Question — Essay-type
How does Vaughan build up a contrast between childhood and adulthood in “The Retreat”?
The central theme of Vaughan’s poem “The Retreat” is the glorification of childhood, based on the Platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul which lives a ‘second race’ on earth. In childhood the soul is attended with the broken memories of its pre-natal existence. In the poem Vaughan stresses the innocence of childhood and the sinfulness of adulthood. Though the contrast is not clearly stated, the glorification of childhood implies the contrast.
As has already been noted, the poet says that in childhood the soul is attended with the pre-natal existence, traces of this heavenly glories still cling to it. Naturally, as a child the poet ‘shined’ in his ‘angel infancy’. This implies that man loses this divine glory in adulthood.
The poet says that the earth appears to the child to be something heavenly. The child is still fresh and pure as it was in its heavenly home. It has not travelled far from heaven, and to it God is abiding in reality. It can ‘see a glimpse of His bright face’. In other words it is very near to heaven, not far away from God. This implies that in adulthood man is far away from heaven, the original abode of the soul.
Wordsworth in his ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ says that in childhood ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy!’ Similarly, Vaughan says that the child has a divine vision. Every object of nature ‘some gilded cloud or flower’ seems to it to have the divine glory. The child finds in the objects of nature ‘shadows of eternity’. Though the beauty of the natural objects is only a faint reflection of the glory of heaven, in them, the child is able to perceive divine glory–the glory and the freshness of a dream. It is obvious that in adulthood man loses this divinity in his vision.
Human soul is fresh from heaven in childhood. Naturally, it is pure and free from all earthly contaminations. Human mind at this period is not vitiated by any corrupt thought, feeling, fancy or utterance. Nothing ‘but a white, celestial thought’ exists in his mind. What the poet emphasises in childhood’s proximity to heaven and absolute purity. He declares this in the following lines–
“Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound,
Or had the black art to dispense
A several sin to every sense,”
This suggests that in adulthood man loses the divine glory in his appearance, and at the same time his mind is polluted with sinful thought, and his senses are vitiated with material pursuits.
In the second stanza of the poem, the poet expresses his longing for the lost vision of innocence. He wants to go back to his childhood, the vantage point from which he hopes to have a vision of heaven. Here he reminds us that human soul intoxicated by heaven is stayed too long in the world, and therefore staggers in its attempt to trace the steps back to childhood. It clearly implies that the ‘enlightened spirit’ loses its divine vision in manhood as man remains preoccupied with earthly pleasures and pursuits.
At the end of the poem this contrast is emphasised with a note of poignant pathos. The poet is aware of the lost of divine glory and divine vision. Naturally, he waits for death that will free him from his ‘fleshly dress’ and then his soul will regain the state it was in when it came down to the earth.
So we find that the contrast between childhood and adulthood in the poem emphasises the glorification of childhood. The poet suggests that as man grows in years, he travels farther from heaven. He becomes more and more preoccupied with affairs of the world. The soul becomes darkened, deadened and drunken losing its original purity and freshness. Vaughan clearly says that the forward motion of life in time leads to sin, and the backward motion to innocence. The forward motion in time becomes paradoxically a morally backward motion, and a backward motion in time becomes a morally forward one.
