Editing Vaughan

EDITING VAUGHAN 267 a construction site te,stify to the fascination of watching someone else at work; and when the workman is Shakespeare the fascination can be intense. We are indebted to expert watchers like Madeleine Doran for showing us what to look for. Editing Vaughan JAM ES CARSCALLEN Henry Vaughan. The Complete Poems. Edited by Alan Rudrum Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1976. 718 Professor Rudrum's edition of Vaughan's complete poetry should prove very useful both to the non-scholarly reader for whom the Penguin series is designed and to,students of Vaughan. Like other volumes in the series it uses modern spelling, although Rudrum has rightly kept Vaughan's italicizations, which, as he says, normally make allusions or indicate special senses of words. There are occasional losses with Rudrum's modernizations. The metre suffers when an ordinary seventeenth-century form like 'flowr' becomes 'flower,' and at the same time modern spelling lulls us out of whatever alertness we might bring to forms like 'Iovest: which become monosyllabic when the metre requires it as it does in the first line of Dressing . Modernization also forfeits a certain amount of wordplay (which might have been more extensively noted), as when 'Adamant' in Man's Fall, and Recovery loses its capital A and no longer hints at Adam. What is gained is, of course, readability for the non-specialist; and Rudrum's edition is scholarly at the same time. Rudrum ha~ carefully examined Vaughan's text as such, and while it does not present many cruxes he has been able to introduce some new emendations, all of them quite convincing. J might suggest a couple that he has not introduced. In Jacob's Pillow, and Pillar the line 'But a strong wind must break thy lofty rocks' is puzzling, since 'thy' does not seem to refer to Jacob, the only person Vaughan has been addressing; I suspect that he meant 'the: although Vaughan does use possessive pronouns in special ways, as with 'my Earth' in The Mornil1g-watch. In the elegy for R. Hall there seems to be the opposite mistake: all editions have 'The fair and open valour was thy shield,' but the line would be more idiomatic if it began 'Thy.' This would be a very minor change; one a bit more substantial would be the substitution of ,who' for 'whom' in the line 'By his breath whom my dead heart heaves' in The Agreement. Rudrum notes an old sense of 'heave,' 'to move, to rouse the feelings of: and interprets the clause as meaning that 'the deadness of the poet's heart is distressing to Christ.' This is possible, but in a passage dealing with God's life-giving power it seems more likely to beGod who heaves the poet's dead heart (which would come to life like a plant rising out of the ground); and 'whom my' would be a very easy mistake for 'who my.' Another 268 JAMES CARSCALLEN possible substitution would be 'earth' for 'ear' in the line 'But all the ear lay hush' in Regeneration. This was proposed by Grosart, and I wish that Rudrum had at least recorded Grosart's proposal: 'ear' would be an easy slip for a typesetter aiter 'eye' in the previous line, and 'earth' gives a more natural reading. 1£ 'earth' is right, Vaughan is probably thinking of Habbakuk 2:20 : 'The Lord is in his holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before him'; and this seems appropriate in a passage where Vaughan is entering a kind of temple in orderto observe worship. (At this point I should add one printer's error Ihave noticed in Rudrum's edition: 'you' for 'your' in line 7 of the poem on Powell's translation of Malvezzi.) Rudrum's editing is at its most helpful in his construing of individual words for the modern reader. To a great extent his success derives from unremitting attention to the OED. Vaughan's diction is sometimes awkward, but it can also be surprisingly precise and suggestive if one knows the old senses of the words he is using, and these are not always apparent from the context. The lover in The World...