| Chapter 1: | Thomas Traherne, Hobbism, and the Seventeenth-Century Sciences: “Handmaids” to Felicity |
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the only poet who was exhilarated by the discoveries of the new science. He shares a regard for science with the school of Donne, or the “metaphysical” poets, who gave form to their intense religious and secular experiences in highly wrought poems that unite sensuousness, intellectuality, and passion, as encapsulated by Donne’s image of a “naked thinking heart” (“The Blossom” l. 27). But while Traherne’s internalization of the new space is more pronounced than that of any other metaphysical poet’s writing, his language is simpler on the whole, exhibiting the “primitive purity” (Spratt 27) advocated by Thomas Spratt in his History of the Royal Society(1667) as “a close, naked, natural way of speaking…bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can” (27)—which, as Secretary of the Royal Society, Spratt regarded as essential for the practical transmission of scientific knowledge.
Also of note is Traherne’s appropriation of scientific language in order to “recast science” (Sawday 261). A recurring example is his employment of the term centre, which derives from the science of gravity. A striking, pre-Newtonian gravitational simile that occurs near the beginning of the Centuries13 gives special borrowed resonance to this word. Traherne promises his reader, alleged to be Susanna Hopton,14 that the blank book she bestowed upon him will be filled
This “Secret Influence,” paralleling the gravitational force, is enlarged upon in the rest of the meditation: