'The World and All Her Train Were Hurl’d'

How often have you encountered a poem or other piece of writing that not only provoked astonishment on first reading but continues to do so after many years? I mean astonishment, not mere surprise or critical approval. I can think of a few passages in Shakespeare and Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation. There’s another, not so well known, that I first read in 1975, that somehow hasn’t grown tired or used-up or otherwise lost its capacity to inspire awe: “The World” by Henry Vaughan. The first line grabbed me: “I saw Eternity the other night.” That’s like saying, “I ran into God down at the bowling alley.” The colloquial-sounding “the other night” cinches it. 

Joseph Bottum has written appreciatively of another poem by Vaughan, “They Are All Gone into the World of Light.” His reading is inspired:

 

“In grief the absent are more real than the present world, and that’s where ‘They are all Gone into the World of Light’ begins: the light the dead have in memory brighter than the dark world in which the bereaved walk. For that matter, human epistemology is compromised and weak. But by building on that idea of light, Vaughan moves us toward a presaged Heaven and the hints in life that the dead still live.”

 

Vaughan’s lines are often a comfort but don’t read like a panacea. Neither does he preach. He reports:

 

“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 think of the Einstein rings photographed by the Hubble space telescope.