THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Susanna Hopton, a grouping less formal than that which had earlier flourished at Little Gidding, but one which
shared many of its spiritual disciplines and aspirations. From his childhood Traherne seems to have experienced a
mystical feeling for the unspoilt radiance of creation; at the age of 4, while sitting ‘in a little Obscure Room in my
Fathers poor House’, he claims to have been prompted to a meditation on the goodness of God by ‘a real Whispering
Instinct of Nature’. In his early manhood he cultivated what he saw as the virtues of ‘Profound Inspection,
Reservation and Silence’, writing in the third part of his Centuries of Meditations of a resolution to spend the period
of his return in rural England ‘in Search of Happiness, and to Satiat that burning Thirst which Nature had enkindled
in me from my Youth’. With the exception of Vaughan, few writers of his period describe such an intense relationship
with nature. It is possible that for both, the absence of the formal flow of the Anglican liturgy during the time of the
Commonwealth intensified their experience of a God revealed as much in the multifariousness of the natural world as
in sacramental worship within the walls of a church. Traherne’s poems and rhapsodic prose of his Centuries
(published from the surviving manuscripts in 1903 and 1908) retain a sense of a free, urgent, and far from Puritan,
response to the wonder and infinity of God. For him the revolution in human affairs consisted of regaining and
exploring the paradisal vision vouchsafed in childhood rather than in building an earthly Jerusalem in anticipation of
the millennium. In his poem ‘Innocence’ he looks back to a time flooded with heavenly light as a way of looking
forward:
That Prospect was the Gate of Heav’n, that Day
The anchient Light of Eden did convey
Into my Soul: I was an Adam there,
A little Adam in a Sphere
Of Joys! O there my Ravisht Sence
Was entertaind in Paradice,
And had a Sight of Innocence.
All was beyond all Bound and Price.
A similar evocation of uncomplicated primal felicity pervades the poems ‘Wonder’ (‘How like an Angel came I down!
| How bright are all things here!’) and ‘The Rapture’ (‘Sweet Infancy! | O fire of Heaven! O sacred Light!’).
[p. 249]
Traherne’s lyrics ‘My spirit’, ‘The Circulation’, and ‘The Demonstration’ offer a series of Neoplatonic reflections on
the interrelationship of the delighted human soul and the intellectual perfection of God. ‘The Demonstration’ speaks,
for example, of a God seeing, feeling, smelling, and living through his creatures: ‘In them ten thousand Ways, | he all
his Works again enjoys, | All things from Him to Him proceed | By them; Are His in them: As if indeed | His Godhead
did it self exceed.’
In the 510 meditations which make up the Centuries (the incomplete fifth Century has only ten sections) Creation
is seen as imbued with the light and presence of God. In the opening meditation the human soul is compared to an
empty book, awaiting the imprint of the truth, the love, and the whispered counsels of its Maker. As a whole, the
Centuries form a record of an intense spiritual communication with God, a process detached from the distractions of
contemporary politics by which the alert soul advances to glory not by ‘the Nois of Bloody Wars, and the Dethroning
of Kings’ but by the ‘Gentle Ways of Peace and Lov’. Despite the occasional awareness of the pain of desertion, of the
fading of light, or of ‘a certain Want and Horror ... beyond imagination’ at the diminution of vision, Traherne
generally expresses a rapt wonder and an unalloyed joy stimulated by the evidence of God’s presence in the visible
world. Traherne does not attempt to write in terms of what would later be termed ‘Natural Theology’, a demonstration
of God and his workings through a close ‘scientific’ observation of nature, for he glimpses a bright world in which
God is implicit rather than defined. ‘You never Enjoy the World aright’, Traherne insists in the twenty-ninth
meditation of the first Century, ‘till the Sea it self floweth in your Veins, till you are Clothed with the Heavens, and
Crowned with the Stars’. This sense of union with Creation is presented as a vision vouchsafed by Heaven rather than
as the achievements of an energetic proto-Romantic imagination. In the fifty-fifth meditation Traherne sees his
experience as flowing freely in time and space and fused with that of the patriarchs and the prophets: ‘When I walk
with Enoch, and see his Translation, I am Transported with Him. The present Age is too little to contain it. I can visit
Noah in His Ark, and swim upon the Waters of the Deluge ... I can Enter into Aarons Tabernacle, and Admire the
Mysteries of the Holy Place. I can Travail over the Land of Canaan, and see it overflowing with Milk and Hony.’ He
moves freely backwards and forwards through both biblical and personal history, both histories being records of
providential direction. In the opening sections of the third Century he recalls ‘those Pure and Virgin Apprehensions I
had from the Womb, and that Divine Light wherewith I was born’. As a child he had seen the English rural world as