The Retreat
by Henry Vaughan
Welsh poet. His most important book is the collection of religious verse Silex Scintillans ['Shining Flint'], first issued in 1650, and enlarged in 1655. Poems such as 'Regeneration', 'The World' and 'They Are All Gone into the World of Light' embody an unusually intense spiritual vision, and his feeling for the natural world gives his best work a vividly immediate quality. His religious convictions are also developed in the prose works The Mount of Olives: or, Solitary Devotions (1652) and Flores Solitudinis (1654).
The Retreat
by Henry Vaughan
|
|
Happy those early days! when I
Shined in my Angel-infancy.
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white, celestial thought;
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two from my first Love,
And looking back, at that short space
Could see a glimpse of His bright face;
When on some gilded cloud or flower
My gazing soul would dwell an hour,
And in those weaker glories spy
Some shadows of eternity;
Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A several sin to every sense,
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness. O how I long to travel back
And tread again that ancient track!
That I might once more reach that plain
Where first I left my glorious train;
From whence th' enlightened spirit sees
That shady city of palm-trees.
But ah! my soul with too much stay
Is drunk, and staggers in the way.
Some men a forward motion love,
But I by backward steps would move;
And when this dust falls to the urn,
In that state I came, return.
|
