Coelum Terrae

Guide to the Poems

The poems are historical parts of the argument and its presentation. This guide identifies speakers, movements and comparisons; it does not provide a cipher that assigns a modern substance to each image.

Hyanthe and the Vial

The Hyanthe sequence on pages 93–95 begins with an observer and a figure enthroned above a globe. A first assumption gives way to closer study. Dress, whiteness, redness, dew and repeated tears culminate in the gift of a vial containing the figure’s distilled heart. Read the motions before deciding how the images signify: looking, revising, weeping, evaporating, returning and handing over. Vaughan later links the tears to the philosophers’ secret water. See the opening, the return of drops and sighs, the final gift and the explicit connection.

The Voice of the Stone

On page 131, Latin verse allows the transforming subject to speak of a spirit that leaves and returns, and of three souls nearly lost. Vaughan then supplies English verse. The sequence belongs to his summary of continual coction and volatile essences. Retaining both the fresh translation of the Latin and the modernised historical English keeps visible the difference between a source quotation and Vaughan’s own poetic handling. See the process summary, the first Latin stanza, the second stanza, the first historical English stanza and its continuation.

The Book Sent Into the World

The closing address speaks to the book itself. Vaughan imagines an object small enough to travel beyond a library, enter a reader’s private space and find friends its author has never met. Literary courtship returns in the imagined women readers, while the declaration of a plain style counters charges of vanity. The last image makes publication an act of allowing a child to go forth rather than suppressing it. Its wit and self-defence complicate the prose retreat into solitude; the work closes through more than one voice. See the departure and the final address.