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.
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