They Are All Gone into the World of Light
Read by John Fuller
They Are All Gone into the World of Light - Henry Vaughan - Read by John Fuller
Vaughan's attention to the natural world all around him in the Valley of the Usk certainly does get into his poems, but it will never make us really think of him as a nature poet. Still, in some of his poems there are surprising moments. In this one, he can suddenly show that he's observed things that would come naturally to a later poet like John Clare: 'He that hath found some fledg'd bird's nest, may know / At first sight, if the bird be flown'. Vaughan can always be shown to have an eye for natural things; in this poem, his 'world of light', though of course, conceptual and metaphysical in implication, is also in a sense simply the sunset upon ...
Vaughan's attention to the natural world all around him in the Valley of the Usk certainly does get into his poems, but it will never make us really think of him as a nature poet. Still, in some of his poems there are surprising moments. In this one, he can suddenly show that he's observed things that would come naturally to a later poet like John Clare: 'He that hath found some fledg'd bird's nest, may know / At first sight, if the bird be flown'. Vaughan can always be shown to have an eye for natural things; in this poem, his 'world of light', though of course, conceptual and metaphysical in implication, is also in a sense simply the sunset upon Allt yr Esgair, a specific place indicated in the poem by the deictic article 'this'. 'Like stars upon some gloomy grove, / Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest / After the sun's remove'. 'Some gloomy grove' reads like a classical poeticism, but 'this hill' is quite precisely a particular place, and as the end of the poem makes clear, what Vaughan sees here he's seeing through a telescope which he's taken with him on a walk up the hill behind his house. I think it gives a beautiful validity to his yearning argument.
They Are All Gone into the World of Light
Like stars upon some gloomy grove,
Whose light doth trample on my days:
High as the heavens above!
Shining nowhere, but in the dark;
At first sight, if the bird be flown;
Call to the soul, when man doth sleep:
Her captive flames must needs burn there;
Created glories under thee!
My perspective still as they pass,