I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of pure and endless light.
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv’n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world
And all her train were hurl’d.

These lines open Henry Vaughan’s devotional poem “The World,” first published in his collection *Silex Scintillans* (1650; expanded 1655). Vaughan (1621–1695), a Welsh poet associated with the “metaphysical” tradition, wrote much of his religious verse in the aftermath of the English Civil Wars and amid a personal turn toward Anglican piety. In “The World,” he frames a visionary, nocturnal glimpse of eternity contrasted with the restless, shadow-like motion of temporal life. The poem’s cosmic imagery (spheres, hours and years) draws on early modern Christian Platonism and the era’s inherited model of a harmonized, ordered universe, using it to stage a moral and spiritual meditation on worldly distraction versus eternal reality.

The speaker’s sudden “sight” of Eternity as a luminous, unbroken ring sets up a stark opposition: eternity is pure, calm, and self-contained, while time is a driven, mechanical sequence of “hours, days, years” that casts the world as a “vast shadow.” The image suggests that temporal existence is not simply fleeting but derivative—an insubstantial projection beneath the true light of the eternal. By placing “the world / And all her train” inside time’s moving shadow, Vaughan implies that human ambitions and social bustle are swept along by forces they do not control. The passage functions as a spiritual corrective: to perceive eternity is to recognize the world’s transience and to reorient desire toward what does not pass away.