the search vaughanthe search vaughan called himself a son of ben, but clearly we see a lot of...

The Search

❖ Vaughan called himself a Son of Ben, but clearly we see a lot of Donne’s and Herbert’s influence in his religious poems.

❖ External & internal journey to find Christ

❖ pilgrimage motif, biblical allusions

❖ night - time of mystical vision

❖ ‘roving extasie’ (l. 4) - characteristic of this poem

Rose -Virgin Mary’s emblem

Rose without thorns -She is free of original sin

Nativity

The Magi (Three Wise Men)

Christ among the Doctors

Model of the Second Temple

The Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount

Bedrock or Foundation Stone- Well of Souls

Jesus and the Samaritan woman at Jacob's Well

Agony in the Garden

Church of Holy Sepulchreat Calvary

❖ Wilderness - place of purification

❖ Desert fathers - early Christian hermits who fled into the desert from the persecution of the Romans

❖ Jesus’s bride - Church, New Jerusalem

❖ ‘rove in’ - from external to internal journey within

❖ The voice of conscience calling him back to the right path - Herbert’s influence

❖ ‘mere despair of wings’ - paradox - only the poor in spirit shall inherit the kingdom of heaven

The World

❖ night - time of mystical visions

❖ blindness/sight; light/darkness

❖ concretize the abstract (eternity -> ring)

❖ categories of men: lover, statesman, miser, epicure, petty men

❖ ring conceit - eternity -> betrothal ring

❖ circular structure

❖ hearing voice at the end

Baroque

Ecstasy of Saint Teresa

Mary Magdalene

Richard Crashaw’s ‘The Weeper’❖ Steps to the Temple (1646) - admirer of George Herbert

❖ Used to live in Italy during the Civil War, he is perhaps the only English poet who, perhaps like none other, was directly influenced by the continental baroque style

❖ overdecorated, obsessed with limited set of sensuous imagery (nest, rose, milk, hair, feet, etc.)

❖ bathos - sudden change from what is lofty or deeply moving to what is foolish, trivial or ludicrous

❖ no real structure, no development, just strings of repetition and variation

❖ no cerebral appeal, sensational rather than metaphysical

Henry King’s ‘The Exequy’❖ T. S. Eliot called this ‘one of the finest’ and indeed ‘matchless’

poem in English language

❖ Donne’s and Jonson’s influence

❖ metaphor, conceit (echoes of Donne)

❖ octosyllabic couplet, restrained tone, occasional (his wife’s funeral)

❖ controlled meditative structure

❖ ll. 1-80 - elegy for his dead wife

❖ ll. 81-120 - metaphor of his journey to join her in death

Andrew Marvell “To His Coy Mistress” “The Definition of Love” “On a Drop of Dew” “Bermudas” “The Garden” (The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn) “A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body” “The Coronet” “The Mower’s Song”

Compare & contrast John Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’ with Richard Crashaw’s ‘The Weeper’ in terms of argument and conceits