Poetry of Traherne by Thomas Traherne

First published: 1699, 1903, 1910; includes A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation of the Mercies of God, 1699; The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne, 1903; Traherne’s Poems of Felicity, 1910

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Thomas Traherne was one of the last seventeenth century inheritors of the Metaphysical tradition of religious poetry, developed to its height by John Donne and George Herbert, who drew of every aspect of the world around them to express their faith and their longing for closer communion with God. Much of their complexity of thought and their awareness of the essentially paradoxical nature of the Christian religion was lost on Traherne, whose concepts and style were much simpler and less compact than theirs. The greatest differences between Traherne and his predecessors undoubtedly resulted from his radically different theology. Both Donne and Herbert struggled with a strong sense of sin, a feeling of human unworthiness, and as a consequence of this realization they had an equally overwhelming perception of the miraculous, outreaching mercy of God.

Traherne, who was closer in spirit to the great Romantic poets William Blake and William Wordsworth than to his own contemporaries, wrote out of a deep conviction of innate human innocence. Original sin forms no part of his faith, though he was conscious, intellectually if not emotionally, of human corruption, which he felt was derived from the world’s emphasis on materialism. Evil comes from human greed; gold, silver, and jewels are symbols not of beauty but of temptation and of that avarice that perverts youthful joy in the creation. Nature, not wealth, is for Traherne the greatest of human possessions. Those who are inheritors of the light of the stars and the fruitful soil can desire no more.

Just as Donne’s complex metaphorical language reflects his equally involved theology, so Traherne’s brief stanzas echo the essential simplicity of his vision. His lyrics have been compared to Blake’s Songs of Innocence (1789), though he never achieved the sustained control of the later poet. Both his form and his devotional tone are perhaps closest to the less impassioned poems of Herbert, who may have inspired him to experiment with a wide variety of verse forms, not always successfully. Traherne’s work is characterized by lines of striking loveliness in the middle of uninspired, wordy mediocrity. His limitations in his religious thought are partly responsible for those of his poetry: a narrowness of vision, a lack of awareness of many significant sides of life, and a tendency to repetitiveness. He never really mastered the poetic control of Donne, of Herbert, or even of Henry Vaughan, another late Metaphysical poet with mystical tendencies, who shared Traherne’s propensity for unevenness in his writing. This problem can be clearly seen in a lyric that begins with an unusual and striking vision of “new worlds beneath the water.” The intensity of the opening is dissipated by the weakness of the end of the stanza.

I saw new worlds beneath the water lie,  New people; yea, another sky   And sun, which seen by day   Might things more clear display.    Just such another    Of late my brotherDid in his travel see, and saw by night   A much more strange and wondrous sight;  Nor could the world exhibit such another   So great a sight, but in a brother.

Dominant themes in Traherne’s poetry include the innocence of childhood, when human eyes look upon everything with delight and wonder, the glories of the natural world, and the corruptions of the commerce-directed society of the time. Perhaps the best known and most skillful treatment of these characteristic themes comes in “Wonder,” a rather ecstatic statement of the poet’s childhood reaction to the world around him.

How like an Angel came I down! How Bright are all Things here!When first among his Works I did appear O how their GLORY me did Crown?The World resembled his Eternitie, In which my Soul did Walk;And every Thing that I did see,  Did with me talk.

Like Wordsworth, Traherne suggests a kind of platonic preexistence, when human souls were united with God. Children retain some of this divine luster until greed gradually wears it away. Though Wordsworth could not have known Traherne’s poems, since they were lost until late in the nineteenth century, his Ode has surprising echoes of a poem called “News,” in which Traherne ponders his early sense that there was a world of bliss beyond the one he saw. Unlike Wordsworth, however, Traherne finds the creation not a consolation for the loss of heavenly bliss, but this bliss itself.

 But little did the infant dreamThat all the treasures of the world were by, And that himself was so the creamAnd crown of all which round about did lie. Yet thus it was! The gem,   The diadem,  The ring enclosing allThat stood upon this earthen ball,   The heav’nly eye,   Much wider than the sky,Wherein they all included were,The love, the soul, that was the kingMade to possess them, did appear   A very little thing.

In another poem, “The Apostasy,” distinguished by a complex, well-handled stanza form, Traherne comments at greater length on his childish appreciation of the natural world, when he seemed to dwell in Eden before the fall.

   As Eve  I did believe  Myself in Eden set,Affecting neither gold nor ermined crowns,  Nor aught else that I need forget;No mud did foul my limpid streams,No mist eclipsed my sun with frowns;  Set off with heav’nly beams,My joys were meadows, fields, and towns.

Temptation entered his paradise with “those little, new-invented things, fine lace and silks . . . or worldly pelf that us destroys.” His own fall was gradual, but he, like all other humans, was corrupted, separated, finally made “a stranger to the shining skies.”

Traherne’s poetry has a pervasive quality of innocence and purity; even when he speaks of corruption, he seems to be living in an incorruptible world himself, and he preserved a child’s “uncomplex” awareness of existence. Both his language and his images reflect these characteristics. They are expanded, not compressed; a poet of mood, rather than of ideas, Traherne built much of his effect through repetition and restatement, deriving images from the preceding ones, finding new examples to express the same idea, as he does in the following stanza:

 A globe of earth is better farThan if it were a globe of gold; a star Much brighter than a precious stone;The sun more glorious than a costly throne—  His warming beam,  A living stream Of liquid pearl, that from a springWaters the earth, is a most precious thing.

Traherne’s fondness for the exclamatory tone is especially evident in a little verse appropriately entitled “The Rapture,” which conveys that joy in existence that is part of so much of his poetry, especially that about childhood: “Sweet infancy!/ O heavenly fire! O sacred light!/ How fair and bright!/ How great am I,/ Whom the whole world doth magnify!”

The poet does have other voices. In “Insatiableness,” a poem faintly reminiscent of Herbert’s “The Pulley,” in which God is seen withholding the gift of rest from humans that “weariness” may turn them back toward the Deity, Traherne restates in three successive stanzas the impossibility of satisfying the “busy, vast, inquiring soul” of humans. His conclusion differs from Herbert’s; this restless spirit is, finally, proof of the existence of God: “Sure there’s a God, (for else there’s no delight,) One infinite.”

One of the most unusual of Traherne’s poems is “A Serious and Curious Night Meditation,” where he deals with a theme he rarely touches on—death as a physical process, rather than as a spiritual reunion with God. Some of the images have the harsh, almost macabre realism of the true Metaphysical poets like Donne and Andrew Marvell.

What is my Fathers House! and what am I!My fathers House is Earth; where I must lie:And I a worm, no man; that fits no room,Till like a worm, I crawl into my Tomb.

Even here there is a suggestion of the awareness of beauty that is characteristic of Traherne, in the lines “Whilst, at my window, pretty Birds do Ring my Knell, and with their Notes my Obit sing.” The conclusion is a weaker version of Donne’s triumphant affirmation in his sonnet, “Death Be Not Proud”: “Sleep is Cousin-german unto Death:/ Sleep and Death differ, no more, than a Carcass/ And a skeleton.” Therefore, since he sleeps peacefully in his bed, he has no reason to fear death.

Traherne’s formula for “felicity,” a term that recurs frequently in both his poetry and in his fine prose work, the Centuries of Meditations (wr. c. 1657-1661, pb. 1908), is effectively summarized in “The Recovery.” Here he presents his conviction that human pleasure is God’s reward: “Our blessedness to see/ Is even to the Deity/ A Beatific vision.” Humans see God’s glory in his works and worship him through their joy.

All gold and silver is but empty dross.  Rubies and sapphires are but loss,  The very sun and stars and seas  Far less His spirit please: One voluntary act of loveFar more delightful to His soul doth proveAnd is above all these as far as love.

Traherne’s own joy in the works of God is perhaps the most memorable quality of his poetry; his exuberant praise of nature and the innocence of childhood is for the reader, at least, temporarily infectious. There is, however, a sameness about his work, a lack of variety in his ideas and in his vocabulary, which makes it difficult to read many of his poems at a sitting without feeling the sweetness and the smoothness rather oppressive. When even evil is described in terms of gold and silver, rubies and sapphires, words that have inevitably been associated with beauty rather than with corruption, the reader eventually begins to long for a single harsh phrase or metaphor of real ugliness. However, notwithstanding all his limitations. Traherne deserves a place of respect among the poets of his century for expressing, often very beautifully and appropriately, his own unique view of life and the way to human happiness.

Bibliography

Blevins, Jacob, ed. Re-reading Thomas Traherne: A Collection of New Critical Essays. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2007. Discussions of Traherne and the laws of property, his use of “curious” visual language, and the quest for prelapsarian speech in his writings and those of his contemporaries.

Cefalu, Paul. “Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Scholasticism in the Prose and Poetry of Thomas Traherne.” In English Renaissance Literature and Contemporary Theory: Sublime Objects of Theology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Applies modern philosophy and critical theory to analyze seventeenth century English devotional poetry by Traherne and other writers. Focuses on the writers’ depictions of the relationship of God to the poems’ subjects.

Clements, A. L. The Mystical Poetry of Thomas Traherne. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1969. A comprehensive study of Traherne’s poetic technique, themes, symbolism, and diction. Discusses the poems contained in the Dobell manuscript, one of the major sources of Traherne’s poetry, as an interrelated sequence in the Christian contemplative tradition of writing. Includes appendixes on Traherne and Renaissance poetic theory and practice, and on the mystical tradition.

Day, Malcolm M. Thomas Traherne. Boston: Twayne, 1982. A useful introduction to the Traherne canon, with a short chapter on the two most important manuscripts of Traherne’s poetry, the Dobell and the Burney manuscripts. Includes a Traherne chronology and a short life history.

Reid, David. The Metaphysical Poets. Harlow, England: Longman, 2000. Chapter 6 focuses on Traherne, discussing his poetry of deprivation and transcendence and interpreting his work from the perspective of Metaphysical poetry.

Stewart, Stanley. The Expanded Voice: The Art of Thomas Traherne. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1970. Contains two insightful, highly detailed chapters on Traherne’s poetry. Stewart believes that Traherne’s poetic craftsmanship has been underappreciated, an oversight he rectifies.