SOURCE: Sabine, Maurine. “‘Stranger to the Shining Skies’: Traherne's Child and His Changing Attitudes to the World.” Ariel 11, no. 4 (October 1980): 21-35.

In the following essay, Sabine examines Traherne's works in terms of his preoccupation with the subject of childhood.

While reflecting upon his writing craft in the Centuries, Traherne avowed that he would make his literary subject “Things Strange, yet Common; Incredible, yet Known; Most High, yet Plain; infinitely Profitable, but not Esteemed.”¹ Readers conversant with the devotional poetry of the seventeenth century will be no strangers to the exultant literary claims which Traherne makes for the child as an “infinitely profitable” religious subject. Yet seen within their historical context, the claims which Traherne makes for the child are not only in advance but revealing of his age. The child was not widely “esteemed” in the Jacobean age; indeed was just emerging from the social obscurity to which...