Famous Bad Poems 1

First of an occasional series: famous bad poems, why they are bad and why they are famous!

Henry Vaughan, My Soul, There Is A Country

My soul, there is a country

Far beyond the stars,

Where stands a wingèd sentry,

All skilful in the wars.

There, above noise and danger,

Sweet Peace sits crowned with smiles,

And One born in a manger

Commands the beauteous files.

He is thy gracious Friend,

And, O my soul, awake!

Did in pure love descend

To die here for thy sake.

If thou canst get but thither,

There grows the flow’r of peace,

The Rose that cannot wither,

Thy fortress and thy ease.

Leave then thy foolish ranges,

For none can thee secure

Save One Who never changes,

Thy God, thy life, thy cure.

Vaughan wrote one of the finest religious poems in the English language: The World, with its deceptively casual stonker of an opening line: ‘I saw Eternity the other night ...’  Visionary, but the trouble with visionaries is that they can’t always express their visions in a manner that’s helpful to those they share them with.  That the same poet could be responsible for this hodgepodge is barely, and yet all too easily credible.

What are the first things you notice about this poem?  The way it moves without warning from the naively literal (‘a country far beyond the stars’) to a wild mixture of metaphors (‘the rose that cannot wither, thy fortress and thy ease’?  The disconcerting way in which military imagery is constantly to the fore in a poem supposedly about the peace of Heaven (‘a sentry all skilful in the wars ... the beauteous files’)?  I suppose anyone who lived through the English Civil War might appreciate that even God needs to keep up a good military deterrent; however, the overall effect is more threatening than consoling, and the idea that the One born in a manger spends His risen life as a sort of sergeant-major engaged in a permanent review of the heavenly troops is anti-climactic in the extreme.

The problems centre around this quatrain, in fact.  Where does ‘Sweet Peace sits crowned with smiles’ come from?  One commentator suggests that, as the other half of the sentence refers to Christ, Sweet Peace must be God the Father.  But I don’t think that even the most way-out seventeenth-century sectarian would have described God on His heavenly throne as being ‘crowned with smiles’: such a saccharine image is incredible.  This Peace can only be a personification of the actual peace of heaven, one of those allegorical figures that used to appear in classicizing masques and pageants in Jacobean times.  This means that a personification and an actual person are being bracketed together in one sentence; and, out of an allegory and God Incarnate, God is being put second.  Bad poetry and worse theology.

Then, just to confuse matters, Vaughan returns to this metaphor in the next-to-last verse: but here, ‘the flower of peace’ seems to be identified as ‘the rose that cannot wither’, which, in the well-known Isaiah-derived imagery, really is Christ.  Anyone would think he never read it over.  Or, if he did, he was still so wrapped up in his vision that he never thought about how it would sound to someone who hadn’t had the same celestial experience.  The poem can only work if the reader is so familiar with Christian imagery that each fragmentary image automatically implies its theological supporting structure to the reader, and the lack of any such supporting structure in the poem itself is not noticed.  Imagine trying to explain the essence of Christianity to an intelligent pagan on the basis of this poem!

Of course, few non-specialists would now have heard of it were it not for C. Hubert H. Parry’s masterly choral setting, which miraculously turns the poem’s overwrought sentiment into lyricism and its bittiness into an articulated structure.  Feeble poems often make first-class songs.  All credit to Parry, and long may his music keep Vaughan’s memory alive and encourage readers to dive into his other, greater poems.