A POET'S RESURRECTION
By STEPHEN HOBHOUSE
THOMAS TRAHERNE is believed to have been horn in or near Hereford about the year 1636. It is therefore fitting that, before 1936 is out, we should commemorate- this brilliant representative of the " meta- physical poets " of the age of Milton—all the more so as Traherne missed his opportunity of a centenary or bicentenary. For till recently his name, save to a few bibliophiles, was quite unknown. It is a romantic story how in the year 1897 William Brooke found the anonymous manuscripts of his poems and meditations on a street bookstall, how Dr. Alexander Grosart, misled by certain superficial resemblances, was preparing to print them in his complete edition of Henry Vaughan the Silurist, and how at length the publisher Bertram Dobell with Brooke's assistance tracked them down by a series of intricate but triumphantly conclusive clues to Thomas Traherne, M.A., B.D., author of three long forgotten little books, Roman Forgeries, Christian Ethicks, and A Serious and Pathetical! Contemplation of the Mercies qf God. Finally another neglected manuscript with many new poems was unexpectedly found on the shelves of the British Museum. After an obscuration lasting for two and a quarter centuries a bright new star had appeared in the constellation of our mystical poets.
Research has revealed very little about the life of Traherne. Son of a Hereford shoemaker, he somehow found a rich patron to send him to Oxford, where (so he tells us) he delighted to study in the Bodleian Library, " the glory of Oxford and this nation," the works of the mystics and philosophers and the Fathers of the early Church. For ten years he was parish priest of the small Herefordshire village of Credenhill ; and then till his death, unmarried, in 1674, he served as private chaplain in London and Teddington to the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. He tells us that in early life he resigned the chance of a lucrative career, choosing rather to live upon ten pounds a year, with a suit of leather clothes (like his great contemporary George Fox) and a very spare diet, " that I might have all my time clearly to myself." His will mentions only his books, a few clothes and some twelve pounds in cash.
Though external information is scanty, we have in Traherne's Centuries of Meditations, supplemented by poems, one of the most charming of spiritual auto- biographies. Long before Blake and Wordsworth, with both of whom he has marked affinities, Traherne was the poet of childhood. His is all the incurable optimism, the careless sense of universal possession, the lovely gaiety of a happy, imaginative child. He tells us in enthusiastic words of the " pure and virgin appre- hensions " of his " Infant Eye," of the ecstatic wonder with which he looked out in his early years on all the common objects and inhabitants of the countryside, and claimed everything as his own peculiar possession. " The skies were mine, and so were the moon and the stars, and all the world was mine." Eternity, too, became " manifest in the Light of the Day, and some- thing infinite behind everything appeared."
" The very day my spirit did inspire,
The world's fair beauty set my soul on fire."
But, as the boy grew up, the " dirty devices " and " churlish properties " of men, the casual and accidental riches invented by them, obscured his true vision and east him into a deep melancholy. From this he was delivered by the study first of the Bible and later on of divine philosophy, more especially that of the Neo- platonist tradition. Once more Nature became " the gateway and frontispiece of eternity " ; and in the human soul he learnt to find nothing.. less than " miraculous abyss of endless abysses, an undrainable ocean, an unexhausted fountain of endless oceans." If only we love God aright, no person, he declares, can be loved too much; nay, even the humblest of inanimate objects are full of " infinite excellences " and demand our constant affection.
Holding this creed, it is not surprising to find Traherne feeling his way towards a new social order founded on human brotherhood and on the conimon ownership of life's necessities, an order to be secured " not by the noise of bloody wars and the dethroning of kings, but by the gentle ways of peace and love."
All this and much more can be read in the melodious and rhythmical prose of Traherne's Meditations, a work for the most part vital and intense (to borrow Milton's phrase) with the impetuous rush of a mind lifted into ecstasy beyond itself. Philosophy goes hand in hand with poetry, and though the poetry is occasionally overwhelmed, it is never for long ; and we have all through the true note of the nature-mystic, ever intent on achieving a closer communion with the Divine source of all things.
Again and again we come across sayings of deep moral or philosophic import possessing often a musical charm that endears them to us. " The memory and mind are a strange region of celestial light." " Thus we see the seeds of eternity sparkling in our natures." " No man can sin that clearly seeeth the beauty of God's face." " It is not our parents' loins, so much as our parents' lives, that enthrals and blinds us."
Traherne's poems are generally inferior to his splendid prose. It is unfortunate that he never lived to revise them, and moreover some, possibly many, of his verses appear to have been corrected, much to their detriment, by his prosaic brother Philip. Taking his poetry as it stands, we must judge the poet's craftsmanship to be often defective, and the exigencies of rhyme and metre often fetter his imagination sorely. In this respect he falls behind his fellow-mystics, George Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan, though he is their superior.in his freedom from artificial conceits and far-fetched metaphors and in the joyous and transparent sincerity of his utterance.
Most of his poems are spontaneous variations of his favourite themes of the purity of the " Infant Eye " and of the child's wonder at being born into a world laden with strange and entrancing treasures. They abound with notes of triumphant happiness very different in tone from Vaughan's sorrowful retrospect towards his " Angell-infancy " or from the solemn Platonic meditations of Wordsworth's great Ode on the Intimations of Heaven in childhood. Traherne was indeed an extraordinary phenomenon in the century of PuritanismI
" A native health and innocence Within my bones did grow, And while my God did all his Glories show, I felt a vigour in my sense That was all Spirit. I within did flow With seas of life, like wine ; I nothing in the world did know But 'twas divine."
Thomas Traherne lived in an age of conflict and confusion. Today, when human life is equally tragic and threatened moreover by the deinons of mechanisation, it is good to become intimate with a poet who,' in spite of all the too obvious discords, sees God's universe, while he listens to the rhythms and cadences of Nature's music, as one mighty harmony of beauty and joy. In the years to come the Centuries of Meditations may well take its place, among the great fellowship of the religious- minded, as one or the best known and best loved of spiritual books.
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