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“I spent considerable time during my doctoral studies in Composition at the University of Calgary reading poetry. My idea was to search for texts not generally set by other composers seeking to find words that would set my mind, heart, and soul aflame, with the ideal of transforming beautiful language into music. I became attracted to a group of seventeenth-century English poets described as the ‘metaphysicals’. The ‘metaphysicals’ include John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan and others. They were given this name (a century later) by Dr. Johnson, who used the term derisively, in objecting to their dense and sometimes obscure imagery. Vaughan grew up in Wales and studied law at Oxford until the outbreak of the English Civil War. He returned to Wales at that time and lived out a quiet life as a physician, Greek scholar, and poet. Vaughan was steeped in Anglican theology, and was deeply and daily immersed in the Bible, so it is not surprising that his poetry is replete with biblical and specifically Christian reference. It is this background and these viewpoints that has always made me suspect that ‘The Ecclipse’ (sic) is more than just a regretful poem by a jilted lover…” Read more.
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