Henry Vaughan & George Herbert: Divine Themes & Celestial Praise

This book contains poems by Henry Vaughan, all of them selected from the 1655 edition of Silex Scintillans. Almost all are followed by a related poem from George Herbert’s 1633 collection, The Temple. For Vaughan, Herbert was that ‘blessed man, whose holy life and verse gained many pious Converts’: poets who wisely exchanged ‘vain and vicious subjects’ for ‘divine Themes and Celestial praise’. Vaughan thought of himself as ‘the least’ of those converts, but the poetry in Silex Scintillans shows him matching and even sometimes surpassing his master’s work.

Henry Vaughan was born in 1621 at Newton-by-Usk in Breconshire. Both he and his twin brother, Thomas, were tutored locally before going up to Jesus College, Oxford. Henry then went on to study law at the Inns of Court in London. After the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, he returned to Wales and served in the King’s army. He remained in Breconshire, marrying twice and practising as a physician, until his death in 1695. Vaughan’s first volume, Poems, with the Tenth Satire of Juvenal Englished, was published in 1646. Another collection, Olor Iscanus, was published in 1651, but it is the 1655 edition of Silex Scintillans, for which this poet is best remembered today.

George Herbert died at the age of 39, in March 1633. A month before, he had given the manuscript of his poems to an emissary of Nicholas Ferrar, who had it copied out and then printed as The Temple. In the preface to that popular book, Vaughan would have learned that Herbert was ‘nobly born’, but had given up on a fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, ‘choosing rather to serve at God’s Altar’. In 1630, Herbert became rector of Bemerton, near Salisbury, where he remained for the rest of his short life.