‘Peace’ by Henry Vaughan (1621-1695)
My Soul, there is a country Afar beyond the stars, Where stands a winged sentry All skillful in the wars; 4 There, above noise and danger Sweet Peace sits, crown’d with smiles, And One born in a manger Commands the beauteous files. 8 He is thy gracious friend And (O my Soul awake!) Did in pure love descend, To die here for thy sake. 12 If thou canst get but thither, There grows the flow’r of peace, The rose that cannot wither, Thy fortress, and thy ease. 16 Leave then thy foolish ranges, For none can thee secure, But One, who never changes, Thy God, thy life, thy cure. 20
Considering the Poem
Henry Vaughan was 21 years old when the bitter and chaotic English Civil War began. He was also, as it turned out, on the losing side. We can well imagine, then, that peace was something very precious to him. Like his contemporaries, he understood what warfare did.
Although the poem, in the end, doubts that a perfect peace is attainable permanently in our world, it presents a short, pithy exploration of what peace depends upon. One of the things you notice quite quickly while you’re reading through for the first time is that Vaughan is meticulously selecting words from one of two registers, or sets, of words: a set to do with peace and order, and another, contrasting set, to do with conflict, chaos and violence. You could even say there was a verbal struggle enacted in the poem between two opposing groups of words.
Peace is presented in often fairly conventional poetic images: the calm, personified, figure of ‘Sweet Peace’ sitting in repose above the turmoil of worldly affairs (5-6); the harmless innocence (and powerful authority) of the baby, quietly at rest in the manger (7-8); the flower of peace and beauty, the ‘rose’ that lives perfectly and eternally in heaven (17); God, the ‘One, who, like the rose, never changes’ .
Vaughan is not a simple man, though. He does not believe that peace is the normal, default state of affairs in the world. He presents it very much as something that is achieved, again and again, (and temporarily).
The continual restoration of peace, in this poem anyway, relies on establishing order and authority. The verse form itself is orderly, almost to a point: the four-line quatrains from which the poem is actually made (and in which it’s sometimes printed) follows a clear scheme of rhyme and a mostly iambic rhythm with three stronger pulses in each verse line. So, the form Vaughan makes, by achieving orderliness in itself, matches and embodies the subject of the poem.
The core idea appears at once, in the opening lines, where a guardian St Michael is pictured for us in calm self-possession and dignity after his victory over Satan. Michael’s making of peaceful order out of conflict initiates the chain of diction associated with war: he is a ‘sentry’ (8); the figure of Peace commands ‘files’ (8), or orderly columns of soldiers on whom, Vaughan implies, the reign of peace relies; and, then, at the end of the poem, the poet reminds us that heaven itself has to be a ‘fortress’ because even there, or nearby, as Michael’s struggle with Satan demonstrated, there may be enemies.
The idea of authority is conveyed implicitly in the placing of the order-giving figures at a height so ‘Sweet Peace’ is, like Michael, elevated far above the noisy chaos of life in the world. Once this symbolic, vertical positioning is established, the meaning of Jesus’s descent to the hubbub of the world in pursuit of our salvation (11-12), despite being the most familiar, fundamental of Christian ideas, suddenly becomes again both original and clear. His self-sacrificing love has made it possible for us to find peace and ease, if not here, then ‘thither’ (13) in a life to come, a life in which we live under the divine ‘cure’, or curacy, of God.
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Christian Poetry Considered 