Final Exam Review-----Henry Vaughan

Henry Vaughan

Background

• called himself "Silurist"
• 1621-Born
• 1632-38 Privately schooled by Rev. Matthew Herbert
• 1638- Jesus College
• 1640-Leaves Oxford to study law in London for 2 years, turned to medicine instead
• 1645- Participated in Battle of Rowton Heath (Civil War)
• 1646- Married Catherine Wise, she gives him 1 son and 3 daughters
• 1646- "Poems with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished"
• 1650- "Silex Scintillians"-religious poems
• 1651- "Olor Iscanus" secular poetry and prose translations
• 1655- "Silex Scintillians" republished with added part
• 1678 - "Thalia Rediviva
• 1652- "The Mount of Olives"
• 1654-"Flores Solitudinis"
• 1695- Died and buried at Llansantffraed

The Retreat

I was happy when I was in heaven. Before I realised what I had as an angel I was appointed to be a man, and before I was taught to like things more than you. When I had yet to wander too far from conception I could still look back and see heaven. At that age I could still admire your true beauty within the clouds and flowers for hours. Before I could speak sins or had the evil to sin with every sense I could still feel your divinity within me. Oh how I wish to travel back to that time from where my spirit sees Jerusalem. But, I have been on Earth too long and can't remember heaven. Some men wish to move forward but I wish to go back and end where I began.



Man

Stanza 1:When thinking about the consistency and state of some things on earth, where bnirds like clockwork as day and night divide, bees at night go home and hive, and flowers early and latea rise with the sun all fall in the same house.

Stanza 2: I wish that my God would give me the same consistency for those things. To always keep to his divine appointments, nothing breaks their peace, they do not have to work for their food and do not have to wear clothes to show their beauty.

Stanza 3: Man is always troubled in mind and body. He has no fixed place and is always moving about the Earth. He has a home but knows not where it is, he says its far but he has forgotten how to get back.

Stanza 4: He tries every option, constantly roaming. A stone has more wit than he, where even on the darkest nights they find their way back home. But by some hid sense Man is the shuttle that God ordered to move through the loom back and forth but always forward.