Glorious Principles of Thomas Traherne

The day is young that is waking at the first with thoughts as they occur from out of dreams and into the vision of shapes again, familiar with the light. Many another has learned through time to give thanks at waking for the light itself and every existing being and thing that breathing permits them to enjoy, further. Such understanding comes voluntarily to the awakened one, never mind their level of lucidity or vagueness, cheeriness or grumpiness, refreshment or hangover. Waking at first is for many another the hour of least affected thought. The time before breakfast is when thought alone is sorting itself out, observing its mood, sitting quietly with an assembly of early morning ideas, making out some liveable form from which to proceed. It is the hour prior to conversation with the world, the trial and error of social media, the holdfast position in preparation for daily news updates, the hour before opening a book. This book by Thomas Traherne, for example. “He thought it a Vain Thing to see Glorious Principles lie Buried in Books, unless he did remove them into his Understanding; and a vain thing to remov them unless he did revive them, and rais them up by continual exercise.” This is paragraph 2 of Book IV of ‘Centuries of Meditations’. The editor has kept the seventeenth century spelling and capitalisation, which give the sentences all manner of pitches and tones and emphases, as if playing an organ. The author is not saying books are vain, but vain if they are not being used for the purpose intended. For him understanding grows, the conversation goes on regardless, in a day where books will lend to the conversation. He removes the contents of the book, by which he means transfers the thoughts to his own mind, the place where they may live again. The sentences of his book are the beginning of the day of their thought, general statements and fundamental truths and primary assumptions that he calls principles, which is why he finishes this paragraph with these words. “Let this therfore be the first Principle of your soul. That to have no Principles, or to liv beside them, is equaly Miserable. And that Philosophers are not those that Speak, but Do great Things.” Thomas Traherne, in his own book, would have us become alive to our own thoughts and more awake to our own principles. Actively to consider thoughts and consciously to think them through with others will fill the day with gladness and felicity. Not to do so will make for personal misery. A great thing spoken, or found in a book, is but one thing. Thought enlivens the day once it is raised up by continual exercise, he is saying from sometime in the seventeenth century, and for this author that is the purpose of a book. Our principles are resurrected, if in a book, and removed to where they can live.

 This is the twenty-first in a series of essays about the book in poetry, written by Philip Harvey and first published on this site.