Scintilla 19: The Journal of the Vaughan Association - Softcover

In Scintilla 19 we celebrate the memory of Peter Thomas who, along with Anne Cluysenaar, organised the first Colloquium in 1995, which led both to The Vaughan Association and Scintilla as a journal. Peter’s work as a scholar of seventeenth-century literature, his sharp eye, dry wit, and congenial, curious, welcoming approach all combined with his deft skill as an editor to leave a legacy that will be unrivalled, not only in the journal itself, but in the enthusiasm of a community interested in the Vaughans and their poetic legacy. This issue appropriately opens with an insightful and beautiful study by Robert Wilcher, a long-time friend of Peter’s, of Henry Vaughan’s public and private elegies. Several of these poems can be dated to the years immediately after the death of Henry’s younger brother, William, who died following his participation in the royalist uprising in South Wales during 1648. They give a glimpse of Henry’s sense of deep personal loss and the psychological, spiritual terrain he traverses in his ‘work of mourning’ while acknowl- edging that ‘he is left with only “the snuff” of the candle that once burned brightly’. They perform, to use Stevie Davies’s phrase, a kind of ‘self-therapy’. But, Wilcher reminds us, Henry’s poems of mourning go beyond the personal, extending their sense of grief into the politics of the moment by giving voice to ‘the traumatized condition of the royalist remnant in its darkest hour’. It is these combined political, personal and spiritual energies that the Vaughan brothers have so often excited in the pages of Scintilla. Identical twins, shaped by their Breconshire birthplace with its reassuring beauty, Henry and Thomas both articulated their memories of the Usk river valley with its hills and groves, creatures, herbs, stones, history and myths. This magical landscape asserted itself in their imaginations even as they experienced the trauma of enormous social and political change. Scintilla exists to probe these conjunctions, crossing boundaries between past and present, between place and vision, our physical environment and our inner lives, between metaphysical experiences and the language of science, poetry, and healing. The new poems that have earned their place in this volume of Scintilla arise out of a similar awareness. They challengingly embody the paradoxes involved in living in what Graham Hartill calls life’s ‘field of harm’. As this volume goes to press, that phrase conjures the obscenities of the Syrian conflict, attended by the killing waters of the eastern Aegean with their pitiful refugee rafts. It also – responsibly, and without falling foul of a category error – applies (in different forms) to aspects of lives lived in ostensibly safe environments, as our poets convincingly demonstrate. The poems – all tightly articulated and conceptually driven – engage with the ways in which (in the words of Maria Apichella) ‘The night is present’ in the midst of all our blessings, and how our rites seek to fend off what Hartill smartly distils as ‘the fangs!’ What is offered here are personal and contemporary versions of ‘Dante’s wood’, ‘Wilfred Owen’s profound dull tunnel’, ‘Eliot’s London Bridge’, and ‘Hansel and Gretel’s European forest’ – overlaid with all the mythopoeic resonances that those constructs bring with them. In tune with the spirit of this journal, the poems included in Scintilla 19 avoid the simplicities of dogma and are careful to locate themselves in ambiguous terrain – a cairn chamber that is a site of both death and rebirth, ‘mirror-world[s]’, domestic hearth-space that is also profoundly unsettling. They walk a tightrope (the subject of Matthew Barton’s ‘Bal- ancing Act’) between scepticism and openness. In doing so, they are all the more alive to the world’s physical and spiritual ecologies of light and dark.