Thomas Traherne is a Treasure

A lesser-read metaphysical poet & theologian

Dear bookish friend,

I’ve been very slowly reading some of the poetry and meditations of the seventeenth-century Anglican cleric and poet, Thomas Traherne. If you like William Blake or Gerard Manley Hopkins, you’re going to like Traherne. He possesses that same attention, that sense of numinous wonder. He is also an eccentric speller and capitalizer, which adds to the fun, in my opinion.

Thomas Traherne was likely the son of a shoemaker at Hereford, though that is speculation because we don’t possess his baptismal record. He went to Brasenose College at Oxford, and became rector of Credenhill. After about a decade serving there, he became private chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal for King Charles II, until that lord’s death. Traherne died shortly after, before the age of 40, and only one of his books was published in his lifetime. His poetry and meditations were discovered at the tail-end of the nineteenth-century by sheer luck, as manuscripts about to be trashed in a bookseller’s stall, and initially mistaken for lost works of his fellow metaphysical poet, Henry Vaughan.

The Traherne Windows in Hereford Cathedral, inspired by Traherne’s poetry, by Thomas Denny in 2007.