Life & Wisdom Quote by Henry Vaughan

Restlessness is Vaughan's diagnosis, and it lands with the chill precision of a devotional poet watching modernity being born. "Man hath still either toys or care" cuts two ways: we distract ourselves with trifles or we dignify our anxiety as duty, but either mode keeps us skimming the surface of life. The line has the compact cruelty of lived observation - it refuses the romance of wandering and calls it what it is: a spiritual attention deficit.

The subtext is theological, but the psychology feels contemporary. Vaughan sketches a creature built for belonging ("He knows he hath a home") and yet estranged from the very coordinates that would lead him there ("scarce knows where"). That gap between knowledge and know-how is the poem's engine. He isn't describing ignorance; he's describing forgetting as a moral condition. Home isn't lost because it's hidden; it's lost because the self is constantly in motion, "ever restless and irregular", converting the earth into a circuit rather than a dwelling.

Context matters: Vaughan writes in the shadow of the English Civil War and the religious turbulence of the 17 'th century, when public certainties fractured and private faith became both refuge and battleground. The poem's power comes from how it uses physical language - "run and ride", "root", "tied" - to make metaphysical drift feel bodily. You can feel the exhaustion of perpetual travel, the modern curse before the modern vocabulary: a life full of motion that can't remember its destination.