The Evening-Watch: A Dialogue

By Henry Vaughan 1621–1695 Henry Vaughan

BODY

Farewell! I go to sleep; but when

The day-star springs, I’ll wake again.

SOUL

Go, sleep in peace; and when thou liest

Unnumber’d in thy dust, when all this frame

Is but one dram, and what thou now descriest

In sev’ral parts shall want a name,

Then may his peace be with thee, and each dust

Writ in his book, who ne’er betray’d man’s trust!

BODY

Amen! but hark, ere we two stray

How many hours dost think ’till day?

SOUL

Ah go; th’art weak, and sleepy. Heav’n

Is a plain watch, and without figures winds

All ages up; who drew this circle, even

He fills it; days and hours are blinds.

Yet this take with thee. The last gasp of time

Is thy first breath, and man’s eternal prime.

Biography

Henry Vaughan, the major Welsh poet of the Commonwealth period, has been among the writers benefiting most from the twentieth-century revival of interest in the poetry of John Donne and his followers. Vaughan's early poems, notably those published in the Poems of 1646 and Olor Iscanus of 1651, place him among the "Sons of Ben," in the company of other imitators of Ben Jonson, such as the Cavalier poets Sir William Davenant and

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