United Kingdom Magzines

As a pragmatic and as an empirical thinker Bacon subscribed to the fundamental Renaissance ideals—Sepantia (search for knowledge) and Eloquentia (the art of rhetoric). Here in the essay Of Truth he supplements his search for truth by going back to the theories of the classical thinkers and also by taking out analogies from everyday life. It is to be noted here that his explication of the theme is impassioned and he succeeds in providing almost neutral judgements on the matter. Again, it is seen that Bacon’s last essays, though written in the same aphoristic manner, stylistically are different in that he supplied more analogies and examples to support or explain his arguments. As this essay belongs to the latter group, we find ample analogies and examples.
Bacon, while explaining the reasons as to why people evade truth, talks of the Greek philosophical school of sceptics, set up by Pyrro. Those philosophers would question the validity of truth and constantly change their opinions. Bacon says that now people are like those philosophers with the important difference that they lack their force and tenacity of argument. He says that like him the Greek philosopher Lucian was equally puzzled at the fact that people are more attracted to lies and are averse to truth. Bacon is surprised by the fact that people are loathed to find out or even acknowledge truth in life. It seems to him that this is an innate human tendency to do so. He finds evidence in support of his arguments in the behaviour of the ancient Greek sceptics who used to question the validity of truth and would have no fixed beliefs. Bacon thinks that people behave like those philosophers. But he understands that they lack their strength of arguments. He then finds the Greek philosopher Lucian, while considering the matter, was equally baffled. Lucian investigated and found that poets like lies because those provides pleasure, and that businessmen have to tell lies for making profit. But he could not come to a definite conclusion as to why people should love lies. Bacon says that men love falsehood because truth is like the bright light of the day and would show up pomp and splendour of human life for what they are. They look attractive and colourful in the dim light of lies. Men prefer to cherish illusions, which make life more interesting. Bacon here gives an interesting analogy of truth and falsehood. He says that the value of truth is like that of a pearl, which shines best in the day-light, while a lie is like a diamond or carbuncle, which shines best producing varied rays in dim light of candles. He comes to the conclusion that people love falsehood because it produces imaginary pleasure about life.
Bacon also examines the statement of one of the early Church authorities, which severely condemned poetry as the wine of the devils. Bacon here shows that even the highest art of man—poetry, is composed of lies. He seems to have compounded the two statements made by two early Christian thinkers. He agrees with St Augustine who criticized poetry as “the wine of error”, and with Hironymous, who condemned poetry as “the food of demons”. The equation is that, since the devil or Satan works by falsehood, lies are its food. Poetry tends to be Satanic because it resorts to falsehood while producing artistic pleasure. Bacon, however, makes a distinction here between poetic untruth and fascination with falsehood in everyday life. He thinks that poetic untruth is not harmful, as it does not leave lasting impressions on the mind and character of a person. On the other hand, the lies, which are embedded in the mind and control and regulate every thought and action of a person, are harmful.
Bacon refers to the Epicurean doctrine of pleasure, beautifully expressed by the famous poet of that school, Lucretius, who considered the realization of truth to be the highest pleasure of life. Bacon says that the value of truth is understood by those who have experienced it. The inquiry, knowledge and the belief of truth are the highest achievements that human beings can pursue. He amplifies the matter by giving an analogy from the Bible. According to him, God created the light of the senses first so that men could see the world around them. The last thing he created, according to him, was the light of reason, that is, the rational faculty. Bacon here interestingly comments that, since he finished the work of Creation, God has been diffusing the light of His spirit in mankind. He supports his argument by referring to the Epicurean theory of pleasure beautifully expressed by Lucretius who held that there is no greater pleasure than that given by the realization of truth. The summit of truth cannot be conquered and there is tranquillity on this peak from which one can survey the errors and follies of men as they go through their trials; but this survey should not fill the watcher with pity and not with pride. The essence of heavenly life on this earth lies in the constant love of charity, an unshakable trust in God, and steady allegiance to truth.
At the concluding section of the essay Bacon explains the value of truth in civil affairs of life. He is conscious of the fact that civil life goes on with both truth and falsehood. He feels that the mixture of falsehood with truth may sometimes turn out to be profitable. But it shows the inferiority of the man who entertains it. This is, he says, like the composition of an alloy, which is stronger but inferior in purity. He then compares this kind of way of life to that of a serpent, which is a symbol of Satan itself. Bacon finds a striking similarity between the crooked and mean devices adopted by people and the zigzag movements of a serpent. To clarify his point more clearly, Bacon quotes Montaigne who said that a man, who tells lies, is afraid of his fellow men but is unafraid of God who is all perceiving. Bacon concludes his arguments by saying that falsehood is the height of wickedness, and such that it will invite the wrath of God on Doomsday.

In the poem The Retreate Henry Vaughan deals with the loss of the heavenly glory experienced during the childhood and expresses a fanciful desire to get back that original stage. The theme, on the surface level, appears very simple; but going into the deeper the reader will find that the poem is founded on the diverse European idealistic, psychological, religious/mystical and philosophical doctrines in the western culture. On the socio-cultural level, the poem can be interpreted as a reflection of the urge for liberating the human psyche from the torments and tyrannies of civilization, an urge which, it must be said, has been expressed by Vaughan in the purest, distilled and highly cultivated form of thought. On the psychological level, the desire to go back to a happy childhood can be interpreted, Freud said, as an escape from the hard realities of life in the defence mechanism of regression, as a daydream, the root cause of which can be traced in the agoraphobia of a person, which constantly goads him/her to seek refuge in the mother’s womb. On the philosophical level, what Vaughan’s says in the poem, tallies with Plato’s theory of anamnesis and transmigration of the soul. But above all, the purpose of the poet here is didactic, and he has given to the poem a deep religious meaning and fervour by drawing upon the inherent Christian doctrines and symbols.
The poem begins with the characteristic lament for the lost childhood days,
“Happy those early days! When I
Shin’d in my Angell-infancy.”
The word “angel-infancy” refers to that period of life, which is marked of innocence and ignorance. If we think of this from a secular perspective, this period of life is seen to have a special attraction for all the human beings. So the poetic property has not been reduced in its secular appeal. But Vaughan is here thinking in terms of mystical Christian theology, in which the child occupies a significant place, on the one hand, symbolising innocence, and on the other, representing the Babe of Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ—a theme which remained a favourite one among the Renaissance painters like Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Bellini. Vaughan’s theme here is not the glorification of Christ as the Babe, the theme is here a retrospection of the degeneration and degradation of his own personal life in contrast to what he had been during his childhood. The memory of that phase of life forces him to go back to that divine world, from which his soul, he believes, came to this world.
The poet, however, gives a theoretical justification to his beliefs by drawing upon the Platonic doctrine of the transmigration of the soul. In this process the soul, Plato said, resides in the world of Ideas, of Beauty, Truth and Goodness before being transplanted into the human body. But once transplanted into matter it forgets its previous existence in the gradual growing contacts with the material world. The theoretical bias is most strongly evident in the lines where the poet says that everything was different,
“Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race.”
But the next moment the poet uses an image, “a white, Celestiall thought”, which derives its symbolism from Neo-Platonic mysticism and Christian mythology. Neo-Platonism explains the manifest material world as merely an illuminated illusion of a light from a single, ever-radiant divine source, God. But the poet’s back also reminds us Adam and Eve’s looking back at the lost Garden of Eden in Milton’s Paradise Lost,
“They looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld
Of paradise, so late their happy seat,
………………………………………
……………………………………….
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow
Through Eden took their solitary way.” (Book IV)
The agony for the poet’s loss of childhood vision of heavenly glory is, it may be said, felt on the same level as that for the loss of Eden and the subsequent degeneration in the archetypal Biblical theme.
All is, however, not lost. The poet finds a spiritual recovery in the Platonic doctrine of Love: he finds the reflections of the Universal Beauty in the particular things of physical beauty. That is to say, by meditating on the particular he tries to graduate to the understanding of the Universal Beauty of God. The poet can,
“…see a glimpse of his bright face;
When on some gilded Cloud or flowre
My gazing soul would dwell an houre.”
Speaking scientifically, this is a psychological journey in its extreme form, in which the poet seeks extinction of the flesh so that the soul is released and made one with the divine source once again. Though this is purely a Platonic concept, it is justified in relation to the Christian theology. Like Moses, who was once granted one side of the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, the poet wants to go back to “That city of Palm trees” or heaven. This is purely a mystical concept, and this distinguishes Vaughan from Wordsworth, who dealing with the same theme in his Immortality Ode works out a poetic resolution, which does not negate the beauty of matter. But Vaughan, on the contrary, finds “weaker glories…some shadows of eternity” in matter. He wants to suspend all the properties of the senses from matter or reality now and hopes to become one with the divine after his death.
At the same time, however it must be said that Vaughan’s vision is also apocalyptic. During the Renaissance St. John’s “Book of Revelation” proved to be a dangerous book of prophecy, and during the Reformation the Apocalypse took various forms, among which spiritual or inner apocalypse entered the collective unconscious of the European peoples. It became a process of purifying one’s inner being. So it may be said that for Vaughan “the Retreate” was also a revelation.

The Retreat

1. “Happy those early days…everlastingness”. (ll. 1-20)

In these lines from the poem The Retreat the poet Henry Vaughan laments over the loss of his childhood vision and the fading away of the heavenly glory associated with that kind of vision. Not only that, he confesses how he has moved himself away from the glory by committing various sins of the body.

The poet begins the poem with an agonizing realization that he had been really happy in his childhood. The reason he cites is that at that time he had been in that period of life, which is marked of innocence and ignorance. At that time he only had in mind the memory of the ever-radiant supreme being, God. He feels that he was not far from God then, and that he could see His bright face from a distance. Not only that, during his childhood it was possible for him to see that reflection of the eternal glory of God in the transitory yet beautiful things of the world, like a sunlit cloudlet or flower. He confesses agonizingly that all that had happened long ago before he learnt the crooked ways of life and began committing all kinds of sins with all the senses.

On the philosophical level, what Vaughan’s says in the poem, tallies with Plato’s theory of anamnesis and transmigration of the soul. Plato said that before being transplanted into the human body, the human soul resides in the world of Ideas, of Beauty, Truth and Goodness. But once transplanted into matter it forgets its previous existence in the gradual growing contacts with the material world. But the next moment the poet uses an image, “a white, Celestiall thought”, which derives its symbolism from Neo-Platonic mysticism and Christian mythology. Neo-Platonism explains the manifest material world as merely an illuminated illusion of a light from a single, ever-radiant divine source, God. But the poet’s back also reminds us Adam and Eve’s looking back at the lost Garden of Eden in Milton’s Paradise Lost,

“They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow

Through Eden took their solitary way.” (Book IV)

The agony for the poet’s loss of childhood vision of heavenly glory is, it may be said, felt on the same level as that for the loss of Eden and the subsequent degeneration in the archetypal Biblical theme. The poet finds a spiritual recovery in the Platonic doctrine of Love: he finds the reflections of the Universal Beauty in the particular things of physical beauty. That is to say, by meditating on the particular he tries to graduate to the understanding of the Universal Beauty of God.

2. “O how I …return”

In these lines from the poem The Retreat the poet Henry Vaughan makes a retrospection of the degeneration and degradation of his own personal life in contrast to what he had been during his childhood. The memory of that phase of life forces him to go back to that divine world, from which his soul, he believes, came to this world.

The poet comes to an agonizing realization that he had been really happy in his childhood. At that time he only had in mind the memory of the ever-radiant supreme being, God. He feels that he was not far from God then, and that he could see His bright face from a distance. Not only that, during his childhood it was possible for him to see that reflection of the eternal glory of God in the transitory yet beautiful things of the world, like a sunlit cloudlet or flower. He confesses agonizingly that all that had happened long ago before he learnt the crooked ways of life and began committing all kinds of sins with all the senses. That is why he expresses his peculiar desire to take a backward motion in order to reach the source, that is, heaven from which he came. Like Moses, who was once granted one side of the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, the poet wants to go back to “That city of Palm trees” or heaven. Now, he feels that his soul, after remaining for a long time in this world and drinking too much to the material things of this world, is feeble. He knows he is unsteady, yet he firmly expresses his renewed conviction that he will be able to reach the original home when his body dissolves into dust.

Generally speaking, The Prelude is a historical record of the growth of Wordsworth’s poetic imagination. It can be called an epic expansion of many poems like the Recluse, and The Excursion and, of course, the Tintern Abbey. The poem derived from many a thing: from the projected Recluse, from Coleridge’s suggestion about the French Revolution and, above all, from Wordsworth’s strenuous introspection. The end-product was a poem in which the poet furnished detailed record of the conditions in which he grew up and of the processes out of which he emerged as a poet of man and nature. In this the poem seems to have strong affinity with Wordsworth’s much read poem Tintern Abbey, which traces the development of his poetic career. But it must be stated here that The prelude is not an autobiography in the ordinary sense though he himself described the poem as “the story of my life; it is an autobiography in the sense that it offers in the poem the story of making of a poet. In this, it can be called a spiritual autobiography of the poet. The other aspect of Wordsworth’s philosophy of nature expressed in the poem can be comprehended in terms of growth. It is found—also in greater detail in The Prelude—that in his earlier poetry nature had no exotic significance. A humanitarian phase had followed, exemplified at its best in The Ruined Cottage. After a period of disillusionment with poetic struggle and theory he was convinced that mankind’s malady in body and heart could be cured only by Nature’s “holy plan”. So this poem illustrates the “religious love”, in which Wordsworth walked with Nature, “the sentiment of being spread over all that moves and all that seemth still”.
In Book I and II of the Prelude wordsworth describes his childhood and boyhood experiences amid lovely natural surroundings. He traces the influence of nature on his personality since his babyhood on the banks of the river Derwent:
“That one of the fairest of all rivers loved,
To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song.”
The he proceeds to describe the kind of influence he came under during his boyhood in “that beloved Vale” of Hawkshead in Esthwaite:
“Fair seed time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and fear...”
However, during his boyhood as a mere boy, his delight in Nature was coarse and animalistic, a delight in the lap of Nature, which was quite usual with a boy of his age. In the Tintern Abbey Wordsworth calls his delight “the coarser pleasure of my boyish days”. This stage can be termed as instinctual one. In the Books I and II he recreates his childhood involvement in physical activities—bathing, bird-snaring, birds-nesting, an expedition in a stolen boat, skating, kite-sailing, noughts and crosses and cards, all are also followed by their corresponding joys and fears. Wordsworth deliberately describes these activities in order to illustrate those innumerable ways through which Nature influenced him on his way to becoming a poet; for instance, in the stolen boat episode he describes the impressions he gathered,
“I heard among solitary hills
Low breathing coming after me, and sounds,
Of undistinguishable motion...”
Thus Wordsworth presents the preludes to the growth of his love of nature. In the final stage we find the poet’s love maturing up to a religious love. Unlike during his early youth when he was interested only in aesthetic judgement and analysis, to the exclusion of Nature’s deeper impulses, now in his mature state Wordsworth has lost his “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures”, as he describes his feelings in Tintern Abbey. As he looks on Nature, he finds that now he is able to think of Nature in single perception,
“...An auxiliary light
Came from mind, which on the setting sun
Bestowed new splendour...”
This is Wordsworth’s pantheistic creed of Nature that stands on the verge of being called mysticism. But he differs from the familiar mysticism as he can understand that he is a lover of Nature. However, he looks to Nature as the best teacher and guide:
“One impulse from a vernal wood,
May teach you more of man
Of moral evil and good
Than all the sages can.”So, in a gradual process Wordsworth has turned into ‘creator and receiver— his sense perception has combined with the moral influence of nature to produce poetry of epical excellence. If Prelude is to be considered an epic, it should be remembered that it is a very modern epic, which also illustrates along with other things modern man’s search for spiritual freedom from the vagaries of civilisation.

One Day I Wrote Her Name…

Spenser

The Text of the Poem

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Agayne I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.

Vayne men, sayd she, that doest in vaine assay,

A mortall thing so to immortalize,

For I my selve shall lyke to this decay,

And eek my name bee wyped out lykewize.

Not so, (quod I) let baser things devize

To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,

And in the hevens wryte your glorious name.

Where whenas death shall al the world subdew,

Our love shall live, and later life renew.

With Amoretti Spenser descended on the permanent paradox, namely the principle of change inherent in nature that causes merciless mutations to everything in this world. This is a paradox which baffled the European intellectuals historically since Ovid. The problem became acute with Renaissance thinkers as they were mainly concerned with the glorification of the self and were seeking to hold onto something that could give resistance to the effacement of the personality caused by time. The popularity of Neo-Platonism can be accounted for by the fact that it provided a clean way out of the clutches of time or the temporal. The urge to seek the resolution can be also found in the artistic scheme of the poets, deliberately making the structure symbolic of certain specific doctrine. This is no less evident in Spenser’s Amoretti, which can be read as a symbolic structure in which the lover’s attainment of his beloved is symbolic of the manifestation of divine beauty.

The sonnet no. 75 (One Day I wrote Her Name…) derives its singular belief from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, where he claimed to have found permanence in the monument created by art. Spenser begins the sonnet with a simple yet archetypal and obsessive and symbolic act on the part of a lover:

“One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away…”

Undeterred the poet tried for the second time; but in the same way his second attempt was futile. Seeing her name thus being repeatedly wiped out, the beloved reminded him that he was trying to immortalize a mortal thing as like her name she would also one day be wiped out from this world:

“Vain man”, said she, “that dost in vain assay”

A motal thing so to immortalize…”

Unusually for a Renaissance lady, the beloved has been given a voice here, and she seems to understand the symbolic and archetypal significance of the waves leveling the sand. The evidence of the destructive properties of time available in the natural world has been grafted on to the context of the human world by the beloved. Not only that, she does reproach the lover for this. This provides the poet with the intellectual necessity to answer her in the sestet.

In the sestet the lover hurries forth to silence the beloved and resolve the tensions created in the octave. Typical with a renaissance poet, the answer lies in the Neo-Platonic idealization of the beloved. The speaker starts with a belief of the renaissance alchemy that baser elements naturally perish in the dust. For Spenser, however, “baser things” symbolize the earthly things subject to decay and death. What he seeks to immortalize is not the physical beauty of the beloved, but those spiritual qualities which provide the beloved with spiritual beauty. The poet is hopeful that his verses will be able to eternize the memory of the beauty of the beloved and transfigure her into a heavenly being.

“…you shall live by fame

My verse your virtues write your glorious name.”

Thus he thinks that he will be successful in preserving her name even after the world is destroyed in the Apocalypse.

The most important assertion, however, comes in the concluding line, in which the poet wants to use this kind of idealization as a way to preserving and immortalizing their love. He hopes further that this will help them to transcend their mundane existence and find a permanent place in the divine scheme of things:

“Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew.”