Print Elegies, Henry Vaughan, and the Everyday Deaths of War

Abstract

Print Elegies, Henry Vaughan, and the Everyday Deaths of War Catharine Gray Can you scale up grief? How do you mourn the ongoing, the escalating? While these kinds of questions about the scale and pace of mourning haunt many moments of historical crisis, including our own, they were particularly pressing for writers of the British Civil Wars faced with the proliferating mortality and bloody, youthful deaths of combat. These writers and their readers, living through waves of famine and disease, were accustomed to death, but the wars that shook England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales between 1638–51 put pressure on traditional cultures of mourning and literatures of grief, as the visibility of military men, framed as eminently grievable by honor codes and political polemic, collided with the sheer numbers and pace of deaths. This pace, which exacerbated already-existing mortality rates, was in turn compounded by the periodical print journalism that developed in large part to report the wars—their political divisions, as other scholars have long argued, but also their widespread material damage. If seventeenth-century news offered "an extreme example" of "information overload," as Joad Raymond recently suggests, then this overload took a particularly bellicose form, including information about war deaths whose fast-paced accumulations threatened to undercut the heroic singularity of martial exemplarity and raised questions about the relations of immediacy to historical commemoration, of accelerated cycles of news to fixity of meaning and consolation.1 This essay turns to a range of seventeenth-century published war elegies that struggle to mourn death, to keep up with the high mortality rates and their dissemination in the onslaught of events characterizing the war news of their moment. For some of these poets, producing broadside and pamphlet elegies in the midst of the wars, this struggle means adapting techniques of information management and journalistic formats to produce metonymies and congeries of combat mortality that make each death one in a repeatable series of current events. Others, such as Henry [End Page 609] Vaughan in his 1646 "An Elegie on the death of Mr. R. W.," play on the mixed media of memorialization—on tombs and monuments, whether of stone or paper—to develop emblems of poetic repetition and fleetingness, dailiness and decay. In doing so, all these elegists undercut the widespread understandings of elegy at the time as, as Andrea Brady puts it, building "paper monuments" that, outlasting the mere matter of bodies and marble memorials, offered durable memory of the dead alongside understanding and closure for the mourners.2 As they negotiate the tense relations between received understandings of elegy and new experiences and media, these multiple poets do not so much produce artifices of eternity as develop a presentist, even journalistic, poetic, as they use war deaths to index the everyday deaths of wartime and thus help figure an emergent structure of feeling: of the swift and open-endedly repetitious nature of their heavily militarized and mediatized moment. By doing so, they come to exemplify the way that some elegy of the period was becoming less a poetry of the punctuating ceremonial occasion than one of the current event, as they address their own ephemerality and relation to cycles of news, while also casting each combat death as just one more occasion in what seemed to be, by the late 1640s at least, the endlessly reiterative occasions of a time of war. As they directly address these multiplying occasions, these elegists question the efficacy of singular acts of poetic consolation in ways that show that the shift to emphasizing lack of closure that Jahan Ramazani associates with modern elegy, in his book on that subject, has pre-modern roots.3 Scholarship on the sixteenth- and seventeenth- century poetry of mourning often emphasizes its memorializing and consolatory functions in ways that confirm Ramazani's characterizations: as it comes to focus on death as a subject, early modern elegy aspires to a monumentality that outlasts material memorials; it cancels complaint with consolation and compensates for loss with God, fame, or poetry itself.4 However, anxieties about the power of writing to offer consolation or even lasting meaning in the face of the erasures of time, violence, and death, long...