Luminous Stuff: The Resurrection of the Flesh in Vaughan’s Religious Verse

Abstract

Henry Vaughan asserts an understanding of resurrection as essentially and fundamentally about the body, and he understands resurrection to be “immanent” in the sense that signs of resurrection can already now be seen breaking into the here and now. Vaughan’s goal in his poetry is to uncover “Traces, and sounds of a strange kind,” as he puts it in “Vanity of Spirit.” Vaughan’s searching analysis of himself splits his bodily life into two: on the one hand, a socialized and historicized life and, on the other hand, a life that, in its material strangeness, is alien to his time and place and therefore the substrate of resurrection. At the same time, Vaughan is also interested in investigating the material stuff of the natural world separate from the uses and meanings that human languages impose upon it. By mystical attention to material stuff, including feathers, rocks, rainbows, and trees, Vaughan believes he can discover a perspective that transcends historical time. In that sense, Vaughan anticipates the Romantic poets. His formal experimentation is designed to make his poetry a tool to investigate the material strangeness of the person. As such, he develops a distinctively avant-garde poetics as theorized by Peter Bürger.