Peace

By Henry Vaughan 1621–1695 Henry Vaughan

My Soul, there is a country

Afar beyond the stars,

Where stands a winged sentry

All skillful in the wars;

There, above noise and danger

Sweet Peace sits, crown’d with smiles,

And One born in a manger

Commands the beauteous files.

He is thy gracious friend

And (O my Soul awake!)

Did in pure love descend,

To die here for thy sake.

If thou canst get but thither,

There grows the flow’r of peace,

The rose that cannot wither,

Thy fortress, and thy ease.

Leave then thy foolish ranges,

For none can thee secure,

But One, who never changes,

Thy God, thy life, thy cure.

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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