Poem Appreciation #4 - News - Thomas Traherne
 

News
by Thomas Traherne. 1637?–1674

NEWS from a foreign country came
As if my treasure and my wealth lay there;
...So much it did my heart inflame,
'Twas wont to call my Soul into mine ear;
......Which thither went to meet
.........The approaching sweet,
......And on the threshold stood
...To entertain the unknown Good.
.........It hover'd there
......As if 'twould leave mine ear,
... And was so eager to embrace
...... The joyful tidings as they came,
... 'Twould almost leave its dwelling-place
.........To entertain that same.

...As if the tidings were the things,
My very joys themselves, my foreign treasure—
... Or else did bear them on their wings—
With so much joy they came, with so much pleasure.
......My Soul stood at that gate
.........To recreate
...... Itself with bliss, and to
...Be pleased with speed. A fuller view
......... It fain would take,
......Yet journeys back would make
... Unto my heart; as if 'twould fain
...Go out to meet, yet stay within
... To fit a place to entertain
......And bring the tidings in.

... What sacred instinct did inspire
My soul in childhood with a hope so strong?
...What secret force moved my desire
To expect my joys beyond the seas, so young?
...... Felicity I knew
......... Was out of view,
......And being here alone,
... I saw that happiness was gone
.........From me! For this
...... I thirsted absent bliss,
... And thought that sure beyond the seas,
......Or else in something near at hand—
... I knew not yet—since naught did please
...... I knew—my Bliss did stand.

...But little did the infant dream
That all the treasures of the world were by:
...And that himself was so the cream
And crown of all which round about did lie.
......Yet thus it was: the Gem,
.........The Diadem,
......The ring enclosing all
...That stood upon this earthly ball,
.........The Heavenly eye,
......Much wider than the sky,
...Wherein they all included were,
...The glorious Soul, that was the King
...Made to possess them, did appear
......A small and little thing!


Comments:

The poem News is taken from Centuries of Meditations by Thomas Traherne, one of the Metaphysical poets. The Centuries is an extended prose work in the manner of a sermon addressed to a friend whom he seeks to comfort and advise. The work is divided into sections of 100 numbered paragraph-sized meditations. Occasionally the clear and at times artfully rapturous prose is interrupted by a poem that illustrates Traherne’s thought.

The Centuries concerns the divine, one’s relationship with God, and the nature of creation. From paragraph 25 in Century 3, leading up to the poem News:

When I heard any news I receivd it with greediness and delight, because my expectation was awakened with some hope that my happiness and the thing I wanted was concealed in it. Gladtidings, you know, from a far country brings us our salvation: and I was not deceived. In Jury was Jesus killed, and from Jerusalem the Gospel came.

In News the poet remembers that as a youth he once heard of a report due to arrive from a wondrous land, and describes his young soul’s eager and joyous anticipation. It doesn’t appear that the news ever reaches the poet, who focuses on the soul’s excitability and waywardness.

The poem changes direction in S3, where the poet is filled with a deep and unsatisfied yearning. In short, after youthful disillusionment, “life is elsewhere,” which the poem sets out to refute. The second line of the opening stanza already stacks the desk: As if my treasure and my wealth lay there.

Traherne’s use of the ear in this poem somewhat parallels The Extasie. Whereas Donne portrays the eye as the portal through which the soul can escape and unite with the beloved—Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred/Our eyes, upon one double string… Our soules, (which to advance their state/Were gone out,) — Traherne in News similarly portrays the ear as a portal but one which holds the Soul in check.

Not that the Soul doesn’t try to fly off to meet the news half-way. From S1:

'Twas [the news] wont to call my Soul into mine ear;/Which thither went to meet/The approaching sweet,/And on the threshold stood/To entertain the unknown Good./It hover'd there/As if 'twould leave mine ear,/And was so eager to embrace/The joyful tidings as they came,/'Twould almost leave its dwelling-place/To entertain that same.
.
It is a young soul, ever anticipating news from elsewhere. In S2 the conceit develops into a conflicted and impatient Soul as messenger, as AWOL, and as host.

First, the soul desires to have a better view of the news and dutifully relay what it has seen to the poet’s heart. Then in its uncontrolled excitement to rush out and greet the news only to abandon the poet’s body, which happens at the time of death. While, finally, at the same time, to stay put and play the good host for the news’ arrival:

My Soul stood at that gate/To recreate/Itself with bliss, and to/Be pleased with speed. A fuller view/It fain would take,/Yet journeys back would make/Unto my heart; as if 'twould fain/Go out to meet, yet stay within/To fit a place to entertain/And bring the tidings in.

In S3 the poet queries youth’s awareness of what is not clearly understood but sensed through divine intuition:

What sacred instinct did inspire/My soul in childhood with a hope so strong?/What secret force moved my desire/To expect my joys beyond the seas, so young.

These lines immediately precede the poet’s declarations of emptiness and yearning. While good news can indeed come from afar, the young poet and his restless, immature soul look only there. He mourns for what he has lost, not knowing he has not lost it. Traherne then points to the young poet’s naivety.

But little did the infant dream /That all the treasures of the world were by/And that himself was so the cream /And crown of all which round about did lie.

The treasure once sensed as being elsewhere is now understood as residing within the self and was the source of his childhood’s original joy. Traherne’s voice and thought in this poem, and the prose in which it is ensconced, seem closer to a liberal, contemporary Christianity. Especially telling in News is the avoidance of the topic of sin, veering even into self-idolatry (that himself was so the cream/And crown).

To counter this temptation in News, Traherne ends by reaching back into the world to expand the narrator’s self-absorbed scope, whose soul, now something much bigger than the self but includes the self, is a feature of the circle of heaven. With the poet’s corrected perspective, the world is now contracted, great distances are collapsed, and bliss is ever present, ever here. The good news, or gospel, has arrived at last:

Yet thus it was: the Gem,/The Diadem,/The ring enclosing all/That stood upon this earthly ball,/The Heavenly eye,/Much wider than the sky,/Wherein they all included were,/The glorious Soul, that was the King/Made to possess them, did appear/A small and little thing!

The implied comparison of all creation and the Soul is to the One unnamed. “News” is inspired by Traherne’s decidedly non-reformed, even mystical Christianity and by a spiritually sensual temperament.

For the poem News: http://www.bartleby.com/101/406.html (Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900.)

For Centuries of Meditations: http://consciouslivingfoundation.org...asTraherne.pdf (London: private publication, 1908)

Comments by Distinguished Guest Amit Majmudar:

So nice to have my sense of the word NEWS refreshed and transfigured a little. With an election so close, "news" conjures lies and chatter, not capital-T Truth.

Traherne's musicality is very different from Merrill's (cf. the other poem posted today). This is poetry where the rhymes come very close together indeed, and are exact, and chime. Rhyme shapes and guides the lines; nothing seems catch-as-catch-can, nothing seems merely at the linebreak for a typographical coincidence of seeing a kindred word eight linebreaks up.

Traherne's embedding of verses inside a prose work is notable. Besides Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy and Dante's La Vita Nuova, the Persians did this a lot, Sa'adi most famously in his Bulistan (translated by none other than Richard Francis Burton). Also Kalidasa's Sanskrit plays (and Shakespeare's for that matter) mix prose and verse. We don't do this nearly enough. I've written a big Ramayana in that mixed form which will be released some time in the next couple years. I think the form would go far to create a more accessible and welcoming reading experience for verse-averse readers. And when there's prose to either side of your poem it pressures your poetry into a more vivid musicality.

This is a very great poem, expertly explicated. We have a long way to go, we contemporaries, before we can compete with Traherne. He obviously learned a lot from Donne and Herbert, as have I. A great thing about being a poet is that you become a perpetual student!

Amit, I can't agree more with you on the subject of prosimetra. It draws people into the verse.

This appreciation is more the kind of scale of analysis I was hoping for from this event. The analysis takes me into the poem, and shows me things I perhaps hadn't noticed (or perhaps once noticed, but have long since forgotten) about the poem.

I think Traherne is my favourite metaphysical (I'm not sure that Donne fully belongs to the school). Traherne uses such ordinary language to convey such remarkably strange ideas and images.

Here the hook for me is the extended metaphor (first two strophes) of the 'soul' as a householder standing at the 'gate' of the ear - waiting for the foreign news to arrive.

One is familiar with the trope of the eyes as the window of the soul;- that is almost a cliché. It shouldn't really be so difficult to move onto the ears as the gate.

But it is. The image in:

And on the threshold stood

where Traherne's soul stands on the sill of his ear, is really very odd (try to visualise it). Sometimes the tiniest tweaks of reality take us into the most entrancing dreamworlds, as the Surrealists knew. (Lots of Traherne sends me back to favourite works by Dali and Delvaux, though Traherne rarely makes me think of other poetry).

The Welsh poet Glyn Jones once told me that in ordinary language we naturally 'see' meanings, and 'look into' things: showing that common language is visually oriented (which is why a poem has 'imagery' presumably). A poem which applies to other senses (hearing, taste, touch) is quietly subverting the natural bias of language toward sight; a clever poet can use that as a stealth weapon.

I think Traherne does that here. His ear looks out at the news which is in the world. We have two shocks, because we don't primarily consider the ear as the prime perceiver of the world, and we rarely consider the ear as active. Hearing is normally passive (or seems so), but here the poem has an eager ear - waiting at the doorjamb for something new.

I wonder would a blind person respond to this poem the same way I do, being sighted. That kind of speculation alone would make this poem precious to me.

Which thither went to meet
The approaching sweet,

We have the sense of hearing going out in those lines (and some others); an ear which reaches out.

It's not a way of thinking I would have discovered for myself. Which is why I value Traherne so highly.

A wonderful - in the proper sense - poem which is full of cultural resonances (the use of "the gate" at the start for example is striking), many of which are helpfully picked up in the excellent commentary. Even though I prefer Donne and like my Traherene best when lit by Finzi's music, this was a revelation of the easeful and thoughtful effects of poetic rigour.

Many thanks for this,
Nigel

From somewhere, quite recently, I have absorbed the idea that at death the soul leaves the body via the ear. I think it was in a fiction by John Riley. At the time I thought it a most original thought, I wonder now if John (if it was John, I become more and more certain) was displalying his wide scope of knowledge, being aware that this belief was at one time "common knowledge". Perhaps it goes back to the Greeks?

I took the trouble to look for how the rhymes were set up in this poem and compare them to the Merrill rhymes. Traherne hasn't been strict. The initial scheme one thought was established in S1 was abandoned in the remaining stanzas unless some of the pronunciations have changed radically--many did, as we know by reading Shakespeare. But here the difference seems too great.

This isn't a poem or poet I would, left to my own devices, linger over long, so I'm glad to have been "compelled" to consider it and I hope to remedy my ignorance as more qualities come to light. I feel more able to engage with Donne, Herbert, Suckling but the fault doubtless lies with me.

I have my guesses about who contributed it (and who contirbuted the Fishsong entry) and will continue to be amazed at the broad and deep range of knowledge, in poetry and otherwise, exhibited by members of this esteemed congregation, the Eratosphere.

All the metaphysicals repay study. I'm grateful to know more about Traherne, who is sometimes skipped over in the 17th-century surveys. And I'd like to know a lot more about prosimetra, which I know only from the work of two contemporaries, way too small a sample.

But I'm having to push myself to read through this analysis. It's an accurate and complete close read as far as I can see. It holds us by the hand and marches us through the poem's ideas, devices, and turns. But I'm not finding it interesting writing in itself. A sense of the writer's delight--that's what I'd like to see more of.

Janice makes a very good point, btw. As one of only two people (Mr. Cantor is the other) who reviewed all of the submissions, I can assert: The Eratosphere online population is incredibly, almost mind-bogglingly, diverse in its tastes and aesthetic sensitivities. It has a reputation for a formal focus that is well-deserved; but the submissions exhibited a diversity that astonished me--and in a few cases expanded my receptivity.

Amit

Where do you find non-rhymes, Janice?

I will second Amit's comments about the diversity of the submissions - they spanned over six centuries, and every approach to the craft from strict rhyme and meter to (as we've seen) only symbols. And, within that broad scope, this entry was one of those that struck me as being both above my pay grade and out of my normal span. I'm good with words and numbers - but not a scholar - I came to poetry very late in life, and I'm afraid that heavy infusions of metaphysics not only confuse and disinterest me, but they sometimes scare me. Poetically, I'm focused far more on my own writing than anybody else's, I tend to read other poets essentially in terms of what I can learn from then, and I live in the now (or at least the twentieth century and beyond) with an emphasis on craft.

Considering that, I'm impressed at how many others are drawn to the poem. I think it's a scholarly (as opposed to writerly) interest, but it makes me realize what a small part of our world I inhabit.

I agree with Maryann regarding the essay - it seems more dutiful (an assignment) than celebration of the poet. But Amit's comments, and Tim's, have encouraged me to take another look at prosimetrum. I've been playing with it sporadically for the past year or so, trying to develop a vehicle for a series of family-history-related poems and anecdotes/vignettes, and always felt uncomfortable - it seemed contrived - but maybe it's time for a deep breath and another look.

Marcia (post 9)

I didn't say anything about "non-rhymes". I said that the rhyme scheme established in S1 was abandoned. Unless dream cream is pronounced to rhyme with king thing, in which case asymmetry is achieved. S1 and S4 would then envelop symmetrical S2 and S3.

Someone better versed in the metaphysical poets than I may correct me, but I believe that the idea of harmony and symmetry was central to the architectonics of metaphysical poetry (as it was in philosophy/ theology and architecture). George Herbert's Easter Wings for instance is a conspicuous example of the symmetry of parts.

S1 a b a b c c d d b b e a e a 14
S2 a b a b c c d d e e f e f e 14
S3 a b a b c c d d e e f g f g 14
S4 a b a b c c d d e e f g f g 14

S1 a: came inflame came same
s1 b: there ear there ear
S1 c: meet sweet
S1 d: stood good
S1 e: embrace place

S2 a: things wings
s2 b: treasure pleasure
S2 c: gate recreate
S2 d: to view
S2 e: take make
S2 f: fain entertain
S2 g: within in

S3 a: inspire desire
s3 b: strong young
S3 c: knew view
S3 d: alone gone
S3e: this bliss
S3 f: seas please
S3 g: hand stand

S4 a: dream cream
s4 b: by lie
S4 c: gem diadem
S4 d: all ball
S4 e: eye sky
S4 f: were appear
S4 g: king thing

I hope this is helpful.

I see the stanzas as having a quatrain of alternating rhymes, 3 rhyming couplets, and another quatrain like the first. So, for me nothing is abandoned.

But, you've looked at it differently, so now I understand what you mean. Helpful? Yes, thank you.

Marcia

Yes, that would provide a symmetrical structure and perhaps is a better way to regard the poet's intentions. Possibly this was a standard pattern of the day (quatrain, three couplets, quatrain), one with which other poets were familiar so the symmetry was taken for granted. I haven't looked to see if it is a structure often used, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that it is.

For a modern reader like myself (and I may be the only one), the self-rhyme "came" creates confusion as it establishes a connection to the rhymes of the initial quatrain.

On prosimetra...

The Japanese haibun, traditionally based on a journey, intersperses prose with haiku.

I agree with Maryann that, as I would say it, this review could use a little bit of vermouth to smooth the reading.

These lines jump out from the point of view of craft.

What sacred instinct did inspire
My soul in childhood with a hope so strong?
What secret force moved my desire
To expect my joys beyond the seas, so young?

I have a problem with the last line of this stanza. It is something that would be brought up if posted by a writer to Eratosphere. It’s the kind of mistake or, at the very least, breach of best usage that a lot of us has committed in working and re-working our translations on the translation board here. It is almost a rookie mistake.

To expect my joys beyond the seas, so young? Were it not for the comma one might read that the “seas” are “so young.” If you hear this line and not see it on the page, what assumption would you make?

As I read this, Traherne wants to rhyme with “strong” but to do that he sacrifices syntactical integrity as if English were inflected the way ancient Greek and Latin are. The intervening phrase “beyond the seas” too far separates the noun “joys” from its modifier “young.” I think it’s a misuse of language that resorts to mere punctuation. Or is this a convention that I’m picking up on? I wonder if Donne had “done” this.

So, if, uh hem, Traherne were to submit this poem for critique on Eratosphere, what might we suggest to improve this line?

How about: To expect beyond the seas my joys so young?

Now one might say that with “expect” modified by the adverb “beyond” means “when I’m beyond the seas (that is, very far away) I expect my so youthful joys.” If so, I believe it less a violation than when we are expected to make a semantic leap to ensure that “seas” doesn’t go with “young,” especially if I’m hearing it. I believe with the rewrite the reader would make the leap that it means “to expect [that] beyond the seas [are] my joys so young.”

Don

Wonderful poem -- many thanks to the presenter. Since this is a new event, may I make bold to suggest, Amit and Michael, that you might slow the pace of introducing new threads? If anyone feels the same, that is. Thanks, Bill

Traherne must have conceived of this poem while listening to music: that is the most common experience of the soul visiting the ear, where in fact it "entertains" (and is entertained by) “the unknown Good.” And an ecstatic experience of music really is like what it says in the first line of stanza 2: “As if the tidings were the things” themselves. (And maybe they are.) The poem’s subject is the internalization of this musical experience—to “stay within / . . . / And bring the tidings in.”

The penultimate stanza reflects on what in the speaker himself has an affinity with the experience that seems to come from outside. Traherne, well before Wordsworth, often reflected on “intimations of immortality recollected in childhood.” In infancy, he says, had a preternatural experience of preexistence—which then he lost hold of, as he says in stanza 3: “I thirsted absent bliss,” and searched for ways to recover it.

The infant self in the last stanza is reflected upon as a microcosm of creation—a local habitation of the “Heavenly eye” (so reminiscent of Emerson’s “transparent eyeball”). This is of course an allusion to the theological/biblical idea of the soul being “made in God’s image”; which itself is a variation on the cross-cultural, interdenominational, mystical idea that the self in its essence is one with the universal Self. This is why the ecstatic awareness that opens the poem at the portal of the ear, where the soul goes to meet it, turns out to be the soul itself: there is an identity of seer and seen, or rather, in the case of this poem, of hearer and heard.

For these reasons and more, I can’t agree with Michael that appreciation of this poem is “scholarly” as opposed to “writerly.” For me, its interest is human, in the sense that it is a meditation on what it means, essentially, to be human. Traherne generously offers the reader a way to share in his intimation—the poem is intimate like the soul in the ear.

Andrew (et al) you might find this interesting.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.230...21101190606813

Oh wow. The Centuries is one of my favorite books. Let us swear eternal friendship.