Centuries of Meditations

The world as treasure, and the Cross at its centre. There are, Traherne says at once, two worlds, one made by God and one made by men, and most of the First Century sets their riches side by side. Men’s treasures are “scarce and rare, insufficient, hard to be gotten” (I.33). God’s are free and common, and the refrain of I.25-39 measures true enjoyment by them, “till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens” (I.29). Then comes something unexpected. From I.54 the survey is centred on the Cross, “like the Centre of Eternity”, and a reader may well ask why a book about enjoying the world puts an instrument of execution at its heart. Ask too what the long prayers before the Cross, from I.62, add to the argument.

Childhood vision. Early in the First Century the author recalls, in a single sentence, how the dust of the streets once looked to his infant eyes (I.25). The Third Century returns to that memory and makes it the matter of an autobiography, opening on the infant’s first sight of the world in some of the most famous sentences in English prose. “The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped” (III.3), the old people were “Immortal Cherubims”, and the child was “the only spectator and enjoyer of it”. The rest of that story is Traherne’s to tell.

The Psalms and the poems. Scripture runs through every page, sometimes in italics and more often unmarked, and the rhythm of the prose owes much to the Authorised Version. The Third Century holds most of the poems, and later in that Century a long run of meditations works through the Psalms one after another, a commentary in all but name. Notice how the voice changes when prose becomes verse, whether the poems say what the prose cannot, and how the Psalms become more than quotation, a second voice in the book that Traherne listens to and answers.