Vaughan's Reflective Versification

Vaughan's religious verse is reflective in at least three senses of the term: his stance is thoughtful and traces his meditations on biblical passages and elements of Christian doctrine; his imagery holds a mirror up to his Welsh country environment and the biblical scenes he has internalized; and his poems explicitly imitate and convey the influence of his most acknowledged predecessor, Herbert.' An immediately recognizable aspect of Vaughan's reflection of Herbert is the variety and complexity of Vaughan's verse forms, in a few instances precisely imitating Herbert's formal inventions.2 Yet as Jonathan Post has shown, "more often . . . the formal resemblances do not constitute exact parallelisms, but are of a more general kind," including varied line lengths, combined stanzaic patterns, and a tendency to follow the high orderliness of Herbert's attempt to reflect God's glory.3