'Unless It From Enjoyment Spring!'

“He is the supreme poet of childhood. He is at play all his life.” 

Had I read this out of context I might have assumed the writer described was Walter de la Mare, whose poetry I ignored for too long because teachers and critics told me he wrote solely for children. (Something similar happened with Kipling and Stevenson.) The late Ronald Blythe, author of Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (1969) and The View in Winter (1979), is writing of a poet I never encountered in school and rarely encounter at all except among church people: Thomas Traherne (1636-1674). The neglect recalls his disappearance from literature for two centuries, until two of his manuscripts were discovered in a London bookstall late in the nineteenth century. The work was at first mistaken for Henry Vaughan’s. A major poet and prose writer was reborn. Like me, Blythe is especially taken with Traherne’s most substantial work of prose, Centuries of Meditation. Blythe writes: “It contains all creation and everything given and possessed in love.” Traherne recounts his boyhood doubts, an experience known to millions over the centuries:

 

“Once I remember (I think I was about 4 years old when) I thus reasoned with myself, sitting in a little obscure room in my father's poor house: If there be a God, certainly He must be infinite in Goodness: and that I was prompted to, by a real whispering instinct of Nature. And if He be infinite in Goodness, and a perfect Being in Wisdom and Love, certainly He must do most glorious things, and give us infinite riches; how comes it to pass therefore that I am so poor? Of so scanty and narrow a fortune, enjoying few and obscure comforts? I thought I could not believe Him a God to me, unless all His power were employed to glorify me. I knew not then my Soul, or Body; nor did I think of the Heavens and the Earth, the rivers and the stars, the sun or the seas: all those were lost, and absent from me. But when I found them made out of nothing for me, then I had a God indeed, whom I could praise, and rejoice in.”

  

In a letter to Arthur Greeves in 1941, C.S. Lewis called Centuries of Meditation “almost the most beautiful book (in prose, I mean, excluding poets) in English.” It’s certainly on the short list. Readers need not be devout or even observant Christians to cherish the book. Blythe notes that one of Traherne’s favorite verbs is “to enjoy.” See his poem “Of Contentment”:   

 

“Contentment is a sleepy thing

If it in Death alone must die;

A quiet Mind is worse than Poverty,

Unless it from Enjoyment spring!”

 

Traherne died at age thirty-eight from smallpox.

 

[Blythe’s brief essay, “Good to Be Alive: Thomas Traherne,” is collected in Writer’s Day-Book (Trent Editions, 2006).]