Poetry Chaikhana Blog

Ivan M. Granger June 25th, 2008

Love
by Thomas Traherne

      O nectar! O delicious stream!
O ravishing and only pleasure! Where
      Shall such another theme
Inspire my tongue with joys or please mine ear!
      Abridgement of delights!
      And Queen of sights!
O mine of rarities! O Kingdom wide!
O more! O cause of all! O glorious Bride!
      O God! O Bride of God! O King!
      O soul and crown of everything!

      To Danae’s pleasing fruitful womb.
      His Ganymede! His life! His joy!
Or He comes down to me, or takes me up
      That I might be His boy,
And fill, and taste, and give, and drink the cup.
      But those (tho’ great) are all
      Too short and small,
Too weak and feeble pictures to express
The true mysterious depths of Blessedness.
      I am His image, and His friend,
      His son, bride, glory, temple, end.

— from Poetry for the Spirit: Poems of Universal Wisdom and Beauty, Edited by Alan Jacobs

/ Photo by alicepopkorn /

This poem by Traherne is almost breathless in its ecstatic exclamations. Though highly structured in meter and rhyme, he just barely seems to be able to get the words onto the page.

The first verse is an overwhelm of bliss and images: nectar, a stream, a kingdom, a king, a bride, a crown.

Why does Traherne start his poem with descriptions of “nectar,” a “delicious steam” that more than anything else can “inspire my tongue with joys”? The ecstatic state is often interpreted by the sense-mind as a beautiful, rich sweetness on the upper palette and at the back of the throat, accompanied by a warmth in the belly. Because there is also a humming in the inner ear and often a visual awareness of a glowing gold or white color (”golden rain”), this experience is often compared to honey or a heavenly ambrosia. The experience is also accompanied by a blissful giddiness and, sometimes, a trembling or other body movements that can mimic drunkenness, so mystics also refer to this subtle liquid as wine: “And fill, and taste, and give, and drink the cup.”

In Christian symbolic language, the King, of course, is Christ, or more generically the personal aspect of God. The Bride is the purified individual soul that joins with the Divine and discovers ecstasy in holy union.

In the second verse, Traherne lists what he had been seeking all his life, what he imagined God to be: endless power, love, glory, beauty… the source of everything. But the next verse moves out of the conceptual to a revelation of what he has actually experienced. And he is flabbergasted to discover that as rich as his mental concepts of the Divine had been, the direct experience is greater still. “Did my ambition ever dream / Of such a Lord, of such love!” Love, true divine love that rejects nothing and embraces everything is just a philosophical idea until it is actually felt — and then you realize the idea hardly hinted at the reality. This is accompanied by a sense of wholeness and bliss that descends upon the awareness, “Joys down from Heaven on my head do shower.”

The final verse is the most personal. Traherne sees himself as Danae impregnated by the divine golden shower, as Ganymede the beloved cupbearer of heaven. God has descended to him, or has lifted him up; he can’t tell, he doesn’t care. The divine living source of everything has, in the most intimate way, touched and claimed him.

But even these descriptions “tho’ great” can’t do justice to the reality. There are no satisfactory words for “The true mysterious depths of Blessedness.” The best he can do to put this relationship into words is to suggest that he now recognizes himself as a reflection of the Divine, an intimate, a vessel, a completed work: “I am His image, and His friend, / His son, bride, glory, temple, end.”

Thomas Traherne was an Anglican clergyman, mystic, philosopher, and poet.

He was born in 1636 or 1637 in Hereford, England. His father was a shoemaker, but he and his brother received an excellent education, due probably to the help of a wealthy relative who was a tavern-owner and the local mayor.

Thomas twice attended Oxford, apparently an eager and inquisitive student. Some of his writings show a familiarity with Platonic and Hermetic mystical thought, which he probably first discovered during his Oxford years.

Thomas Traherne became rector of a church in the small town of Credenhill, not far from Hereford. During his time at Credenhill, the young clergyman went through a powerful mystical experience. As a student at Oxford, he had become something of an agnostic, but he now found himself transformed and sought to express his new “Felicity” through writing.

Traherene later became the private chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, who was to remain his benefactor for the rest of their lives, enabling him to continue in his spiritual search and his writings.

Religious conflict and controversy wracked England during this time. The Anglican Church, the Roman Catholic Church, and the rising Puritan movement all struggled against each other, leading to civil war and rippling out into all aspects of politics and social life before settling into the opulent and somewhat decadent Restoration of King Charles II.

Yet, through all this period, there were also quiet movements of esoteric study and spiritual reawakening, which included Thomas Traherne.

Traherne wrote his Centuries of Meditations, a collection of brief philosophical inspirations, as part of a correpsondence with Susanna Hopton. Her home also became a gathering place of students of the deep spirituality that Traherne was expressing.

Although Thomas Traherne’s philosophical writings had a minor impact on the mystical circles of his day, the majority of his poetry was not published until more than 200 years after his death — precipitating a rediscovery and deeper appreciation of his exhuberant mysticism. In 1896, two of his manuscripts of poetry were accidentally discovered in a tiny used book store in London. They were published as the Poetical Works in 1903. In 1910, another manuscript of his poetry was discovered in the British Museum, published as his Poems of Felicity. Even as recently as 1967, another manuscript of poems was salvaged from a fire at a garbage dump, and published in 1989 as Commentaries of Heaven: The Poems.

“But it is an happy loss to lose oneself in admiration at one’s own Felicity: and to find GOD in exchange for oneself.” — Centuries

More poetry by Thomas Traherne

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