Welsh Journals

Davies is well aware of Vaughan's limitations, as man and poet. She avoids the quasi-hagiographic approach of some earlier accounts. On the poetry itself she has much to say which effectively challenges the idea of Vaughan as the poet only of 'isolated lines rather than poems' (Robert Ellrodt). Davies's Vaughan is far more than the maker of the occasional or memorable phrase, though she rightly concedes that he is a 'variable' poet. Davies's readings of individual poems are consistently sensitive and perceptive. Time and again they make clear the ways in which Vaughan's too-often-maligned craftsmanship articulates and focuses meaning and effect. Writing of 'The Morning-Watch', for example, she demonstrates the manner in which the counterpointing of syntactical and metrical breaks, and the abundance of rhyme and assonantal rhymes, create a system of complex cross rhythms and inner echoes which is 'exactly right to express the "symphony of nature", the imperfect creatures' perfect impromptu' (p. 13 5). In discussing 'Love-Sick', she points to Vaughan's virtuosic use of highly patterned alliteration and parallelism which may, as she suggests, be indebted to the traditions of cynghanedd and dyfalu. In her reading of 'Joy of my life', she brings out beautifully the poem's sophisticated simplicity, and she writes exactly and ungushingly of the way in which its syntactical weaving across a combination of long and short lines enacts (and demands from the reader a re-enactment of) an equivalent of the kind of precarious balance with which it is concerned. Henry Vaughan is everywhere informed by Davies's reading: not just of the expected work on Vaughan but of much else too from J. Daryll Evans on The Churchyard Yews of Gwent to J. H. F. Abeleen on The Genetics of Behaviour. Nowhere, however is there any excess of scholarly ostentation. The book spends relatively little time in direct engagement with previous accounts of Vaughan though Davies is ready to offer stinging rebuttals of a few earlier judgements which do a disservice to Vaughan. Just occasionally, Davies allows her focus to blur: passages on Thomas do not always throw light on Henry; a digression on Eve and Adam's laments in Paradise Lost (his apparently 'pure Beethoven', hers with 'all the poignancy of a Mozart aria') does little to aid our understanding of Vaughan. But these are quibbles and do nothing to detract from the value of the book. Written with great clarity, intelligence and forcefulness, both learned and imaginative, this is an exemplary study. It not only locates Vaughan in his own time and place; it makes clear why his work is a continuing presence, why it matters in our own time and place. GLYN PURSGLOVE Swansea