Olor Iscanus: A collection of some select poems and translations, formerly written by Mr Henry Vaughan Silurist.
London: printed by T. W[arren]. for Humphrey Moseley, 1651.
Price: $16,000.00
Small Octavo: [xvi], 158, [1] errata; complete with engraved title page by Robert Vaughan, and preceding explanatory leaf.
FIRST EDITION. The same sheets were reissued in 1679, with a cancel title page, but only two copies in that state are recorded.
Finely bound in late 19th century in navy blue straight-grained morocco, spine gilt; marbled end-papers, gilt edges. Signed on turn-in by R. Wallis, binder. Contents lightly washed. Short mended tear to engraved title.
First edition of a fine copy of the book of poems which succeeded Vaughan’s famous volume, Silex Scintillans (1650). This collection was finished before that collection was published, and might have been suppressed but for the efforts of his friends. Unlike the verse in Silex Scintillans, Vaughan’s poetry here is mainly secular, with numerous occasional poems addressed to contemporary poets such as William Cartwright, John Fletcher and his fellow countrywoman Katherine Philips, "To the most Excellently accomplish'd Mrs. K. Philips," in which he promises to "vow / "No Lawrel growes, but for your Brow." (pp. 28-29).
Henry Vaughan was born at Newton by Usk in Brecknockshire, and the title of this collection refers to his native river, describing himself as ‘the Swan of Usk’, as well as a ‘Silurist’ because he came from the country of the Silures tribe of ancient Britain. The swan is shown on the additional engraved title page by Robert Vaughan. The first poem here is addressed ‘To the River Isca’, elevating it at least to the level of the Tiber, the Thames and the Severn:
First, may all Bards born after me
(When I am ashes) sing of thee!
May thy green banks and streams (or none)
Be both their Hill and Helicon;
May Vocal Groves grow there, and all
The shades in them Propheticall (p. 2)
Vaughan prepared Olor Iscanus for the press in December 1647, intending it as his second published volume, a sequel to Poems (1646). Its publication was interrupted by the death of his younger brother William and by a change of spiritual direction that led Vaughan to compose instead the devotional lyrics of Silex Scintillans (1650). The volume eventually appeared in 1651 through the agency of his twin brother Thomas Vaughan, who acted as Henry's literary agent in London during the early 1650s.
The title Olor Iscanus presents the author as "The Swan of Usk," a designation subsequently used as Vaughan's sobriquet by his relative John Aubrey and his Oxford correspondent Anthony Wood. The collection opens with "To the River Isca," a poem that functions as a title poem, “both articulating Vaughan's aesthetic ambition and ostensibly accomplishing it. The first ten lines offer a catalogue of river poets descending from gods of antiquity to Vaughan's contemporaries John Milton and William Habington”(Nauman): Apollo and the Eurotas, Orpheus and the Hebrus, Petrarch and the Tiber, Sidney and the Thames, Habington and the Severn. See Jonathan Nauman, “From Rivers to Fountains: Henry Vaughan’s Secular and Sacred Inaugurations”, Connotations Vol. 33 (2024)
Vaughan’s experiences as a royalist who fought in the English Civil War are reflected in certain poems. “Vaughan writes a joking poem on his poverty (the royalist ruined in his fortunes); he writes verse letters to his friends (as royalists scattered by their adversities did); he writes elegies for acquaintances slain in battle.”(DNB) There are also a few neo-Latin poems in the collection, including the one opposite the title page (‘Ad Posteros’), and others on pp. 63-4, as well as prose translations from Latin (Plutarch, “Of the Benefit Wee may get by our Enemies”; Maximus of Tyre, “Of the diseases of the mind and the body”) and Spanish (Antonio de Guevara, “The Praise and Happinesse of the Countrie-Life”).
ESTC R6212; Wing V123; Allison, Four Metaphysical Poets, 5 (pp. 38-9).