"Our blessedness to see
Is even to the Deity
A Beatific vision! He attains
His ends while we enjoy. In us He reigns."
And again
"In them [i.e., human souls] He sees,
And feels, and smells, and lives;
To them He all conveys;
Nay even Himself: He is the End
To whom in them Himself and all things tend."
The soul whose value is thus final is for Traherne the one great reality; and the mystery of its existence limited to a small body, yet in thought—and what is more real than thought?—embracing the universe, is one on which he dwells in rapt strains. All of Traherne's poetry is the record of these experiences and reasonings. He was an orthodox Anglican, but we hear comparatively little in his poetry of sin and of the death of Christ. Sorrow and the macerating sense of sin are swallowed up in the ecstasy of a soul made one with God by mutual need and love, and tasting already the joys of Paradise.
"Did my Ambition ever dream
Of such a Lord, of such a Love! Did I
Expect so sweet a stream
As this at any time? Could any eye
Believe it? Why all Power
Is used here,
Joys down from Heaven on my head do shower,
And Jove beyond the fiction doth appear
Once more in golden rain to come
To Danaë's pleasing fruitful womb
His Ganymede! His Life! His Joy!
Or He comes down to me, or takes me up
That I might be his boy,
And fill, and taste, and give and drink the cup;
But those tho' great are all
Too short and small,
Too weak and feeble pictures to express
The true mysterious depths of Blessedness.
I am His Image and His friend.
His Son, Bride, Glory, Temple, End."
