Critical analysis Henry Vaughan's The Retreate
In the poem The Retreate Henry Vaughan deals
with the loss of the heavenly glory experienced during the childhood and
expresses a fanciful desire to get back that original stage. The theme, on the
surface level, appears very simple; but going into the deeper the reader will
find that the poem is founded on the diverse European idealistic,
psychological, religious/mystical and philosophical doctrines in the western
culture. On the socio-cultural level, the poem can be interpreted as a
reflection of the urge for liberating the human psyche from the torments and
tyrannies of civilization, an urge which, it must be said, has been expressed
by Vaughan in
the purest, distilled and highly cultivated form of thought. On the
psychological level, the desire to go back to a happy childhood can be
interpreted, Freud said, as an escape from the hard realities of life in the
defence mechanism of regression, as a daydream, the root cause of which can be
traced in the agoraphobia of a person, which constantly goads him/her to seek
refuge in the mother’s womb. On the philosophical level, what Vaughan’s says in the poem, tallies with
Plato’s theory of anamnesis and transmigration of the soul. But above all, the
purpose of the poet here is didactic, and he has given to the poem a deep
religious meaning and fervour by drawing upon the inherent Christian doctrines
and symbols. The poem begins with the characteristic lament for the lost
childhood days, “Happy those early days! When I Shin’d in my Angell-infancy.”
The word “angel-infancy” refers to that period of life, which is marked of
innocence and ignorance. If we think of this from a secular perspective, this
period of life is seen to have a special attraction for all the human beings.
So the poetic property has not been reduced in its secular appeal. But Vaughan
is here thinking in terms of mystical Christian theology, in which the child
occupies a significant place, on the one hand, symbolising innocence, and on
the other, representing the Babe of Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ—a theme which
remained a favourite one among the Renaissance painters like Botticelli,
Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Bellini. Vaughan’s
theme here is not the glorification of Christ as the Babe, the theme is here a
retrospection of the degeneration and degradation of his own personal life in
contrast to what he had been during his childhood. The memory of that phase of
life forces him to go back to that divine world, from which his soul, he
believes, came to this world. The poet, however, gives a theoretical
justification to his beliefs by drawing upon the Platonic doctrine of the
transmigration of the soul. In this process the soul, Plato said, resides in
the world of Ideas, of Beauty, Truth and Goodness before being transplanted into
the human body. But once transplanted into matter it forgets its previous
existence in the gradual growing contacts with the material world. The
theoretical bias is most strongly evident in the lines where the poet says that
everything was different, “Before I understood this place Appointed for my
second race.” But the next moment the poet uses an image, “a white, Celestiall
thought”, which derives its symbolism from Neo-Platonic mysticism and Christian
mythology. Neo-Platonism explains the manifest material world as merely an
illuminated illusion of a light from a single, ever-radiant divine source, God.
But the poet’s back also reminds us Adam and Eve’s looking back at the lost
Garden of Eden in Milton’s Paradise Lost, “They looking back, all th’ eastern side
beheld Of paradise, so late their happy seat, ……………………………………… ……………………………………….
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow Through Eden took their
solitary way.” (Book IV) The agony for the poet’s loss of childhood vision of
heavenly glory is, it may be said, felt on the same level as that for the loss
of Eden and the
subsequent degeneration in the archetypal Biblical theme. All is, however, not
lost. The poet finds a spiritual recovery in the Platonic doctrine of Love: he
finds the reflections of the Universal Beauty in the particular things of
physical beauty. That is to say, by meditating on the particular he tries to
graduate to the understanding of the Universal Beauty of God. The poet can,
“…see a glimpse of his bright face; When on some gilded Cloud or flowre My
gazing soul would dwell an houre.” Speaking scientifically, this is a
psychological journey in its extreme form, in which the poet seeks extinction
of the flesh so that the soul is released and made one with the divine source
once again. Though this is purely a Platonic concept, it is justified in
relation to the Christian theology. Like Moses, who was once granted one side
of the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, the poet wants
to go back to “That city of Palm trees” or heaven. This is purely a mystical
concept, and this distinguishes Vaughan
from Wordsworth, who dealing with the same theme in his Immortality Ode works
out a poetic resolution, which does not negate the beauty of matter. But Vaughan, on the contrary,
finds “weaker glories…some shadows of eternity” in matter. He wants to suspend
all the properties of the senses from matter or reality now and hopes to become
one with the divine after his death. At the same time, however it must be said
that Vaughan’s
vision is also apocalyptic. During the Renaissance St. John’s “Book of
Revelation” proved to be a dangerous book of prophecy, and during the
Reformation the Apocalypse took various forms, among which spiritual or inner
apocalypse entered the collective unconscious of the European peoples. It
became a process of purifying one’s inner being. So it may be
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