But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness.

These lines are from Henry Vaughan’s devotional lyric “The Retreat,” a poem in which the Welsh metaphysical poet looks back on childhood as a time of spiritual clarity. Writing in the mid-17th century after the upheavals of the English Civil Wars and amid a turn toward religious introspection, Vaughan often contrasts the soul’s divine origin with the body’s “fleshly” limitations. In “The Retreat,” he imagines the soul as having come from God and still retaining, in youth especially, a sense of its heavenly home—an intuition that fades as worldly experience and sin accrue with age.

Vaughan suggests that beneath the body’s outward “dress” (the mortal, material condition), the soul can still perceive flashes of eternity—“bright shoots” that break through the surface of ordinary life. The image fuses embodiment and transcendence: the flesh is not denied, but it is treated as a covering that cannot fully suppress the soul’s memory of its divine source. The lines encapsulate a central metaphysical theme: the human being as a creature of two realms, with moments of insight or grace revealing an “everlastingness” that outlasts time, decay, and the distractions of adulthood.