THOMAS

See also:

• THOMAS TRAHERNE (1637?-1674)

TRAHERNE (1637?-1674)  , English writer, was, according to Anthony a Wood, a " shoemaker's son of Hereford." He entered Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1652, and after receiving his degree in 1656 took holy orders . In the following year he was appointed rector of Credenhill, near Hereford, and in 1661 received his M.A. degree . He found a good patron in Sir Orlando Bridgeman, lord keeper of the seals from 1667 to 1672 . Traherne became his domestic chaplain and also " minister " of Teddington . He died at Bridgeman's house at Teddington on or about the 27th of September 1674 . He led, we are told, a simple and devout life, and was well read in primitive antiquity and the fathers . His prose works are Roman Forgeries (1673), Christian Ethics (1675), and A Serious and Patheticall Contemplation of of God (1699) . His poems have a curious history.discovery included, beside the poems, four complete "'Centuries of Meditation," short paragraphs embodying reflexions on religion and morals . Some of these, evidently autobiographical in character, describe a childhood from which the " glory and the dream " was slow to depart . Of the power of nature to inform the mind with beauty, and the ecstatic harmony of a child with the natural world, the earlier poems, which contain his best work,. are full . In their manner, as in their matter, they remind the reader of Blake and Words-worth . Traherne has at his best an excellence all his own, but there can be no reasonable doubt that he was familiar both with the poems of Herbert and of Vaughan .

The poems on childhood may well have been inspired by Vaughan's lines entitled The

Retreat . His poetry is essentially metaphysical and his workmanship is uneven, but the collection contains passages of great beauty . See Bertram Dobell's editions of the Poetical Works (1906) and Centuries of Meditation (1908) .