Henry Vaughan was a Seventeenth Century Welsh poet who also practised medicine. He is best known for his poem Silex Scintillans and his poetry has enjoyed something of a renaissance in more recent times.
Spirituality Page: Henry Vaughan
Henry Vaughan was a Seventeenth Century Welsh poet who also practised medicine. He is best known for his poem Silex Scintillans and his poetry has enjoyed something of a renaissance in more recent times.
Following study in Oxford and in London he returned to his native Breconshire, which was a source of inspiration for his writings, and he lived on the estate at Llanssantffread where he was born and which he inherited from his parents. He married twice and had four children, dying at the age of 74 in 1695. He had a strong attachment to the Established Church and his brother was ordained an Anglican priest, being deprived of his living during the Commonwealth.
The disruption of this period caused Vaughan much distress and a good deal of his poetry of that time is directed to showing his readers how to understand their membership of a church whose actual body in the form of regular worship is absent. This was in fact the period when he was most active as a poet and much of his work is directed to giving his readers a kind of standpoint from which to judge present travails such as in the words "foolish ranges" in the poem "Peace" below.
He was heavily influenced by the religious poet George Herbert, and it is his religious poetry that remains critically acclaimed. His poem "They are all Gone into the World of Light" concerns the mysteries of death and the speaker's desire to uncover more about those who have passed away. It ends with the lines:
Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill
My perspective as they pass
Or else remove me hence unto that hill,
Where I shall need no glass.
One of the loveliest of his poems is "Peace". Vaughan wrote this in 1650 as part of Silex Scintillians and it describes Heaven as a place without danger or sadness, filled only with the peace and happiness of God. There, we will find the angels and Christ "One born in a manger" who "commands the beauteous files". Hubert Parry included it in his Songs of Farewell composed in 1918, the year before he died, and the poem is of course especially relevant at this troubled time.
Peace
My Soul, there is a country
Afar beyond the stars,
Where stands a winged sentry
All skillful in the wars;
There, above noise and danger
Sweet Peace sits, crown'd with smiles,
And One born in a manger
Commands the beauteous files.
He is thy gracious friend
And (O my Soul awake!)
Did in pure love descend,
To die here for thy sake.
If thou canst get but thither,
There grows the flow'r of peace,
The rose that cannot wither,
Thy fortress, and thy ease.
Leave then thy foolish ranges,
For none can thee secure,
But One, who never changes,
Thy God, thy life, thy cure.
Anne and John Duddington