THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

‘Silence and stealth of dayes’ is Christ’s ‘pearl of great price’ which outweighs all other value; the roots that sleep in
the wintry soil of ‘I walkt the other day’ are to bring forth new life in an eternal spring; the sense of lonely exile in
‘They are all gone into the world of light!’ is transformed by the investigation of a series of conceits (death as a jewel
shining in the night, an empty bird’s nest, a dream of angels, a star confined in a tomb) which serve to ‘disperse these
mists which blot and fill | My perspective’. The dispersal of gloom is elsewhere taken as a central metaphor for
revelation: ‘The Morning-watch’ welcomes the floods of light as a foretaste of heaven; ‘The Dawning’ recognizes that
dawn is ‘the only time | That with thy glory doth best chime’ and therefore the fittest time to meditate on the Second
Coming; Eternity ostensibly glimpsed with such wonderful casualness in ‘The World’ is like ‘a great Ring of pure and
endless light’ in which ‘the world | And all her train were hurl’d’. When in ‘The Night’ Vaughan describes the
nocturnal visit of Nicodemus to Jesus, he plays with a series of contrasts between light and darkness, waking and
sleeping, education and oblivion. The poem centres on a pun and a paradox: at midnight Nicodemus sees both the Son
and the Sun and his enlightenment consists of an insight into the mystery of God’s ‘deep, but dazling darkness’. It is
a night into which Vaughan’s poetry consistently peers.
Henry King’s meditations on mortality and eternity lack the often electrifying originality of Vaughan’s. As Dean
of Rochester Cathedral in 1642, King (1592-1669) had had his library destroyed and his church pillaged by a
rampaging gang of Puritan iconoclasts; in the same year he was appointed Bishop of Chichester only to be ejected
from his see in 1643 (he was restored to it in 1660). As his somewhat florid ‘Elegy upon the most Incomparable King
Charles the First’ of 1649 demonstrates, the nature of his political and religious loyalties was never in doubt. The
‘Elegy’ unequivocally sees Charles as a martyr enthroned in heaven while below him his former subjects are sundered
from each other by ‘that Bloody Cloud, | whose purple Mists Thy Murther’d Body Shroud’. Vengeance, King
solemnly reminds his readers, is a prime prerogative of God, a factor which ‘bids us our Sorrow by our Hope confine, |
And reconcile our Reason to our Faith’. Much of King’s verse is, however, secular in subject and unspecifically
Christian in its imagery, though even his amorous poetry is haunted by a vague melancholy and an awareness of
transience. Both the ‘Midnight Meditation’ and the much imitated stanza ‘Sic Vita’ (generally ascribed to him) stress
the frailty of human life and human aspiration. Amongst his many elegies the tribute to his dead wife, ‘The Exequy.
To his Matchlesse never to be forgotten Freind’, quite transcends the rest of his poetry in quality and poignancy.
Although the poem scarcely sets out to forbid mourning, its interplay of images of books and libraries, of suns, stars,
and seasons, and finally of battle (‘My pulse like a soft Drum | Beats my approach, tells Thee I come’) suggests
something of King’s debt to the ‘valedictions’ of John Donne.
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Secular Verse: Courtiers and Cavaliers
In his poetic tribute to his ‘worthy friend’ George Sandys, Thomas Carew (1594/5-1640) contrasted his own ‘unwasht
Muse’ to the hallowed temple frequented by Sandys’s. Sandys (1578-1644), the author of a verse Paraphrase upon the
Psalmes of David (1636), the translator of Hugo Grotius’s sombre Latin tragedy, Christ’s Passion (1640) and,
somewhat less devoutly, of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1621-6), seemed to Carew to have set a standard against which
his own secular poetry was impiously wanting. Carew’s aspirations to turn to religious verse are, however, only
modestly voiced in his poem: his ‘restlesse Soule’ may, perhaps, find itself tired with the pursuit of mortal beauty, and
the same ‘perhaps’ conditions the idea that his soul may neither quench her thirst nor satisfy her appetite for things
spiritual by contemplating the earthly. Prompted by Sandys’s example he proposes that he may at some future point
cease adoring God ‘in moulds of Clay’ and may turn instead to writing ‘what his blest Sp’rt, not fond Love shall
indite’. These remained largely unfulfilled ambitions. When Carew’s Poems appeared in print in 1640 they were on
the whole elegantly turned, witty, gentlemanlike love-lyrics. Some, such as the epitaphs to Lady Mary Wentworth and
to Lady Mary Villiers, develop conceits appropriate to a meditation on untimely death; others, such as ‘To my Friend
G.N. from Wrest’ and ‘To Saxham’, celebrate country-house hospitality in the manner of Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’, but
the real substance of the volume lies in its variety of amorous addresses to, and reflections on, a fictional mistress
known as Celia. These verses play with the supposed power of the poet to make and unmake a reputation for beauty;
they neatly exploit a simple metaphor (such as the idea of excommunication in ‘To my inconstant Mistris’ or a
parallel with an armed rebellion in the state in ‘A deposition from Love’); or, as in the smooth ‘Song’, ‘Ask me no
more’, they establish an indulgently erotic mood through a series of sensual images (roses, sun-rays, nightingales,
stars, and, finally, the Phoenix in her ‘spicy nest’). Carew’s direct debt to the divergent examples of Jonson and
Donne is evident more in the poems he addressed to both masters than in his own love-poetry. The ‘Elegie upon the
Death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr John Donne’ is eloquent in its appreciation of the innovatory power of a poet whose