The poet of sudden cloudbreak: a commentary on Thomas Traherne.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

--Einstein

THE POEMS of Thomas Traherne (1637-74), Anglican parson, mystic and enthusiast, present unlikely substance in our era of the God Delusion. In the more extravagant of his expositions on what it is to be blessed, the poet's inventory of joys, graces and virtues can be rather too ecstatic to quite persuade. Early evangelising pressures on my life made me wary of revelatory exclamation.

But equally I resist fundamentalist atheism's current impatience to finish with God's presence in The Creation altogether, because this is the triumph of debunking over intimation. I favour discourse where reason and intimation interact on the religious substance, as they do most closely in Traherne's finer work.

In this, uninhibited by doubt, cynicism or any sense of personal unworthiness, he illumines a compelling metaphysic for the dimension of spirit within The Creation, and the paradoxical privileges of existence entailed by that.

 
   The common Air and Light 
   That shines, doth me a Pleasure 
   And surely is my Treasure: 
   Of it I am th' inclusive Sphere 
   It doth in me entire appear 
   As well as I in it; it gives me Room, 
   Yet lies within my Womb. 
   ("Misapprehension") 

In the one hundred or so poems that come to us from Traheme's hand we encounter the visionary temperament where reason, imagination and morale have that self-possession of the intently focused. Like Blake, Traherne could formulate the disarming question.