Images of Christ in Vaughan's "The Night": An Argument for Unity

Images of Christ in Vaughan's "The Night' An Argument for Unity by Jeff S. Johnson General acclaim for "The Night" has come to be somewhat of a commonplace among modern Vaughan critics. E.C. Pettet, for example, regards "The Night" as "another of Vaughan's masterpieces and perhaps hisgreatest poem"; Barbara Lewalski, more recently, claims not only that "The Night" is "one of Vaughan's most remarkable poetic achievements," but, furthermore , that it is "perhaps the most complex, and the finest, of Vaughan's poems"; and Jonathan Post, author of the most recently published book-length study of Vaughan's poetry, praises both "The Night" and "Regeneration" as "Vaughan's two finest poetic achievements."' Nevertheless, the relation of the final stanza to the remainder of the poem has continued to be a critical enigma, and, asa result, the body of scholarship for "The Night" has failed to produce any viably consistent conclusions concerning the important critical problem of the unity of the poem. Leland Chambers, one of the few Vaughan critics who attempts with some success to treat "The Night" as a poetic whole, concludes that "the poem abounds in biblical allusions, imagery and diction calculated to bring the whole weight of scriptural authority to bear against the view that God is darkness, even 'dazling darkness," as 'some say.' "2 Chambers, however, in reacting against the speculations of those who identify God as darkness, those who see hermeticism as the governing principle within the poem, and those who focus attention on whether or not Vaughan ever experienced the mystical revelations for which many scholars believe he yearned, seems compelled to back his way into an exegesis of the allusive cohesion of "The Night" by beginning where Vaughan's poem ends. While Chambers correctly perceives that The Night" is fundamentally an expression of a Christian 99 Jeff S. Johnson poet, he nevertheless argues from rather than to the conclusion of the poem. In contrast to Chambers' approach, I would argue that Vaughan achieves a unity of poetic thought and expression in "The Night" through the nine images of Christ that underly, though not in precise mathematical fashion, the nine stanzas of the poem: the vision of Christ as the Virgin-shrine, the sacred veil, the winged healer, the rare flower, the Logos, the Creator, the emulative model for mankind, the bridegroom of the Church, and, above all, the divine light, an image that interfuses all of the others and by which Vaughan perceives and understands the essential nature of God in Christ. The poetic whole that results from these aggregate images necessarily requires that the final stanza of "The Night," and in particular the closing couplet, not be comprehended simply as Vaughan's mystical request for a night that is God, but rather as a plea for a nocturnal environment, for a time and a place in this world in which he might repose in commune with his God. The initial image of Christ in "The Night" appears in the opening line, where Vaughan describes Christ as "that pure Virgin-shrine."3 While Alan Rudrum correctly asserts that the phrase "Virgin-shrine" is not itself specifically biblical in origin, the phrase is not wholly without a biblical context.4 After all, Christ as portrayed in the Gospels is the virgin son of the Virgin Mary. In addition, the sense of Christ as a shrine stems from the teaching that when God first gave the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai, he decreed that his presence would reside between the two cherubs that overlooked the golden mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25:22). Since the coming of Christ, however, God's presence is no longer found among the inanimate objects of the Tabernacle, but is embodied within Christ.5 Thus, Christ became the holy container of God. Nevertheless, the fact that Nicodemus had to look "Through that pure Virgin-shrine" (I. 1) in order to see "such light / As made him know his God by night" (II. 5-6) indicates that Vaughan understands the body of Christ to be a mercifully protective covering for the full glory of God, an idea that prepares the reader for the...