Henry Vaughan
Stanza 2
Sacramental
Scintillans; darksome
Cityscape with fungal decay
Sources: George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/ggb2005022955/, photoshopped; and Henry Vaughan, “They are all gone into the world of light!”
A seventeenth-century sense of “glory,” new in Vaughan’s time, is “nimbus” or “aureole”: a surrounding circle of light.
Forever, illustrated
A
They’re junk, these words shedding a thin dust of history as they collect around a smiling picture. In the pile, “01 Jul” has nothing to do with “Forever.” “Forever” is inside the picture’s margins, but it could just as well be outside with “01 Jul.” Because it has no place it must be, it has no reason to mean. On its emptied envelope, it can’t help us to remember. It can’t help us to picture.
B
Making itself remember that it originated in a light seen and experienced, an image lifts itself out of the darkness between words and becomes real.
Click to enlarge.