Henry Vaughan's Borrowings from Owen Felltham

Henry Vaughan's Borrowings from Owen Felltham by Richard F. Kennedy Of Henry Vaughan's extensive borrowings from George Herbert, Hutchinson says: "a reader who knows well both The Temple and Silex Scintillans never comes to the end of the verbal parallels. There is no example in English literature of one poet adopting another poet's words so extensively."' Some of these same remarks might also be applied to Vaughan's borrowing from Owen Felltham, for here too one seems never to "come to the end of verbal parallels." Scholars such as Jean Robertson and L.C. Martin have shown a great deal of Henry Vaughan's indebtedness to Felltham's Resolves, most strikingly in the poet's appropriation of entire passages of translation of Latin poetry by the resolvist, passages ranging from six to fifteen lines.2 They have also noted other borrowings of words, phrases, and images — such as the famous phrase "shootes of everlastingnesse" from "The Retreate" with which Martin compares Felltham's description of the soul as a "shoot of everlastingnesse," or the equally famous image of eternity as "a great Ring" in "The World," which also has a parallel in Felltham's Resolves.3 In addition to the nineteen borrowings noted in Martin's commentary, there are another forty-eight places where Vaughan may be indebted to the Resolves, usually only for a striking word or image, but sometimes for as many as a halfdozen expressions woven into the fabric of one poem, as in "The Charnel-house," or for almost an entire line, as in "To his friend —," line 60. Vaughan's imagination seems to have been stirred particularly by Felltham's habits of neologizing and by his original or innovative use of lexical forms. To help signal this feature as well as to strengthen the probability of a borrowing, I have tried to note whenever the Oxford English Dictionary cites the resolvist as the first user of a word, or of a 109 Richard F. Kennedy particular form of a word, and so on.J Since the first two sets of the Resolves (the first published in 1623. the second in 1628) predate Vaughan's first publication (Poems, 1646) by nearly twenty years, the borrowings could have been only in one direction when Vaughan was writing his major works from 1646 to 1655. The only place where Felltham might be indebted to Vaughan — and the possibility seems remote at best — is in a third set of resolves, first published in 1661, where the phrase "deaths sad entrance" (p. 355) is paralleled by "sad entrance" in the first line of Death' in Silex Scintillans (1650). The following list refers to the pagination and hneation of Martin s second edition, and cites Felltham's Resolves (R) from the third edition of 1628-29, of which there is a convenient facsimile reprint.5 To save space, the following list contains the key words shared by Vaughan and Felltham; the reader is referred to the complete texts to examine the full context of these shared words. Poems (1646) Dedication ? 2.2-4 "To you . . . have I made sacred these Fancies ." Cf. Dedication: "I haue sacred this offertory ... to your Ladyship' (R. p. 319). p. 2.6 "revell it:' Cf. "reuell it" (R, p. 11). "To my Ingenuous Friend, R. W." p. 3.2 "harmles mirth." Cf. harmelesse. nay, amending Mirth" (R, p. 218). See also p. 19.73. "Juvenals Tenth satyre Translated " p. 19.73 harmles. and just mirth." See p. 3.2. p. 21.153 "distractive feare." Cf. "distractiue terrors" (R. p. 54). Felltham's use of "distractive 'antedates OED 110 VAUGHAN AND FELLTHAM p. 26.349 'spirited, wanton ayres." Cf. "[Music] is but wanton dAyre, and the Titillation of that spirited Element" (R. p. 273). The participial adjective "wanton'd" is not in OED. The phrase in Vaughan's poem does not correspond to anything in the Latin of Juvenal (Iines214and215). Olor lscanus (1651) The Charnel-house" p. 41.11 Torpedo." Cl "Torpedo'' (R, p. 323). See also p. 185.18. p. 41.17. 19 shoreless . . Excesse " Cf. "shorelesse excesse ' (R, p. 11). OED cites Felltham's use of "shoreless" as the earliest. p. 41...