The Death of Righteous Men: Prophetic Gesture in Vaughan's "Daphnis" and Milton's Lycidas

The Death of Righteous Men: Prophetic Gesture in Vaughan's "Daphnis' and Milton's Lycidas by Cedric C. Brown In his biography of Henry Vaughan, F. E. Hutchinson did "Daphnis. An Elegiac Eclogue" a good turn and a bad. The good was to pay it a compliment: "perhaps the most distinguished of his poemsexcept for the best in S;7ex Scintillans."' The bad was to suspect it of being cobbled up from an earlier elegy. The idea was suggested by apparent inconsistencies in the poem. It also chimed with a general observation about Thalia Rediviva, that it contained a lot of early material, one feels, in Hutchinson's opinion, unpublished leftovers of no great value. In this way the estimation and understanding of Vaughan's considerable elegy for his twin brother became enmeshed with the valuation of the whole volume, the unevenness of the one reflected in that of the other. In fact it can be shown that "Daphnis" is wholly a pcem of 1666. The topicality of the poem has been established by Graeme Watson, together with its consistency.2 "Daphnis" is not only the most ambitious poem in Thalia, speaking much of Vaughan's attitudes to past and present history, but also one of the few indisputably Restoration poems of his that we have, to be valued precisely because of its lateness. It seems like a last word.3 In the published order of Thalia it is the last poem by Henry, bridging his poems and those of Thomas himself, which follow. It looks back over the span of Henry's life as it celebrates the dead twin. There is also a strategy in the poem which ties it to Milton's elegy, Lycidas. Assumptions of simple influence are not necessary. Beyond genre, the two pastoral elegies have in common a prophetic gesture, a way of giving significance to the events of the present by setting them against a sense of the Cedric C Brown past and by casting them as "signs" of an imminent revelation of God's purpose. In both poems, by means of the use of similar prophetic devices, the present is examined by one whose calling has approached that of watchman to the nation. There was, of course, a great range of prophetic devices that could be deployed and combined by writers and preachers of this time, in an age in which prophecies had become epidemic. "The stile of Prophet, in this land I carry," said the candid George Wither, in Brittan's Remembrancer, "And such a Calling, here, is ordinary."4 1 have no wish to reduce Milton's complex elegy for Edward King, or the intricate "Daphnis," to the level of Wither's popularizing plainness, but I would suggest that one feature separating them out from other pastoral elegies is the prophetic investing of particular deaths with a political significance. In this, though in rather different ways, both poems are characteristic of authors who are most aware of history. A particular prophetic formula which seems worth considering for both poems is one well-known in the seventeenth century, that of the death of the righteous man. as described by Isaiah. The formula is illustrated, for example, in the following passage from Nicholas Barnard's The Life and Death of the Archbishop of Armagh (1656). Barnard had been Ussher's chaplain in episcopalian days and he shared with his former master, as with many others, the fear of the Catholic menace (exemplified by Gerard's Plot of 1654). In the year of his death Ussher is being cited as one of those unquestionably godly men of the old Protestant stamp, one who would always suspect "the grim Wolf with privy paw." Here Barnard rehearses Ussher's prophecy of imminent national disaster: And the last time he was in London, he did much lament with great thoughts of heart, the disjoyntings of affections, and the deadly hatred he saw kindling in the hearts of men ... by the severall opinions in matters of Religion: ... he was confident, that the enemy which hath sowen those up and down the Nation, were Priests, Friars, and Jesuits.and suchlike "DAPHNIS AND LYCIDAS Popish agents; . . . and he was perswaded...