Thomas Traherne

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.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.[2] Following the 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.[2] 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.[13] Traherne was described as "one of the most pious ingenious men that ever I was acquainted with",[14] 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".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".[20] 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.[21] 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.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".[24] 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 (Eugenius Philalethes) and John Norris of Bemerton.[27] 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.[29] 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.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 ("the highest reason").In some of his theological writings, Traherne exhibits a passion for the Anglican faith and the national church that is evident in his confrontations with Roman Catholicism and Nonconformism during this time of political and religious upheaval.[13] However, Traherne takes a less polemic tone in the posthumously published Christian Ethicks (1675) in which he explores theological implications of Calvinist thought on freedom and necessity.Because of human limitations and failings, one cannot build a suitable and coherent moral system of beliefs—those virtues must derive from a divine source and their reward from perceiving the infinite love of God at the root of all things."[47] Traherne seems to convey the idea that paradise can be rediscovered and regained only through reacquiring this childlike innocence—a state which "precedes the knowledge of good and evil" and seems to be composed of a boundless love and wonder.Those who have acknowledged an influence since then have been the Trappist monk Thomas Merton; the Christian humanist Dorothy L. Sayers; the poet Elizabeth Jennings; and C. S. Lewis, who called Centuries of Meditations "almost the most beautiful book in English".[56] They also had their influence within the Anglican Communion which, though it does not create saints in the same way as in the Roman Catholic tradition, has frequently canonised people of great holiness, sometimes by a formal process and sometimes by popular acclamation or local custom.[57] Following this precedent, and in commemoration of his poems and spiritual writings, Thomas Traherne is included in the Calendar of Saints in many national churches within the Anglican Communion.There have also been a wide variety of musical styles over the past century, from art song to devotional motets, from advanced modernism to minimalism, and there have been some purely instrumental interpretations as well.[67] Also among the largely sacred choral music of Patrick Larley has been his On Christmas Day (2002), a sequence of seven pieces, of which numbers 1, 3 and 7 incorporate verses from Traherne's poem "On Christmas-Day".[76][77] Other settings of Traherne's work have been made by Bulgarian-born Dobrinka Tabakova ("Centuries of Meditations", selections set for full choir, harp or piano and strings, 2012);[78] by the French Claude Ballif, (Poème de la félicité for three female voices, 1977);[79] and by the Finnish Jouni Kaipainen, whose "Felicity and Fullnesse" is described as a monodrama for high baritone and orchestra in which verses by Traherne alternate with verses by Hanno Eskola (2006).[80] In North America, the Canadian composer Frederick Karam (1926–1978) wrote "From Dust I Rise", an anthem based on lines from Traherne's poem "The Salutation", first performed in 1958.