An Allusion to Herbert's 'Affliction I' in Traherne's Commonplace Book

Abstract

WE have long known that Thomas Traherne read George Herbert, but explicit references to Herbert's poetry are rare in Traherne's body of work. The Church's Year-Book (Bodleian, MSS. Eng. th. e. 51) holds a transcription of ‘To All Angels and Saints’, and the Lambeth Manuscript, discovered by Jeremy Maule in 1997, contains several lines from ‘Longing’.1 But another of Traherne's notebooks, currently held by the Bodleian Library (MSS. Eng. poet. c. 42), contains a previously unnoticed allusion to Herbert's ‘Affliction I’.2 While the poems that occupy the first half of the manuscript have been published as the ‘Dobell poems’, the latter part of the folio notebook comprises a host of unpublished personal notes generally understood to be Traherne's commonplace book. The notes are organized as alphabetically arranged entries in a similar fashion to Commentaries of Heaven. Traherne's allusion to Herbert occurs under a short entry entitled ‘Grace’. Although Traherne does not cite Herbert by name, his slightly modified quotation is clearly recognizable as the last two lines of ‘Affliction I’. Hebert's poem reads: ‘Ah my deare God! though I am clean forgot,/Let me not love thee, if I love thee not’ (ll. 65–6).3 Traherne quotes the lines as follows: ‘Tho I am poor O Ld & be forgot/Let me not lov thee if I lov thee not.’