History Book: A great poet of joy

NICK EICHER: Today is Monday, September 23rd. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher. 

JENNY ROUGH: And I’m Jenny Rough. Coming up next: The WORLD History Book. Today the life of a prolific poet, who remained unknown for more than two centuries, until his unsigned manuscripts were uncovered in a used book stall. WORLD’s Paul Butler has his surprising story.

PAUL BUTLER: There’s a lot we don’t know about Thomas Traherne, but one thing we do know is when he died. September 27th, 1674. That said, no one today is quite sure when he was born. It was likely sometime in 1636. He writes often of his youth.

JON GAUGER:
These little limbs,
These eyes and hands which here I find,
These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins.
Where have ye been?
Behind what curtain were ye from me hid so long?
Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue?

The early 20th century scholar who discovered Traherne’s unpublished poetry says he was the son of a shoemaker, others claim his father was a well-known politician. Thomas Traherne probably wouldn’t have cared either way. For his mind was occupied with other things. From a very young age, he was filled with wonder about the world and all it contained:

JON GAUGER:
To note the Beauty of the Day,
And golden Fields of Corn survey;
Admire each pretty Flower
With its sweet Smell;
To praise their Maker, and to tell
The Marks of His Great Power.

GENE VEITH: Thomas Traherne is a great poet of joy.

Gene Edward Veith is a retired English professor…and author of Between the Lines, A Christian Guide to Literature.

GENE VEITH: And one of his great themes is what he calls felicity.

JON GAUGER:
His talk was to be all of praise,
Thanksgiving, rapture, holy-days;
For nothing else did with his state agree;
Being full of wonder and felicity…

GENE VEITH: …that's the joy that Christians should have when they realize that God who loves you made this whole world.

After earning degrees from Oxford’s Brasenose College, Traherne served as an Anglican minister in a few village parishes before becoming a private chaplain. An unnamed friend published these reflections…writing that he was “free from anything of the sourness or formality by which some great pretenders to Piety rather misrepresent true Religion…” Little more than that is known of his ministry. But his poetry speaks of a grateful sinner saved by grace.

JON GAUGER:
O holy Jesus who didst for us die.
And on the Altar bleeding lie,
Bearing all torment, pain, reproach, and shame,
That we, by virtue of the same.
Though enemies to God, might be
Redeemed and set at liberty:

The 17th century saw a handful of exceptional Christian writers—often labeled as “metaphysical” or “mystical poets.” Gene Veith says the term is misleading.

GENE VEITH: Usually mysticism is about trying to become one with God, but Christianity is about God’s … coming to us, a very incarnational kind of appreciation and praise of God that I think is just very very powerful and very beneficial for Christians to read.

Beneficial…yet Veith says, sadly neglected in much of the evangelical church today.

GENE VEITH: We sort of lost poetry and don't know how to read it or even approach it.

Gene Veith believes it’s time for Christians to rediscover the renewal of the mind includes both reason and imagination…and poetry is well suited for that.

GENE VEITH: It's been said that a poem is a trap for meditation.

JON GAUGER:
Sure Man was born to meditate on things,
And to contemplate the eternal springs
Of God and Nature, glory, bliss, and pleasure ;
That life and love might be his Heavenly treasure ;

GENE VEITH: Sometimes it takes a poem to help us pay attention to really the wonders that are all around us.

And that’s one of the things that Thomas Traherne does so well. Veith reads here a few stanzas from his favorite:

GENE VEITH: Even to our earthly bodies hast thou created all things, all things visible, material, sensible. Animals, vegetables, minerals…trees, herbs and flowers…clouds, vapors, wind, dew, rain, hail and snow. Light and darkness, night and day, the sun, moon and stars. What then, O Lord, has so intended for our souls who give us to our bodies such glorious things?

Veith admits much of the poem seems like a list of disconnected things that God has made and uses for His purposes. Yet the imagination is engaged as the reader is called to meditate on what the list means.

GENE VEITH: This world is wonderful enough. What's heaven going to be like? And he immediately just opens up into an even greater kind of joy that waits before us.

Thomas Traherne discovered that joy before turning 40. When he died, none of his poetry was known much wider than his church and friends. He never married, so he bequeathed his books and manuscripts to his brother Phillip. When Phillip later died, his wife’s family inherited the collection. Where it remained undiscovered for generations. In the 1890s the property was sold to a book stall vendor where a scholar stumbled upon it and purchased it for pennies…unsure of what he’d found.

He thought the unidentified manuscripts were undiscovered poems of Henry Vaughan—another Christian Welsh poet of about the same time. The man nearly published them as Vaughan’s work, but he died suddenly leaving the project unfinished. His library changed hands. And that’s when bookseller, essayist, and publisher Bertram Dobell discovered the manuscripts and eventually pieced together the mystery of the author as Thomas Traherne. Dobell’s anthologies introduced the unknown cleric—and his felicity—to a whole new world.

JON GAUGER:
While in those pleasant Paths we talk
Tis that towards which at last we walk;
But for we may by degrees
Wisely proceed
Pleasures of Love & Praise to heed,
From viewing Herbs & Trees.

Thomas Traherne is buried in St Mary's Church at Teddington, the last church where he served unofficially. His earthly remains are interred under the church's reading desk.

My thanks to voice actor Jon Gauger for bringing Traherne’s poetry to life.

The poem selections are from Dobell’s second edition of the anthology—and available for free on the Internet Archive.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Paul Butler.

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