Henry Vaughan - Definition

Henry Vaughan (1621 - April 28, 1695) was a Welsh Metaphysical poet and a doctor, the twin brother of the philosopher Thomas Vaughan.

Vaughan was born, and lived for most of his life, in the village of Llansanffraid, near Brecon, where he is buried. During the English Civil War, he was a Royalist sympathiser. He took his literary inspiration from his native environment, calling himself a "Silurist" in homage to the Silures, the Celtic tribe of south Wales which resisted the Roman invasion of Britain. Vaughan's greatest verse appears in the collection Silex scintillans, first published in 1650.

Henry Vaughan's poetry reflects his love of nature and mysticism and influenced the work of Wordsworth, among others. Much of Vaughan's poetry has a particularly modern sound. This is an example of an especially beautiful fragment of one of his poems entitled
The World:

I saw eternity the other night

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm as it was bright,

And round beneath it time in hours, days, years,

Driven by the spheres,

Like a vast shadow moved in which the world

And all her train were hurled.

External links

• Henry Vaughan (http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/vaughan/) by Anniina Jokinen