Abstract
Vision plays a central role in Thomas Traherne’s theology. The pervasive motif of the ‘Infant Ey’ expresses his belief that the spiritual status of the individual depends upon their ability to look correctly at the world so as to perceive God in all his works; a process that enables the viewer to achieve an experience of heaven on earth. This chapter examines the ways in which Traherne’s theological ideas about sight are put into practice in the visual presentation of his poetry. Traherne uses the disrupted, multidirectional structure of his texts to assert the inadequacy of the rational mind and of conventional language to express mystical experience. This motif forms an important part of his formal poetic strategy to oblige the reader to view his texts through the ‘Infant Ey’. Partner offers a fresh interpretation of the sources and precedents for his innovative typography, examining in particular how his use of brackets derives from existing practices in the graphic organisation of knowledge. Partner considers how a more fully contextualised reading of Traherne’s style can lead to a fuller understanding of how he seeks to change the way that his reader looks at the world by changing the way that we read.
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Notes
- 1.
Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions (1582), sig. F8r.
- 2.
Clark, Vanities of the Eye; Johns, Nature of the Book.
- 3.
Marvell, ‘Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body’, in Poems, I.5.
- 4.
On the broader history of the concept of objectivity, see Daston and Galison, Objectivity.
- 5.
Hooke, Micrographia (1665).
- 6.
Glanvill, Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661), Preface, sig. B2r.
- 7.
Ibid., pp. 5–6.
- 8.
Hooke, Micrographia, sig. A2r.
- 9.
See Ridlon, ‘Function of the “Infant-Ey”’.
- 10.
For the pervasive interest in self-knowledge and its elusiveness in the period, see Chap. 9, later, by Elizabeth L. Swann.
- 11.
This practice was theorised by Hall, Arte of Diuine Meditation (1606); see also Huntley, Bishop Joseph Hall.
- 12.
For example, see Eliot, ‘Review’.
- 13.
For example, see Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, pp. 352–87.
- 14.
This is according to the seventeenth-century sense of ‘objectively’ as the apprehension of objects as they are presented to the mind (OED 3a).
- 15.
Traherne, Seeds of Eternity, in Works, vol. I, p. 234.
- 16.
Sawday, Body Emblazoned, pp. 261–63; Stewart, Expanded Voice, p. 164.
- 17.
Gary Kuchar observes, responding to Sawday, that Traherne’s lists are unlike those of Bacon, because ‘the expansive, supplementing movement of a catalogue is an index of the very subjectivity that Traherne is at pains to articulate, a subjectivity whose desire for God is as inexhaustible as God himself’: Kuchar, ‘Traherne’s spectres’, p. 80.
- 18.
Selkin, ‘Language of vision’, pp. 92–104; Sawday, Body Emblazoned, pp. 261–62.
- 19.
Ong, Ramus, p. 303. On the pre-existing circulation of such techniques and the tendency for the individual influence of Ramus to be overstated, see Maclean, ‘Logical division’.
- 20.
Reid and Wilson, Ramus, Pedagogy.
- 21.
Dryness, Reformed Theology, pp. 123–41.
- 22.
Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 383.
- 23.
For a consideration of the important additional poetic example of Lancelot Andrewes’ Private Devotions, and for a more extensive treatment of Traherne and vision, see Jane Partner, Poetry and Vision in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), Chap. 2.
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Partner, J. (2018). Seeing and Believing: Thomas Traherne’s Poetic Language and the Reading Eye. In: Mukherji, S., Stuart-Buttle, T. (eds) Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England. Crossroads of Knowledge in Early Modern Literature, vol 1. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71359-5_4
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