ABSTRACT
Evidently Henry Vaughan’s sense of himself as writer, prose man and verse man, attached itself to Welsh origins. About the beginning of the Civil War, Vaughan returned from London to his father’s house in Wales. Thomas Vaughan was evicted from his in 1650 by the Act for Propagating the Gospel. At some time after 1647, when he had his original version of Olor Iscanus ready for the press, Henry Vaughan turned to an intense devotional life, and the persecuted church of Laud became the focus of his political loyalty. His interiority is not just devotional, but political, solipsistic, recessive, visionary. Both light and darkness signify the spirit in Vaughan because he makes both retreats from the life we live with other people in the world and both, for him, signify death, the final abstraction from life.
