Henry Vaughan

This article is about the poet Henry Vaughan. For the architect of the same name, see Henry Vaughan (architect) .

Henry Vaughan ( April 17, 1621 or 1622 , † April 23, 1695 ) was a Welsh poet who is mostly assigned to the metaphysical poets .

Life

Childhood and youth

Henry Vaughan was born the son of Welsh landowner Thomas Vaughan Sr. and his wife Denise Vaughan, b. Morgan was born in Brecknockshire . He was the older twin brother of the philosopher Thomas Vaughan . They grew up on a small country estate in Llanssantfread parish that their mother inherited from their father, David Morgan. In 1628 the family had a third son, William. Henry probably grew up bilingual (English and Welsh). In his poems an idealized picture of childhood sometimes appears, which suggests a happy childhood of his own.

In 1638 Vaughan went to Oxford with his twin brother and studied there at Jesus College . Two years later, however, at his father's request, he moved to London to begin studying law there. Some suggest that he finished his studies early to fight on the side of the royalists in the English Civil War (he was a country nobleman and devout Anglican), but there is no clear evidence of this.

Career as a poet

After his studies and possible military service, Vaughan lived until his death on the country estate where he was born and which he inherited from his parents. He gave himself the title Silurust , which is derived from the name of the Silurians : a Celtic tribe that lived in Vaughan's homeland and had resisted the invasion of the Romans. This shows Vaughan's strong ties to his homeland and his cultural and ethnic roots.

His early poems, published in the volumes Poems and Olor Iscanus , are still in the footsteps of the Renaissance poet Ben Jonson . Here Vaughan deals with secular issues, including the civil war.

However, the events of 1648-50 caused a profound change in Vaughan's thought and work. In 1648 his younger brother William died. In the following year the civil war was lost for the royalists and thus for the Anglican Church. In the same year Vaughan met a serious illness. All of this led Vaughan to turn to spiritual poetry from then on. He published them in the volume Silex Scintillans . Two years later, The Mount of Olives was published , a collection of sacred prose texts reflecting Vaughan's religious beliefs (in line with his poems).

After monarchy was restored and the Anglican Church regained its position in 1660, Vaughan ended his career as a poet.

The late years

Henry Vaughan was very interested in medicine, probably also through the influence of his brother Thomas. He translated two medical works, Hermetical Physick and The Chemists Key , from Latin into English and practiced as a doctor for many years, but without a medical degree.

Little is known about the last three decades of his life. The last written documents about him are the files of a legal dispute between his children over the division of the paternal property. It was not until the year before Vaughan's death that this conflict was resolved. Henry Vaughan was married twice and had four children from each marriage. He died in 1695 on his country estate near Llanssantfread and was buried in the village cemetery. Vaughan did not achieve literary fame during his lifetime. Today's interest in him is primarily based on Silex Scintillans .

The main work of Silex Scintillans

The Latin title of Vaughan's main work Silex Scintillans means " flint " (silex: stone, rock; scintillans: sparks spraying). It is a metaphor for the religious reawakening of the cold human heart: It can be struck by God's word like a bolt of lightning and thereby spray sparks and kindle a warming fire. The title page of the first issue contains an illustration to illustrate this.

The poems were written in a downright desperate situation for the Church of England : The Book of Common Prayer and the Anglican worship service were banned by the ruling Puritans under Oliver Cromwell . Vaughan remained true to his faith; but he feared that the Anglican congregations would now disintegrate, as the foundations of their religious practice and with it all internal cohesion were taken from them. That is why he now wrote poems that called upon the Anglicans to be patient, pious and charitable. His intention to create a kind of "replacement" for the Book of Common Prayer is also evident in the fact that he wrote poems about church festivals and arranged them within the Silex Scintillans in the order of the festivals in the Anglican church year .

Vaughan was based on the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. Stylistically, he was also strongly influenced by George Herbert and his collection of poems The Temple from 1633, in whose successor he explicitly stood. The classification of Vaughan in the literary stream of metaphysical poets results primarily from these poems. Traditional Welsh poetry also influenced his writing style, e.g. B. there are far more alliterations and assonances in his poems .

A main theme of the Silex Scintillans is the relationship between this world and the hereafter, between the physical and spiritual world. The basic situation described in the poems is rather negative: it is shaped by the absence of the Church and the resulting doubts about the presence of God in this world. This corresponded to the real situation of the Anglicans: They could no longer practice their religion and were therefore "removed from God". The emotional handling of this situation is completely different in the first edition of the Silex Scintillans than in the newly added poems of the second edition, which appeared five years later. The 1650 edition primarily speaks of despair, hopelessness, loneliness and the inability to deal with the insecurity of human existence. In the new poems of the second edition, a wistful, but also more hopeful tone is struck: They express confidence in the return of God and the approaching end of religious oppression, but also the joyful expectation of a better afterlife.

As for the representation of nature, there are striking parallels between Vaughan and William Wordsworth . However, it has not been established whether Wordsworth really knew Vaughan's texts. To call Vaughan the “forerunner” of English Romanticism would go too far: Although the representation of nature is similar, the underlying perception of it is completely different. Vaughan viewed nature neither for its own sake nor as a mirror of one's inwardness, but as the realization of a divine idea. He tried to read nature like the Bible. He wanted to come closer to deciphering a divine plan of creation and thus to a fundamental knowledge of the world, even if a final understanding of both "books" depends on inspiration from the Holy Spirit and cannot be achieved by human understanding alone.

Works

• Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished (1646)
• Olor Iscanus: A Collection of Some Select Poems, and Translatons (1651)
• Silex Scintillans: or Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (1650, 2nd, extended ed. 1655)
• The Mount of Olives: or, Solitary Devotions (1652)
• Flores Solitudinis. Certaine Rare and Elegant Pieces (1654)
• Hermetical Physick: Or, The right way to preserve, and to restore Health. By That famous and faithful Chymist, Henry Nollius. Englished by Henry Vaughan, Gent. (1655)
• The Chemists Key to shut, and to open: Or the True Doctrin of Corruption and Generation, Henry Nollius's De Generatione Rerum naturalium, translated by Vaughan (1657)
• Thalia Rediviva: The Pass-Times and Diversions of a Country-Muse In Choice Poems on several Occasions (1678)

literature

• Vaughan, Henry: The Complete Poems. Edited by Alan Rudrum. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. ( ISBN 0-14-042208-0 )
• Friedensreich, Kenneth: Henry Vaughan. Boston: Twayne 1978 (= Twayne's English authors series 226). ( ISBN 0-8057-6697-9 )
• Garner, Ross: Henry Vaughan. Experience and the tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 3rd edition 1967 [1959]. ( ISBN 0-226-28421-2 )
• Simmonds, James: Masques of God. Form and Theme in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 1972. ( ISBN 0-8229-3236-9 )
• Wall, John: Henry Vaughan. In: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 131. Farmington Hills: Thomson Gale 1993, pp. 291-309. ( ISBN 0-8103-5390-3 )

Web links

• Vaughan's work on luminarium.org