'Some Things Are Little on the Outside'

I never tire of Richard Wilbur’s best work and was marveling again at “‘A World Without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness’” (Ceremony and Other Poems, 1950), which takes its title from a passage in Thomas Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation. No ascetic, Wilbur embraces and celebrates the sensory world. The world is a gift and not to be scorned: 

“Wisely watch for the sight

Of the supernova burgeoning over the barn,

Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the spirit's right

Oasis, light incarnate.”

 

Which sent me back to Traherne’s prose. His literary reclamation is always stirring to remember, an inspiration to dejected writers. During his life, Traherne (1637-1674) published only one book, Roman Forgeries, an anti-Catholic tract. In 1896, more than two centuries after Traherne’s death, the book collector William Brooke was browsing in a London bookstall and found two unsigned manuscript notebooks, one of prose, the other of verse. He suspected they were the work of Henry Vaughan. Bertram Dobell purchased them after Brooke’s death, determined they were Traherne’s work and introduced them to the world as The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne (1903), Centuries of Meditation (1908) and Poems of Felicity (1910).

 

When I read Traherne’s prose, the slightly overripe word that comes to mind is pellucid – “transmitting or allowing the passage of light; translucent, transparent.” There’s a remarkable lightness and buoyancy to his style. I love the prose of his contemporaries, Sir Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, as well, but would never confuse theirs with Traherne's. His float Mozart-fashion, never sinking with stridency or self-importance. Take the opening passage, perhaps my favorite overture in any work of literature:

 

“An empty book is like an infant’s soul, in which anything may be written. It is capable of all things, but containeth nothing. I have a mind to fill this with profitable wonders. And since Love made you put it into my hands I will fill it with those Truths you love without knowing them: with those things which, if it be possible, shall shew my Love; to you in communicating most enriching Truths: to Truth in exalting her beauties in such a Soul.”

 

And this, which takes us back to Wilbur and his “Things of This World”:

 

“Some things are little on the outside, and rough and common, but I remember the time when the dust of the streets were as pleasing as Gold to my infant eyes, and now they are more precious to the eye of reason.”