Below is the late Richard Wilbur’s metaphorical exploration of one sentence of Thomas Traherne’s: “”Life without objects is a sensible emptiness, and that is a greater misery than death or nothing.” (Second Century, Meditation 65) The little we know of Traherne’s life reveals a man of fascinating contradictions: a kind and self-effacing mystical poet full of childlike wonder at creation, whose only work published in his lifetime was a prose polemic rife with conspiracy theories and dripping with white-hot rage at everything and everyone Catholic. Largely unknown to or ignored by scholars until the twentieth century, much of Traherne’s work remains unpublished. In this poem, Richard Wilbur captures the felicitous spirit of Traherne’s verse, described by one critic as “bafflingly simple.”
A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness
The tall camels of the spirit
Steer for their deserts, passing the last groves loud
With the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the whole honey of the arid
Sun. They are slow, proud,
And move with a stilted stride
To the land of sheer horizon, hunting Traherne’s
Sensible emptiness, there where the brain’s lantern-slide
Revels in vast returns.
O connoisseurs of thirst,
Beasts of my soul who long to learn to drink
Of pure mirage, those prosperous islands are accurst
That shimmer on the brink
Of absence; auras, lustres,
And all shinings need to be shaped and borne.
Think of those painted saints, capped by the early masters
With bright, jauntily-worn
Aureate plates, or even
Merry-go-round rings. Turn, O turn
From the fine sleights of the sand, from the long empty oven
Where flames in flamings burn
Back to the trees arrayed
In bursts of glare, to the halo-dialing run
Of the country creeks, and the hills’ bracken tiaras made
Gold in the sunken sun,
Wisely watch for the sight
Of the supernova burgeoning over the barn,
Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the spirit’s right
Oasis, light incarnate.
-Richard Wilbur
Image: Memorial window to Thomas Traherne, Hereford Cathedral