Poem of the Week 2024/18

Bliss

                        I

                All bliss

            Consists in this,

    To do as Adam did:

And not to know those superficial toys

    Which in the garden once were hid,

    Those little new invented things.

    Cups, saddles, crowns are childish joys.

        So ribbons are and rings.

        Which all our happiness destroys.

                        II

                Nor God

            In His abode

        Nor saints nor little boys

Nor angels made them, only foolish men,

    Grown mad with custom, on those toys

    Which more increase their wants, do dote.

    And when they older are do then

        Those baubles chiefly note

    With greedier eyes, more boys tho men.

– Thomas Traherne

Though most of his work was hidden in manuscripts until the early twentieth century, the Church of England priest Thomas Traherne was part of the great seventeenth-century flowering of spiritual poetry in English.

Bliss is a heady subject: not contentment, or even happiness, which seem like possible earthly states, but bliss, a state associated with the ecstasy of personal communion with God, which on earth seems available only in the occasional saintly trance. Starting with the title, this poem tells us to turn away from worldly things & look to the heavenly. It's a radical subject to take. & the poet's treatment of it is radical: in tight & elegantly balanced lines, he advocates a rejection of most of what we consider civilization & a return to the prelapsarian ways of Adam, in a garden without the "superficial toys" that occupy most humans. In fact this seems to be a garden without Eve; this is a conspicuously male-centered view of life, mentioning men & boys only. It is possible that the "ribbons and rings" listed as childish joys are meant to refer to feminine ornaments, but it's equally plausible that they refer to male insignias: ribbons in the sense of a military/political decoration or something attached to a medal, rings as signs of office or authority (or ribbons & rings as worn by the more ornately dressed men of the time). The other "childish toys" – cups, saddles, crowns – seem masculine as well: the cups referring to drinking parties, saddles to hunting, & crowns neatly encompassing both the British coin & the ultimate political authority, the monarch. (Women of course drank, if not in parties, & some hunted, & there were queens as well as kings, but these things were seen as predominantly male-centered & male-dominated.) Romantic or sexual love does not even make an appearance in the list of worldly vanities.

So what did Adam do, besides not know "superficial toys"? The state described is before he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good & evil, so he didn't know that. What did he know? It doesn't seem to be a matter of consciously knowing; the poet says bliss is to do as Adam did, not think or feel as he thought or felt. Adam experienced God the Creator, & Nature his creation, in a very direct & personal way. How is it possible for us, the fallen children of Adam, to regain this state? By taking the recommendation of the more austere saints (Buddhist as well as Christian), & renouncing the world: not the natural world of God's creation, but The World in the sense of striving & struggling human society. What we think of as long-lasting traditions are dismissed as little new invented things: not only novelties, but small ones as well. Contrast that with the eternity of God; Traherne notes that God in His abode (Heaven, of course, but isn't He also present in His creation?) did not invent these ways, nor did angels, nor saints, nor "little boys", but "foolish men". The contrast between boys & men is interesting; the poet specifies little boys, so he seems to be embracing, long before Rousseau or the Romantic movement, the idea that children are born pure & corrupted by society (so much for Original Sin!).

The edifice of human society, the weight of tradition & "how things are done", is here summarized as foolish men, gone mad with custom, for things that are, after all, recent & ephemeral. The poet advocates a radical rethinking of our relationship to society, to Nature, & therefore to God. He notes that ambition can never be satisfied: those toys the more increase their wants; superficial toys, childish joys, baubles: no value is given to earthly attainments; they are destroyers of happiness. The foolish men prove their folly & their madness by eyeing them greedily, never satisfied with what they have, never thinking they could approach existence in a different way. The close proximity of dote & older suggests that what used to be called the second childhood of senility is endemic among the ambitious. The pinnacle achievements of manhood are here equated with the rawness of boys; these accomplished adults are, psychically, more like boys, despite their official manhood. Here boy suggests not innocence but immaturity. Is it simply the exigency of rhyme that leads to the poem's ambiguous play between the innocence of little boys, who would never come up with the foolish things of the world, & the immaturity suggested in dismissively terming authoritative, accomplished men boys? Even as the poet suggests childhood is a time of innocence, the weight of Biblical teaching tells him that all human states, even childhood, are prone to corruption. This would not be the first time rhymes led a poet into a fruitful, suggestive tension.

I took this poem from Selected Poems & Prose by Thomas Traherne, edited by Alan Bradford for Penguin Classics.