Reading Henry Vaughan

"Mornings are mysteries", so Henry Vaughan and at this morning of the year as light awakens slowly with each day its mysteries will unfold slowly too, revealing themselves as new opportunities.

For each inclosèd spirit is a star
Enlightening his own litle sphere,
Whose light, though fetched and borrowèd from far,
Both mornings makes, and evenings there.

Vaughan, contrary to the opinion of other Metaphysical poets, specifically Donne and Herbert, ascribes such 'inclosèd spirits' not just to humans, but to other sentient beings, in this case a bird but also to "stones ... active winds and streams". For him the world was full of responsive fellow creatures whose mysteries might be probed, if not fully discovered.

So this New Year Day I take down my well-thumbed copy of his Complete Poems and resolve to follow, for a while, his daily observances as recorded there, avoiding perhaps those familiar poems that I have re-read many times and seeking out what other mysteries, missed in earlier readings or buried too far back in reading memory to be recalled.

His works are in that category he himself signified as

Bright books! the perspectives to our weak sights:
The clear projections of discerning lights.
Burning and shining thoughts; man's postume day:
The track of fled souls, and their Milky-Way.

The track of his fled soul burns brightly still and I'll carry his shining thoughts out of the dark night of the year into its morning mystery.

Shells, Stones and Mermaid's Purses

Shells on a beach lying between pebbles banded with quartz, others the colours of jade or garnet, embedded in gritty sand, infused in some far-distant geological event, worn smooth by the tides ebbing and flowing across a beach that was once a forest and before that a salt marsh, changes in the ebbing and flowing of the land itself through the relentless tide of time seeming to flow one way only but bringing with it changes that turn sea beds into mountains and wash away even the highest mountains.

Yet on this beach now, lying next to fragments of ancient rocks, are these shells, new-formed by comparison but discarded, their inhabitants digested by the oystercatchers foraging in the sea's edge. And here, too, the empty egg case of a dogfish, its hard casing and vetch-like tendrils obsolete on this beach where it attracts the name 'mermaid's purse', an apparently more fitting identification for so durable an object than one that assigns its purpose as a container for the eggs of a fish. So fact and fancy dwell together in the combination of the name of the object and what we know it to be in this blink of time's eye, though two blinks ago it would have been otherwise.

So as the the Sun in the northern hemisphere begins, gradually, to strengthen (as from the standpoint of this beach it appears to us)and we turn our calenders to day one of our arbitrary reckoning of a new year, these shells, this mermaid's purse, these ancient stones - all fragments of time's relentlessness - lie in witness ( lie in witness?)to what was, to what is, and await with deceptive stillness the flux of what will be.