History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to SwinburneLang, Andrew
History
History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne
Lang, Andrew
English literature -- History and criticism
Like Wordsworth, Vaughan finds the divine near him everywhere:--
There's not a wind can stir,
Or beam pass by,
But straight I think, though far
Thy hand is nigh.
"Silence and Stealth of Days" is excellent, but never quite recaptures
the charm of the opening phrase. "The Burial of an Infant" has the
purity of a snowdrop: and "They are all gone into the World of Light"
haunts the memory; while "The Timber" is a set of variants on a brief
melancholy note of Homer. There are lovely lines, not unlike Herrick's,
on "St. Mary Magdalen," and her locks,
Which with skill'd negligence are shed
About thy curious, wild, young head.
Vaughan lived to see another Revolution, and died in 1695.
Herrick.
Robert Herrick, son of a prosperous goldsmith of a Leicestershire
family, was born in London, in 1591, and for twelve years was an
"Elizabethan," though his poems are "Caroline". In 1607 Herrick was
apprenticed to his uncle; in 1613 entered as a Fellow Commoner at St.
John's, Cambridge, he migrated to Trinity Hall, and took his Master's
degree in 1620. He had friends and patrons at Court, was one of the
sons of Ben Jonson, and lived on his wits and on his patrons, in a
poetical, musical, pleasant idleness. He took holy orders, not in the
spirit of George Herbert, and in 1629 received the living of Dean
Prior, in Devonshire. He did not desert, and probably did not neglect,
his parish, from which he was thrust by the Puritans in 1647; in the
next year his "Noble Numbers," and "Hesperides" was printed in "a rich
disorder"--the lines are on various levels in this most desirable
volume. The frontispiece shows a fleshly, muscular rather Roman-looking
poet to whose lips the bees bring honey. At the Restoration, Herrick
was restored to Dean Prior, where he died in October, 1674.
"Dull Devonshire" he calls the county, in his verses; he did not live
long to resent its rural torpor. His delightful poems are all full of
the country life, they smell April and May. His book is like a large
laughing meadow in early June, all diapered with flowers, and sweet
with the songs of birds, some a mere note or two of merry music, some
as prolonged and varied, though never so passionate, as the complaint
of the nightingale.
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers,
Of April, May, of June and July flowers;
I sing of Maypoles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.
Everything is sweet, spontaneous, glad and musical. Some pieces are
far from straitlaced of course, but, even setting these apart, "The
Hesperides" hold the greatest and richest bouquet of English songs.
Favourites are "Delight in Disorder," "Gather Ye Rose buds while Ye
May," "Corinna's Going a Maying,"
To Anthea (Bid me to live and I will live
Thy Protestant to be.)
To Meadows (Ye have been fresh and green,
Ye have been filled with flowers.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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