian writer, Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius' Neoplatonic visions of divinity and the celestial hierarchies of angels influenced Dante Alighieri, among many others poets. Henry Vaughan's poetry moves from dark to light, with the seeds of one being always present in the other. His nights, for all their darkness, also grow light. Vaughan's poetry is about big themes, cosmic themes, religious themes, with titles such as 'The World', 'Regeneration', 'Peace', and 'The Retreat'. Vaughan is not shy of big themes, as some poets are. He dives right in. His openings are particular powerful, striking up a majestic tone immediately: I saw Eternity the other night Like a great Ring of pure and endless light... ('The World') Happy those early days! when I Shined in my Angel-infancy. ('The Retreat') 'My soul, there is a country Far beyond the stars... ('Peace') They are all gone into the world of light! And I alone sit ling'ring here... ("They are all gone") Through that pure Virgin-shine, That sacred veil drawn o'er the glorious noon... ('The Night') Revised and updated text. Illustrated. www.crmoon.com
Henry Vaughan was a Welsh metaphysical poet, author, translator and physician, who wrote in English. He is chiefly known for the religious poetry contained in Silex Scintillans, published in 1650, with a second part published in 1655.
Background
Vaughan was born on April 17, 1621 in Llansantffraed, England, the eldest known child of Thomas Vaughan (c. 1586 – 1658) of Tretower, and Denise Jenkin (c. 1593) only daughter and heir of David and Gwenllian Morgan of Llansantffraed. Vaughan was the older of twins, his brother being Thomas Vaughan, a philosopher and alchemist.
Education
Vaughan was educated privately by a local rector, spent two years at Jesus College, Oxford, and then proceeded to London to study law.
Career
The outbreak of the Civil War, in which Vaughan fought for a time on the royalist side, put an end to any idea of a legal career. Returning to the Brecon district sometime in the early 1640's, he later became a doctor; and the rest of his long life was spent obscurely, as a devout medical man and naturalist of sorts, in that lovely but then remote part of Wales. His works of poetry were Poems (1646), Olor Iscanus ("The Swan of Usk"; preface dated 1647, but not printed till 1651), Silex Scintillans ("The Flashing Flint"; 1650, and enlarged 1655), and Thalia Rediviva (published in 1678, but mainly composed of poems written in the 1640's and 1650's). He also published several books of prose - mainly devotional and translations - including The Mount of Olives (1652) and Flores Solitudinis (1654). Vaughan's high poetic reputation is due almost entirely to a brief, largely unheralded, and astonishing outburst of creative activity in his late twenties and early thirties, which, deriving from an intense spiritual regeneration, though there were other important roots, produced the religious lyrics of Silex Scintillans. In this volume, in such pieces as "The Morning-Watch, " "The Night, " "The Retreat, " and "They are all gone into the world of light, " he gave English poetry some of the finest short poems of the 17th century. Though the lyrics of Silex Scintillans are exceptionally indebted to George Herbert (1593-1633) and to the Bible - to say nothing of hermetic philosophy - paradoxically, they communicate a most individual sensibility and vision. This individuality is to be felt especially in the recurrent but richly varied primary images and symbols - stars and light in innumerable forms, dew, water, and green, growing things - and in the poet's complex, continuous awareness of the alternations of light and darkness, night and an early morning that is persistently associated with spring, childhood, dreams of Eden, renewal, and resurrection. The dominant impulse behind the poems is a twofold one: on the one hand, an often tortured yearning for tranquillity and an anguished sense of separation from God and of spiritual homesickness; on the other, a fundamental joyousness, with ecstatic moments of divine visitation, dreaming vision, and of a world irradiated with glory. Stylistically, Vaughan's poetry has obvious faults and limitations: it is generally plain-spun in texture, often undistinguished or mechanical in rhythm, and sometimes diffuse and prosaically flabby. But these weaknesses are redeemed in a large number of poems by a simplicity, concreteness, purity, and vigorous directness of diction, by a dynamic tension that is produced through running flexible speech rhythms across the framework of elaborate metrical forms, and, above all, by the unanalyzable magic of such haunting, vibrantly suggestive lines. As with many great writers and poets, Henry Vaughan was acclaimed less in his lifetime than after his death, which came on 23 April 1695, aged 74. Vaughan is recognised as an "example of a poet who can write both graceful and effective prose" and influenced the work of poets such as Wordsworth, Tennyson and Siegfried Sassoon.
Vaughan could claim kinship with two powerful Welsh families, one Catholic and one Protestant. His paternal grandfather, William, was the owner of Tretower Court. His paternal grandmother, Frances, was the natural daughter of Thomas Somerset, who spent some 24 years in the Tower of London for his adherence to Catholicism. As she survived into Vaughan's boyhood, there may have been some direct Catholic influence upon his early nurturing.
Connections
By 1646, Vaughan had married Catherine Wise, with whom he reared a son, Thomas, and three daughters, Lucy, Frances, and Catherine. After his first wife's death, he married her sister, Elizabeth, probably in 1655.