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.
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