Vaughan and Wordsworth on Innocence and Experience

Miles Levy-Nordhoff

Wexler

Engl 495ESM

23 September 2013

Vaughan and Wordsworth on Innocence and Experience

Because so many authors have similar styles and discuss similar issues, it is easy to come to a hasty conclusion that the authors were inspired by one another or talking back to the other; however, it is an amazing phenomenon when two authors are so similar that certain lines seem to be mimicking each other. Writing 150 years before William Wordsworth, the well-known ‘poet of nature’ who “defined” poetry in his “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads,” the lesser-known Henry Vaughan discussed similar themes of divinity, nature, innocence, and experience. Even to an inexperienced litterateur, Wordworth’s “Ode” and Vaughan’s “The Retreat” are undeniably similar in theme and style.  It is known that Wordsworth had copies of several of Vaughan’s works, proving Wordsworth was inspired by him. Although he got many of his ideas from Vaughan, Wordsworth’s opinions of innocence and experience differ slightly from Vaughan’s. While Wordsworth found value in experience, Vaughan favors innocence in his poem, “The Retreat.”

            Like Wordsworth, Vaughan values innocence because it is divine and gives the ability to be closer to God. Vaughan’s poem “The Retreat” begins, “Happy those early days! when I/ Shined in my angel-infancy”(1-2). Vaughan compares the innocence of childhood to being an angel in heaven. The poem’s narrator (assumed to be Vaughan, himself) explains that his life on Earth is not his main purpose, “Before I understood this place/ Appointed for my second race,/ Or taught my soul to fancy ought/ But a white, celestial thought” (3-6). Vaughan explains that an innocent (angelic) mind only thinks about and desires God. Experience teaches one’s soul to desire ungodly things. Wordsworth’s opening lines to his “Ode” seem to be a verbal echo of these lines by Vaughan, “There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,/ The earth, and every common sight,/ To me did seem/ Apparelled in celestial light” (1-4). Vaughan continues in his poem describing the loss of innocence like walking away from God and looking back, seeing “a glimpse of his bright face” (10). Both Wordsworth and Vaughan found tranquility and divinity in nature, but in slightly different ways. Wordsworth, being a poet of nature, found true divinity and spirituality in nature. Nature brought one back to times of divine innocence. In his critical essay “The Source of Henry Vaughan’s Ideas Concerning God in Nature” A. C. Judson writes, “since all nature possesses something of the Eternal spirit, the child, blessed with the keenest memory of his celestial home, can most easily perceive it” (602). To Vaughan, this is true, but it is only a shadow. “When on some gilded cloud or flower/ My gazing soul would dwell an hour,/ And in those weaker glories spy/ Some shadows of eternity” (11-14). While Vaughan does find divinity in nature, it is a “weaker glory.” Nature is just a mimetic representation of the divine. Nature may seem eternal (it certain does to Wordsworth), but, sounding like Plato, Vaughan believes anything physical is temporary: mere “shadows of eternity.” He furthers this philosophy in the lines, “But felt through all this fleshy dress/ Bright shoots of everlastingness” (19-20). Coleridge (a close confidant to Wordsworth) seems to mimic these lines in his poem “Sonnet XVII”: “some have said/ We lived ere yet this fleshy robe we wore” (5-6). These poets believe mortal life is merely temporary and our skin and bodies are only for show.

            While both Wordsworth and Vaughan value innocence, Vaughan separates from Wordsworth’s ideology and views experience as highly negative. If innocence is divinity and the ability to be closer to God, then the opposite of that would be, trivially, ungodliness and sinfulness. Vaughan describes innocence as the time “Before I taught my tongue to wound/ My conscience with a sinful sound” (15-16). In these lines, Vaughan is talking or arguing with his conscience (something supposed to determine right from wrong), an effect of experience. The word choice of “taught” implies willingness and even a choice to sin, thus proving experience is not to be sought. Vaughan believes that the end goal, after this temporary, mortal “fleshy dress,” is to return to innocence, in heaven with God: “Some men a forward motion love,/ But I by backward steps would move” (29-30). The forward motion he describes is a movement toward experience; backward steps is the movement back to innocence and divinity. Vaughan, continues “And when this dust falls to the urn/ In that state I came, return” (31-32). Again hinting that his mortal body is temporary, he explains that he wants to return to innocence, where he came. This could also symbolize a physical return to dust, for before he was mortal, what was he? In her critical essay “Vaughan and Wordsworth” Helen N. McMaster compares and contrasts Vaughan and Wordsworth’s texts and writes, “In Wordsworth’s “Ode” there is no such confidence in the idea of a return [to innocence]; life to him was not a great circular journey from a home which will be safely reattained [sic] through the mercy of Christ, but a progressive evolution from one state to another during which the spirit is encouraged to believe in its immortality by recollections of childhood when common sights were ‘apparelled in celestial light’” (322). Although Wordsworth was highly influenced by Vaughan’s ideas and beliefs, their opinions on innocence and experience differed. The differences between the two poets are at the same points where likenesses can be found.

Works Cited

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<http://www.jstor.org/stable/4171987>.

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