Page 42 - 100 Best Loved Poems - Teaching Unit

“The Retreat”
by Henry Vaughan, pages 18-19

Vocabulary
gilded – covered with gold

1. Identify an example of half-rhyme in this poem.

Answers may vary. Examples: “I” and “eternity,” “spy” and “eternity,” “wound” and
“sound,” and “love” and “move.”

2. How are the ideas in Henry Vaughan’s introduction reflected in this particular poem?

Answers may vary. Example: In the introduction to Henry Vaughan’s work, the reader is
told that his verses contained alchemical themes. One facet of alchemy was the desire to
discover a means to indefinitely prolonging life. In this poem, Vaughan reflects on his
youth, and by the end, reveals he wishes he had stayed forever young, and wishes to be that
way again.

3. In your own words, explain the first stanza of this poem. What does Vaughan miss? How
does he believe he has changed? Use quotes from the poem to support your translation.

In the first stanza, Vaughan writes that he misses the days of “angel-infancy.” When he
was a child, he could gaze at a flower or cloud for an hour and see in them “shadows of
eternity.” He feels he has changed because now he knows how to hurt people (“taught my
tongue to wound”) and has sinful thoughts (“conscience with a sinful sound”).

4. In the last stanza, how does Vaughan see himself as different from other men?

Vaughan writes that while most men wish to move forward in time, perhaps working
toward success, love, and rewards, he wishes to move backward. He wishes that once he
dies, he will become as pure as he was when he was born: “And when this dust falls to the
urn/In that state I came, return.”

T-24