SOURCE: "Love Poetry," in Masques of God: Form and Theme in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972, pp. 65-84.

An Australian-born American scholar of English literature, Simmonds is also the editor of Milton Studies, a play-wright, and the author of an important study of Vaughan's accomplishment, Masques of God: Form and Theme in the Poetry of Henry Vaughan (1972). In this work, he declines to follow "the usual custom of treating the secular and sacred verse as separate categories; rather, he examines Vaughan's poetic, intellectual, and religious development and their "essentially organic, continuous, and natural" flow. In the following chapter from this work, Simmonds explores Vaughan's love poetry.

Most of Vaughan's love poems are grouped in two distinct sequences, addressed to "Amoret" and "Etesia" respectively. Each brief story of courtship begins in the traditional way with love at first sight, but each develops toward a different...