This week's poem, "Shadows in the Water," is by one of the lesser-known metaphysicals, Thomas Traherne. Belonging to the distinguished company of poets who publish none of their verse, Traherne's might have been forgotten altogether but for the accidental discovery, in the late 19th century, of a collection on sale for a few pence at a London bookstall. Luckily, the poems' buyer was the clergyman and literary scholar Alexander Grosart: less luckily, he attributed their authorship to Henry Vaughan. You can read about the poems' further adventures here.
An Anglican minister and theologian with an interest in science, Traherne saw no conflict between his faith and the possibility of life elsewhere in the cosmos. "What if beyond the heavens there were infinite numbers of worlds at vast unspeakable distances? and all those worlds full of glorious kingdoms?" he wrote in The Kingdom of God. "Would this abolish Heaven? Verily, in my Conceit, it enriches it." Such a generous theology informs "Shadows in the Water".
In the first stanza, Traherne writes an apologia for the "sweet mistake" on which the poem elaborates: a mistake which, of course, is a conceit, deliberately plotted. No child old enough to play in puddles would believe the reflections to be real people, or certainly not for long. The tone is didactic but gentle. Traherne clearly has the patience, tact and imagination of a natural educator. He delights in shaping and extending the fantasy, and furthering the paradox by placing his shadow-world in a "chink" of water, a mere puddle "which a dry ox or horse might drink." This world is twice described as spacious; other positive attributes are brightness and the freedom of movement possible there.
The analogy might therefore be with eternal life: people are drowned and restored, "and with another heaven crowned." But the poem is more complicated than that. Traherne takes the argument for "other worlds" upward and onward, suggesting that our own existence might reflect another. The "great tracts of land" he imagines "compassed about with heavens fair" are not necessarily those of Eden.
The poem's symmetry demonstrates its concept. Each eight-line stanza has two foreshortened trimeter lines, after which the basic tetrameter rhythm is restored. Lines 1-4 and 7-8 might therefore symbolise image and shadow, separated by the "film" which the speaker perceives between himself and the shadow world. Of course, the use of variant meters in a single stanza is common among the Elizabethan and metaphysical poets, but here the pattern seems to be additionally suggestive.
The elevation of childhood innocence, challenging the theory of original sin, is also found in Henry Vaughan's poetry: "Happy those early days! when I/ Shined in my angel infancy" ("The Retreat"). It was an idea that greatly attracted the Romantics. Traherne is unlikely to have influenced Wordsworth, but it seems quite possible that the magical puddle in "Shadows in the Water" was on Elizabeth Bishop's mind when she wrote about the underwater transformation of the Riverman: "I waded into the river/ and suddenly a door/ in the water opened inward …"
Traherne avoids excessive nostalgia for his infant innocence. The child's perception is valuable, he suggests, but not unattainable by those outside that state of grace. The clarity is available to sophisticated intelligence – as the poem itself demonstrates. This view, too, would have commended itself to Bishop.
"Shadows in the Water" might almost be surrealism avant la lettre. The upside-down world is presented plausibly. Those frequent repetitions of "another" and "other":- "another world", "another heaven", "another face", "other worlds", etc., may be meant to encourage readers to let their own imaginations take flight. Just as an "art divine" has given the world its wonderful plurality, so the double-vision of the poem includes us, its readers, among the poet-creator's shadows.
Lacking the brilliant, worldly wit of John Donne, Traherne has his own metaphysical style, philosophically playful if less rich in word-play. In "Shadows in the Water" he is not inviting us to discard logic, I think, but to bring imagination into the logical method. Though not a Christmas poem, it breathes a holiday-like atmosphere, rearranging predictable patterns and recommending a suspension of disbelief in unlikely possibilities.
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Shadows in the Water
In unexperienced infancy
Many a sweet mistake doth lie:
Mistake though false, intending true;
A seeming somewhat more than view;
That doth instruct the mind
In things that lie behind,
And many secrets to us show
Which afterwards we come to know.
Thus did I by the water's brink
Another world beneath me think;
And while the lofty spacious skies
Reverséd there, abused mine eyes,
I fancied other feet
Came mine to touch or meet;
As by some puddle I did play
Another world within it lay.
Beneath the water people drowned,
Yet with another heaven crowned,
In spacious regions seemed to go
As freely moving to and fro:
In bright and open space
I saw their very face;
Eyes, hands and feet they had like mine;
Another sun did with them shine.
'Twas strange that people there should walk,
And yet I could not hear them talk:
That through a little watery chink,
Which one dry ox or horse might drink,
We other worlds should see,
Yet not admitted be;
And other confines there behold
Of light and darkness, heat and cold.
I called them oft, but called in vain;
No speeches we could entertain:
Yet did I there expect to find
Some other world, to please my mind.
I plainly saw by these
A new antipodes,
Whom, though they were so plainly seen,
A film kept off that stood between.
By walking men's reverséd feet
I chanced another world to meet;
Though it did not to view exceed
A phantom, 'tis a world indeed,
Where skies beneath us shine,
And earth by art divine
Another face presents below,
Where people's feet against ours go.
Within the regions of the air,
Compassed about with heavens fair,
Great tracts of land there may be found
Enriched with fields and fertile ground;
Where many numerous hosts
In those far distant coasts,
For other great and glorious ends
Inhabit, my yet unknown friends.
O ye that stand upon the brink,
Whom I so near me through the chink
With wonder see: what faces there,
Whose feet, whose bodies, do ye wear?
I my companions see
In you, another me.
They seeméd others, but are we;
Our second selves these shadows be.
THOMAS TRAHERNE