Thomas Traherne

Thomas Traherne was an English clergyman and religious writer, born in Hereford, probably in 1636 or 1637, the son of a shoemaker. He studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, became rector of Credenhill in Herefordshire, and later served as chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman at Teddington, where he died in 1674. Almost nothing of his work was printed in his lifetime.

His poems and prose meditations lay forgotten in manuscript for more than two centuries. They were found on a London bookstall in the 1890s and, once identified as his, edited by Bertram Dobell, whose Poetical Works appeared in 1903 and in a second edition in 1906. The poems, centred on childhood, wonder and the delight of the created world, are given here from Dobell's second edition (1906), together with the poems first printed in H. I. Bell's Poems of Felicity (1910).