'Bright Books! the Perspectives to Our Weak Sights'

April is the kindest and cruelest month. 

Think of the births: George Herbert (April 3, 1593), Shakespeare (April 23, 1564), Henry Vaughan (April 17, 1621), Daniel Defoe (April 24, 1731), Edward Gibbon (April 27, 1737), William Hazlitt (April 10, 1778), Anthony Trollope (April 24, 1815), Charles Baudelaire (April 9, 1821), Henry James (April 15, 1843), Constantine Cavafy (April 17, 1863), Walter de la Mare (April 25, 1873), Vladimir Nabokov (April 22, 1899), Samuel Beckett (April 13, 1906), C.H. Sisson, (April 22, 1914), Bernard Malamud (April 26, 1914).

 

And then the deaths: Shakespeare (April 23, 1616), Miguel de Cervantes (April 23, 1616), Henry Vaughan (April 23, 1695), William Cowper (April 25, 1800), William Wordsworth (April 23, 1850), Mark Twain (April 10, 1910), Edwin Arlington Robinson (April 6, 1935), A.E. Housman (April 30, 1936), Willa Cather (April 24, 1947), Flann O’Brien (April 1, 1966), Evelyn Waugh (April 10, 1966), Basil Bunting (April 17, 1985), Ralph Ellison (April 16, 1994), Thom Gunn (April 25, 2004), Saul Bellow (April 5, 2005), Muriel Spark (April 13, 2006).

 

“Bright books! the perspectives to our weak sights,

The clear projections of discerning lights,

Burning and shining thoughts, man’s posthume day . . .”

 

That’s Henry Vaughan, who was born and died in April, in his poem “To His Books.” Vaughan mentions no writers by name but suggests he has culled his library down to the essential volumes: “But you were all choice flow’rs, all set and drest / By old sage florists, who well knew the best.” In another poem, “On Sir Thomas Bodley’s Library, the Author Being Then in Oxford,” he returns to the familiar trope of authors remaining alive through their books:

 

“They are not dead, but full of blood again;

I mean the sense, and ev’ry line a vein.

Triumph not o'er their dust; whoever looks

In here, shall find their brains all in their books.”

 

My favorite among Vaughan’s poems remains the first one I read more than half a century ago. “The World” begins:

 

“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,

       Driv’n by the spheres

Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world

       And all her train were hurl’d.”

 

I happened on it by way of another book, Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951). Mystics often lose us with their inarticulate enthusiasm. Their experiences defy language so they resort to yawping (Whitman), the linguistic equivalent of the early Shakers writhing on the floor. In contrast, Vaughan might be describing a picnic in the park with the folks. His tone is matter-of-fact, methodical, almost journalistic. He does this with impressive regularity, especially in his opening lines, as in “They Are All Gone Into the World of Light!” and “I Walk’d the Other Day.” The effect is of a gifted storyteller who hooks us with his first words. To be convincing, wonder must be made to sound familiar.

 

Give thanks for the kindness. National Poetry Month does little to ease the cruelty.