‘The Salutation’ by Thomas Traherne (1637-1674)

       These little limbs,
These eyes and hands which here I find,
These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins,
    Where have ye been? Behind          4
What curtain were ye from me hid so long?
Where was, in what abyss, my speaking tongue

       When silent I   
So many thousand, thousand years
Beneath the dust did in a Chaos lie,    9
    How could I Smiles or Tears,             
Or Lips or Hands or Eyes or Ears perceive?
Welcome ye treasures which I now receive.  

        I that so long
Was Nothing from eternity,
Did little think such joys as ear or tongue
    To celebrate or see:                16
Such sounds to hear, such hands to feel, such feet,
Such eyes and objects, on the ground to meet.

       New burnished joys,
Which finest gold and pearls excel!
Such sacred treasures are the limbs of boys,
      In which a soul doth dwell;        22
Their organizèd joints and azure veins
More wealth include than the dead world contains. 

         From dust I rise,
And out of Nothing now awake;
These brighter regions which salute mine eyes,
      A gift from God I take.            28
The earth, the seas, the light, the lofty skies,
The sun and stars are mine if these I prize.  

         A stranger here
Strange things doth meet, strange glories see;
Strange treasures lodged in this fair world appear,
      Strange all and new to me;         34
But that they mine should be, who Nothing was,
That strangest is of all, yet brought to pass.  

Considering the Poem

Many Christian poets have written about life after death but only Thomas Traherne has written about non-existence before birth. 

Because Traherne touches the margins of all possible time at one point or another in this poem, it is useful to notice how he manages time in the verse.  It gives a framework that the author has made and that we can follow.   

He begins in the poem’s present, speaking as a child (though with an adult capacity for reasoning) who, at the moment of writing, is experiencing a shocked wonder at witnessing the forming of his own body; he then asks himself the question which dominates much of the poem: ‘Where have ye been?’. This question moves us back into the second period of past time in the poem, into the ‘thousand, thousand’ (8) years before he had a bodily existence.

What, he wonders, could that have been like? It was not extinction; it was just unformed, chaotic, non-existence rather like the ‘void’ that Genesis tells us existed before the creation (Genesis 1:2).

He tries to look back and describe this deep time – if time is the right word for the suspended nothingness in which he hangs. Perhaps it is an empty space rather than a moving time that he imagines? During this pre-life in emptiness, he is unable to know, or ‘celebrate’ (16), the ‘treasures’ (12) that make up the physical life that he will receive. Traherne packs the first three verses with words for facial features connected with the senses and with incoming and outgoing communication, most notably the elemental emotions that are told in ‘Smiles’ and ‘Tears’ (10).

All these details about the life we know and express through our senses are presented with an excited gratitude for the beauty of life in the world. The ecstatic tone reaches a climax in the fourth verse: words to do with the value, intricacy and beauty of a body tumble through the lines until Traherne reaches the perception that a human ‘soul’ (22), his own soul, inhabits the ‘sacred treasures’ (21) of his body.

The start of the third time period in the poem is marked by the important words ‘now awake’ (26).  We are back in the present. He is alive, and looks around him, now not at his own forming body but at the strange beauties in nature.  A lesser writer would have stopped at that point, probably.  But then something unexpected happens. 

As he looks around him, Traherne feels anything but at one with the fascinating world in which he finds himself. In each of the first four lines of the last verse, and in the last line of the poem, the words ‘Strange’ or ‘Stranger’ appear. He reminds us that we are made in such a way that we can only look outward onto a world in which everything we see, people, things, the lot, is something other than us; this is a kind of natural alienation and a fundamental part of what being alive entails and, maybe, as Traherne’s anxious tone implies, the source of many of our human problems.

The poem ends with a suggestion of what seems like a further time period, the ‘strangest’ (36) of all. The poet uses the ambiguous phrase ‘brought to pass’ (36) to crystallize a wonder that his life on the planet has occurred at all, and, paradoxically, that it has been brought into existence in order to pass away. But, at this point, Traherne is on the verge of writing about another subject – the life to come – so he stops.

The poem, if not the story, is finished.