Thomas Traherne
Thomas Traherne was an English poet, Anglican cleric, theologian, and religious writer. The intense, scholarly spirituality in his writings has led to his being commemorated by some parts of the Anglican Communion on 10 October or on 27 September.
The work for which Traherne is best known today is the Centuries of Meditations, a collection of short paragraphs in which he reflects on Christian life and ministry, philosophy, happiness, desire and childhood. This was first published in 1908 after having been rediscovered in manuscript ten years earlier. His poetry likewise was first published in 1903 and 1910. His prose works include Roman Forgeries, Christian Ethics, and A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation of the Mercies of God.
Traherne's writings frequently explore the glory of creation and what he saw as his intimate relationship with God. His writing conveys an ardent, almost childlike love of God, and is compared to similar themes in the works of later poets William Blake, Walt Whitman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. His love for the natural world is frequently expressed in his works by a treatment of nature that evokes Romanticism—two centuries before the Romantic movement.
Biography
Early life and education
Traherne's birth and baptism are not recorded in parish registers. According to antiquarian Anthony à Wood, he was a "shoemaker's son of Hereford" born in either 1636 or 1637. Bertram Dobell identifies this shoemaker as John Traherne. However, other sources say that Thomas was the son of Philipp Traherne , a local innkeeper and twice Mayor of Hereford, and his third wife, Mary Lane.Traherne writes about his childhood, which included a natural wonder at and appreciation of the world around him, in Centuries of Meditations and in his poetry.
Traherne was educated at Hereford Cathedral School and matriculated in Brasenose College, Oxford, on 2 April 1652, receiving his baccalaureate degree on 13 October 1656. Five years later he was promoted to the degree of Master of Arts on 6 November 1661, and he received a Bachelor of Divinity on 11 December 1669.
Church ministry
After receiving his baccalaureate degree from Oxford in 1656, he took holy orders.On 30 December 1657, he was appointed as the rector of Credenhill near Hereford, by the Commissioners for the Approbation of Public Preachers, although at the time he was not an ordained priest. A curious note appended to the record of his appointment is that Traherne counted upon the patronage of Amabel Fane, the widow of the Earl of Kent. Traherne served in this post for ten years.
Following the Stuart restoration of the monarchy and the return of Charles II, Traherne was ordained priest on 20 October 1660 by the Bishop of Oxford, Robert Skinner, at Launton near Bicester.
In 1667, Traherne became the private chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, 1st Baronet, of Great Lever, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal to King Charles II, at Teddington in Middlesex. It was while residing there that Traherne died on 27 September 1674, having that day dictated a brief nuncupative will to his friend and neighbour John Berdoe, in which he made bequests to the servants who had looked after him and left his few belongings to his brother Philip and sister-in-law Susan. On 10 October 1674 he was buried in St Mary's Church at Teddington, under the church's reading desk.
Character and lifestyle
Traherne was described as "one of the most pious ingenious men that ever I was acquainted with", and "a man of a cheerful and sprightly Temper … ready to do all good Offices to his Friends, and Charitable to the Poor almost beyond his ability". Traherne believed he suffered from the weaknesses of a sociable personality: "Too much openness and proneness to Speak are my Diseas. Too easy and complying a Nature".According to Anthony à Wood, Traherne "always led a simple and devout life; his will shows that he possessed little beyond his books...".
Writings
Publication history during lifetime and soon after
Traherne was an inconsequential literary figure during his lifetime and his works were not known or appreciated until long after his death. As a country priest he led a devout, humble life and did not participate in literary circles. Only one of his works, Roman Forgeries, was published in his lifetime. Christian Ethicks followed soon after his death, and later A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation of the Mercies of God, which was published as the work of an anonymous author whose character and background were discussed in a brief introduction by the publisher.At Traherne's death in 1674 most of his manuscripts were bequeathed to his brother Philip. After Philip's death they apparently passed into the possession of the Skipp family of Ledbury in Herefordshire, where they languished for almost 200 years. In 1888 the family's assets were dissolved, yet the manuscripts did not re-emerge until 10 years later.
Later publication history
In the winter of 1896–97, William T. Brooke of London discovered some anonymous manuscripts in a "barrow of books about to be trashed" or a "street bookstall". Brooke thought that they might be lost works by Henry Vaughan and showed them to Alexander Grosart, a Scottish clergyman and expert on Elizabethan and Jacobean literature who reprinted rare works. Grosart agreed that the manuscripts were by Vaughan and planned to include them in an edition of Vaughan's works that he was preparing for publication. Grosart died in 1899 and the proposed edition was never completed.Grosart's collection, including the manuscripts, was purchased by Charles Higham, a London bookseller, who asked his friend Bertram Dobell to examine them. Dobell was convinced that they were not by Vaughan and soon deduced that they were by Traherne. The manuscripts included poetry as well as a collection of contemplative paragraphs "embodying reflexions on religion and morals".
The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne was published in 1903 and Centuries of Meditations in 1908. Other publications followed. Eventually the Centuries were to be described as "one of the finest prose-poems in our language" and passages from them were set to music almost as often as the poems.
Manuscripts
A Traherne manuscript of "Centuries", the Dobell Folio, "The Church's Year Book", and the "Early Notebook" are held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Burney Manuscript is at the British Library, London; and "Select Meditations" is in the Osborn Collection, Beinecke Library, New Haven, Connecticut.A manuscript discovered in 1996 in the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., by Julia Smith and Laetitia Yeandle was later identified as an unfinished 1,800-line epic poem by Traherne entitled "The Ceremonial Law". In 1997 Jeremy Maule, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, discovered more works by Traherne among 4,000 manuscripts in the Library of Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Lambeth manuscripts, mostly prose, encompass four complete works and a fragment of a fifth: Inducements to Retiredness, A Sober View of Dr Twisse, Seeds of Eternity, The Kingdom of God and the fragmentary Love.
Reception of the poetry
Although Traherne is now counted one of the leading Metaphysical poets, the name of that "school" went unmentioned on his first publication. In his preface to The Poetical Works, Dobell linked him with "that small group of religious poets which includes Herbert, Vaughan and Crawshaw", but distinguished him as uniquely individual and "neither a follower nor imitator of any of these". In the selection of his poems that followed two years later, they were accompanied in the same volume by the 'verse-remains' of Henry Vaughan's twin brother Thomas and John Norris of Bemerton. The reputation of the two latter was then and remains as philosophers. Both were also clergymen and Norris was the incumbent of Herbert's former parsonage; it was not until much later that he was to be described also as "the last of the Metaphysicals". Traherne, then, is being presented by propinquity as a representative of the line of 17th-century devotional poets rather than the member of a particular school.At the time of publication, those writers whom Samuel Johnson had described dismissively as "metaphysical poets" had yet to achieve the critical prominence they were given after the appearance of Herbert Grierson's anthology, Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century. In any case, none of Traherne's poems were included there and when he did come to the notice of T. S. Eliot, it was only to be put aside as "more a mystic than a poet". After that, it took decades before his work was given more serious scrutiny.
Certainly, the mystical element is strikingly evident in Traherne, but his Metaphysical credentials are confirmed by the way in which he seeks to explain issues of truth, knowledge, and the faculties of the mind and heart by methods of theological and rational examination. Typical also is the way in which these meditations are worked out as extended Baroque conceits, of which "Shadows in the Water" is a particularly striking example. A further link with fellow devotional poets of his period is found in the idealisation of childish innocence and the use of Platonic themes which Traherne shares with Henry Vaughan and John Norris.
Influences
Development of personal faith
Given some of the autobiographical and confessional material in his works, Traherne must have suffered from a lack of faith in his formative years at Oxford. He describes this as a period of Apostasy and that he later found his way back to faith:However, there is an alternative reading possible, which may be closer to the facts of Traherne's experience as he expresses them in the quote above. This is that he did not suffer a loss of faith, but rather identified his maturation away from a natural, innocent child's view of the world and his place in it, from an innate understanding of the wonder of God's creation, to a burdened grappling with the rules and expectation of church and society as an apostasy itself, which he had to overcome then by careful and disciplined study. This childlike, accepting, and joyous view of faith and religious ecstasy is at the core of the writing from which the excerpt above is drawn, and is part of the reason for Traherne's appeal.