Faith, Hope and Poetry by Malcolm Guite

Author:Malcolm Guite
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Vaughan has come a long way from the simple and desolate contrast between light above and darkness below with which the poem opened. In the very act of grieving he has discovered afresh the captive flames of his own immortal soul. And now the death, which at the beginning of the poem had robbed him of his friends, has become instead the hand that will give him liberty. He is ready at last to speak directly to his Father, able to rejoice in eternal life without despising the glories of time. True, he prays for liberation from this world, but it is a prayer that acknowledges that God’s light can shine in the creation as well as beyond it, and that sometimes that light will disperse the mists that blot and fill the glass through which we darkly see the world. Indeed, Vaughan’s poetry has exactly that effect on our ‘perspective’, in both its old and modern sense. Vaughan closes his poem with a prayer to the ‘Father of eternal life’ that, if he cannot now find himself in heaven, he may have the ‘mists dispersed’ so that he may ‘peep’ into glory. In some ways the answer to that prayer is the poem itself – the power of the poetic imagination to disperse mists and give us at least a ‘peep’ into realms of glory:

O Father of eternal life, and all

 Created glories under thee!

Resume thy spirit from this world of thrall

 Into true liberty.

Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill

My perspective still as they pass,

Or else remove me hence unto that hill,

Where I shall need no glass.

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