Vaughan's Reflective Versification

Vaughan's Reflective Versification by Susanne Woods Vaughan's religious verse is reflective in at least three senses of the term: his stance is thoughtful and traces his meditations on biblical passages and elements of Christian doctrine; his imagery holds a mirror up to his Welsh country environment and the biblical scenes he has internalized; and his poems explicitly imitate and convey the influence of his most acknowledged predecessor, Herbert.' An immediately recognizable aspect of Vaughan's reflection of Herbert is the variety and complexity of Vaughan's verse forms, in a few instances precisely imitating Herbert's formal inventions.2 Yet as Jonathan Post has shown, "more often . . . the formal resemblances do not constitute exact parallelisms, but are of a more general kind," including varied line lengths, combined stanzaic patterns, and a tendency to follow the high orderliness of Herbert's attempt to reflect God's glory.3 If Vaughan's verse were reflective only of past models, it would be difficult to account for its often acknowledged vitality and immediacy, what the poet and critic Conrad Aiken called its "extraordinary intensity."4 In fact Vaughan's versification reflects not so much the model of Herbert as the movements of his own time. John Shawcross has placed Vaughan's secular verse securely within a Cavalier tradition more contemporary to Vaughan than Herbertor Jonson (James Simmonds' candidate for stylistic influence on Vaughan).5 1 would suggest that Silex Scintillans (written between about 1648 and 1655) illustrates the divergent mid-century tensions of English versification, which may be perceived as emanating in part from Donne and Jonson, but which in Vaughan's own time were exemplified primarily by Milton and the developing art of the young Dryden. Not only does Vaughan's versification reflect the most dynamic trends of his period, it bridges the gap between the apparently disparate styles which Milton and Dryden have 91 Susanne Woods come to represent. The immediacy and force of Vaughan's verse derives at least in part from its modernity — from its participation in the ongoing development of English poetic style — rather than from a necessarily more pallid imitation of his predecessors, however vital themselves and however much Vaughan admired them. S/7ex Scintillans intersperses invented or free forms among traditional and fixed forms. The main body of the work begins characteristically with the complex constructions of "Regeneration ," ten stanzas of eight lines each, 4a2b4a3b3c 2d4c3d, with several loose or off rhymes (winds/mind, falls/ scales, in/spring). There is no question but that the form is elaborately various, and Herbert's influence readily apparent. Yet the particular freedoms Vaughan takes are more like Milton than Herbert. Herbert is usually cautious with rhyme, using its denial or variation for clear mimetic purposes (as in "Denial!" or "The Collar"); he is also sparing of run-on lines. From at least "Lycidas" forward, Milton experiments with freedom from conventional rhyming and early learns the techniques of different levels and patterns of enjambment, what he would call in his verse preface to Paradise Lost, "sense variously drawn out." So Vaughan in "Regeneration" achieves a Miltonic variety of intralinear and interlinear rhythms: With that, some cryed, Away; straight I Obey'd, and led Full East, a faire, fresh field could spy Some caICd it, Jacobs Bod; A Virgin-soile, which no Rude feet ere trod, Where (since he slept there), only go Prophets, and friends of God. (II. 25-32) The poem concludes, however, with a tetrameter couplet, and this most traditional and restrained of English verse forms dominates the preceding dedicatory material as well. Tetrameter also follows "Regeneration" in the loose quatrains of "Death. A Dialogue." But the next two poems, "Resurrection and 92 VAUGHAN'S REFLECTIVE VERSIFICATION Immortality" and "Day of Judgement," return to the lyric variety "Regeneration" led us to expect. If the reader is comfortable at this point with what appears a clearly developing preference for elaborate structures in Vaughan's verse, the next several poems are sure to create unease. "Religion" is in tetrameter quatrains concluded by a pentameter quatrain (the stanza of Devenants Gondibert and much of Dryden's early work); "The Search" is in tetrameter couplets followed by a short-lined...