Welsh Journals

number of half-tones, densely-set type, lengthy quotations and numerous footnotes, not to mention the price, may well deter the amateur local historian interested in the Forest of Dean from buying the book, whilst there is unlikely to be a large academic sale. Once remaindered, however, as most of Sutton's more specialized titles are after a year or so, it will be worth buying, if only as a quarry of information. PHILIP RIDEN Cardiff HENRY VAUGHAN. By Stevie Davies. Seren Books, Bridgend, 1995. Pp. 213. £ 6.95. For too long the popular image of Henry Vaughan (1621-95) has been of a kind of saintly Solitary transcending his troubled times, a gifted but slipshod poet, author of poems which start strikingly and then fade away. Important work by Alan Rudrum and others has done much to correct and qualify this picture, but it is with this new book by Stevie Davies that we come closest to a comprehensive reassessment. This should certainly be the first book that every student of Vaughan ought to read; were it the only read there would be little cause for alarm. Henry Vaughan is a thoroughly personal book. It begins and ends with Stevie Davies's reflections (and Siegfried Sassoon's reflections) in the graveyard at Llansantftraed, where Vaughan is buried. Throughout it registers Davies's encounters, not just with the writings, but with the surrounding landscape; with what can be reconstructed of the Vaughans' domestic life and family relationships; with the political and social history; with complex traditions of thought. Inevitably there is much that has to be speculative but Davies is scrupulously honest in making clear when she is going beyond the strictest warrant of the 'facts'. The result is a very persuasive picture of a Vaughan who is 'complex, churning, emotional, ascetic, inchoate' (p. 171). That complexity is traced in terms both personal and historical. The dynamics of his relationship with his brother Thomas ('The Crucible of Township', as she calls it, aptly enough) are illuminatingly explored. So, too, are the striking ways in which Vaughan's sensibility (though not his theology) was 'a curious mingling of reformation with Counter-Reformation' (p.19). Davies writes very shrewdly of how, given the historical circumstances, 'even the most spiritual and inward poems in Silex Scintillans are charged with counter-revolutionary energy' (P. 156).