Henry Vaughan, a mystical Welsh doctor, started writing poetry in the style of John Donne and followed his platonic love poetry in his early poems, which were secular by nature. But illness detached him from the world and turned his thoughts into spiritual things.
The poet fell deeply under the influence of George Herbert and imitated him in his later poems. Yet his poetry is stamped with distinct individual qualities.
There is a marked difference between Vaughan’s poetry and his predecessors like Donne and Herbert. This difference lies more in his mysticism than in any other elements. A genuine mystical strain is evident in Vaughan’s thoughts. The most mystic matter-of-factness gives his poetry its most impressive quality.
The strange other-worldly insights that characterize Vaughan’s poetry are the fruits of his imagination on religious themes. His verse rang out with most power and beauty when his own quietest and mystical vision was at its most intense.
Vaughan’s Mystic Is Fluid And Nature-Inspired
Vaughan’s mysticism is more fluid and less argumentative. He was not a priest like Herbert or Crashaw; he was at heart a mystic more at home in sacred than in secular verse.
The poet prays not in a Church like Herbert but in the open air. Inspired by the picturesque beauty of the land he lived in, he loved nature like the poets of the Romantic period.
No poet of the pre-romantic period is known to have such love of nature as he had. Because of the mystic attitude to Nature, his feelings mingle with his Christian meditations, and it has imparted to the best of his work something romantic and modern. Vaughan has the soul of a hermit.
Wordsworth, the high-priest of Nature, seems to have been influenced by him in his Ode on the Immortality of the Soul. New images grace his meditations on life and death in the face of changing nature.
It is time that Vaughan is a less effective preacher, a far more minor and finished artist than Herbert. His temper is more that of mysticism. The sense of guilt is less acute with him than with Donne.
Vaughan Longs for Closeness with God in His Mysticism
In Herbert, the purpose of sin is the great alienator of man’s soul from God, but in Vaughan, it is merged in the broader consciousness of separation; it is a veil between the human soul and that Heaven, which is its true home.
Vaughan’s soul is ever questing back to the days of his youth or the youth of the world. His soul goes back to the days of Christ’s sojourn on earth when God and man were in more intimate contact.
In the poem, Religion he says:
In Abraham’s Tent the winged guests
(O how familiar then was heaven !)
Eate, drinke, discourse, sit down, and rest
Until the Coole, and shady Even.
Religion, Henry Vaughan
Again in Resurrection and Immortality, he yearns for the final reconciliation beyond the grave,
One everlasting Sabbath there shall run
Without succession, and without a sun.
Resurrection and Immortality, Henry Vaughan
Nature reveals herself not as a museum of spiritual analogies but as a creature simpler than the man to this mystical mood. By its simplicity and innocence, she is in closer harmony with God.
Vaughan’s Religious Verses Seems to Be Less Practical
Vaughan achieves adequate imaginative vision in short passages, but the spirit of these passages throughout his religious verse is more quietistic; less practical than Herbert’s.
Vaughan spent his youth among the romantic glens of the valley of the Usk in Northern Wales. The influence of the beautiful sights and scenes of nature is quite evident in his best poems like The World, Departed Friends, and The Hidden Flowers.
These poems show an extraordinary insight into the mystical life of nature and the heart of childhood, and a strange nearness to the unseen world. In The Retreat, he anticipates the central theme and the style of Wordsworth’s great Immortality Ode.
Like William Blake, he touches the more profound mysteries with childlike simplicity and unconsciousness in delicate and elusive music. He says:
O how I long to travel back
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain
Where first I left my glorious train.
The Retreat, Henry Vaughan
Vaughan’s Lucidity in Themetizing Childhood And Nature
Vaughan is at his best when he deals with the themes of childhood and communion with nature and with eternity. He finds pure happiness of white-souled child fresh from a celestial home who feels:
Through all this fleshy dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.
The Retreat, Henry Vaughan
Vaughan sees nature as symbolical to God. Among the best of his other poems is The World. In this poem, we come across the magnificent image:
I saw eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
The World, Henry Vaughan
Vaughan Promotes The Christian Neo-Platonism Through His Poetry
Vaughan is the great exponent of Christian Neo-Platonism in English. He echoes Herbert constantly, more than perhaps any other English poet echoes another. But his bond is religious, not artistic, and he is akin to Herbert in his earnestly practical piety.
Curiously enough, the poems that stress this theme are not his best, but his major Christian faith keeps Vaughan’s mysticism from dissolving into nebulous Pantheism of some later mystics.
Few men of the 17th century approached God through nature and their senses, but Vaughan gets delighted to find the One in the many. He is like an exile on earth. He is the happiest when he has a glimpse of the white parity of heaven or the presence of God in birds, trees, flowers, or stones.
Vaughan Detaches Himself from World in His Mysticism
The real contributions of Vaughan to literature are those poems where he is most himself and calls no man a master. His mind and temper are essentially distinct from Herbert’s.
In the poems The World and They Are All Gone into the World of Light, we find this mystic approach. He becomes detached in mind from his time’s common interests and ideas. His thoughts move in a rarer, remoter air as with a true mystic.
The concrete themes like the festivals in the Church do not suit Vaughan. The more mysterious themes of eternity, communion with the dead, Nature, and childhood fascinated him, and this theme received finer treatment in the poems mentioned above.
EndNote
Vaughan may be a much less intellectual poet than Donne. But as a mystic poet, he stands out prominent among others.
The mystical quality of Vaughan’s poetry has made him distinct from other contemporary poets. He may not be a great poet so far as art is concerned,
However, he has a decent place in English literature for his thoughtful but straightforward mysticism, inspiring many English poets of the succeeding ages.
