'The World and All Her Train Were Hurl’d'

How often have you encountered a poem or other piece of writing that not only provoked astonishment on first reading but continues to do so after many years? I mean astonishment, not mere surprise or critical approval. I can think of a few passages in Shakespeare and Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation. There’s another, not so well known, that I first read in 1975, that somehow hasn’t grown tired or used-up or otherwise lost its capacity to inspire awe: “The World” by Henry Vaughan. The first line grabbed me: “I saw Eternity the other night.” That’s like saying, “I ran into God down at the bowling alley.” The colloquial-sounding “the other night” cinches it. Joseph Bottum has written appreciatively of another poem by Vaughan, “They Are All Gone into the World of Light.” His reading is inspired: “In grief the absent are more real than the present world, and that’s where ‘They are all Gone into the World of Light’ begins: the light the dead have in memory brighter than the dark…

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