Analyze of Henry Vaughan's poem

Biograph

Henry Vaughan, (born April 17, 1622, Llansantffraed, Breconshire, Wales—died April 23, 1695, Llansantffraed), Anglo-Welsh poet and mystic remarkable for the range and intensity of his spiritual intuitions.(MOVEMENT / STYLE : Metaphysical poets)

Educated at Oxford and studying law in London, Vaughan was recalled home in 1642 when the first Civil War broke out, and he remained there the rest of his life.

In 1646 his Poems, with the Tenth Satyre of Juvenal Englished was published, followed by a second volume in 1647. Meanwhile he had been “converted” by reading the religious poet George Herbert and gave up “idle verse.” His Silex Scintillans (1650; “The Glittering Flint,” enlarged 1655) and the prose Mount of Olives: or, Solitary Devotions (1652) show the depth of his religious convictions and the authenticity of his poetic genius. Two more volumes of secular verse were published, ostensibly without his sanction; but it is his religious verse that has lived. He also translated short moral and religious works and two medical works in prose. At some time in the 1650s he began to practice medicine and continued to do so throughout his life.

Though Vaughan borrowed phrases from Herbert and other writers and wrote poems with the same titles as Herbert’s, he was one of the most original poets of his day. Chiefly he had a gift of spiritual vision or imagination that enabled him to write freshly and convincingly, as is illustrated in the opening of “The World”:

I saw Eternity the other night

Like a Great Ring of pure and endless light

He was equally gifted in writing about nature, holding the old view that every flower enjoys the air it breathes and that even sticks and stones share man’s expectation of resurrection. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth may have been influenced by Vaughan.

1. Vaughan’s poetry was largely disregarded in his own day and for a century after his death. He shared in the revival of interest in 17th-century metaphysical poets in the 20th century. The standard edition is Works (1914; 2nd ed., 1957), edited by L.C. Martin.

The Retreat

BY HENRY VAUGHAN

O, how I long to travel back,

And tread again that ancient track!

That I might once more reach that plain

Where first I left my glorious train,

From whence th’ enlightened spirit sees

That shady city of palm trees.

But, ah! my soul with too much stay

Is drunk, and staggers in the way.

Some men a forward motion love;

But I by backward steps would move,

And when this dust falls to the urn,

In that state I came, return.

Analyze : 
First line :  if time can be back he wants to back at that time
Second line : the time which has past years ago that is time when he was younger
Third line : because when he was younger he same as another child which is pure, much happy, not contain in the dark things that happen in old life
4th line  : he still rember the felling of when he left his state and move to new area by the train
5th line : He is in the full youthful spirit in the first time he left his state
 6th line : he feels like he will survive or adaptation in the city of palm that is Jerusalem
7th line : he thought that it didn't feel like he had settled too long in the new country
8th line : but he still not have the purpose of life, but he likes his own opinion that he decided.
9th line :  he thinks that he isn't like the another man, another man doing things is move forwad do not things about the mess that they made they still move forward
10th line : but he is a man who move back fix everything that he messed up before
11th line : even though he sticks to his own opinion and doesn't care about the others but in the end it's the same as the others, he thinks about his death time, when he death he will become a dust
12th line : His body will return to the earth and become again what it was before he was born.

Source : https://www.britannica.com/biography/Henry-Vaughan
                https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45430/the-retreat-56d2250b6cff5