A Concordance to the Poetry of Thomas Traherne

By George R. Guffey

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.
This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9780520318366

George R. Guffey

Enter the Author Bio(s) here.

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A Concordance to the Poetry

of

THOMAS TRAHERNE

A Concordance to the Poetry

of

THOMAS TRAHERNE

Compiled and Edited by

GEORGE R. GUFFEY

Computer Programmed by

VINTON A. DEARING

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

1974

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1974 by The Regents of the University of California

ISBN: 0-520-02449-4

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-76112

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS 1

CONTENTS 1

PREFACE THE POETRY CONCORDED

INDEX WORDS

CONTEXT LINES

TITLES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE CONCORDANCE

WORDS IN ORDER OF FREQUENCY

PREFACE

THE POETRY CONCORDED

This concordance to the poetry of Thomas Traherne is based on the edition prepared by H. M. Margoliouth (Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, 2 vols. [Oxford, 1958]). In that edition, now considered standard, most of Traherne’s poems are located in the second volume (The Poems, pp. 1-211, and The Thanksgivings, pp. 222-223, 225-226, 286—287); twelve additional poems, however, do appear in the first volume (The Centuries, pp. 2, 61, 99,112-113,121,122-123, 125-127,138-139, 139-140,150-153,175).

In preparing the section of his edition he entitled The Poems, Margoliouth was faced with some textual problems. Two quite different manuscript versions of twenty-two1 of the poems were in existence. The most authoritative version was that of the Dobell Folio (Bodleian MS Eng. poet. C. 42);2 but, complicating matters somewhat, Philip Traherne, Thomas’s brother, had revised the poems extensively (British Museum MS Burney 392). To facilitate a comparison of Thomas’s text and Philip’s, Margoliouth decided to print the two versions on facing pages (II, 4-85)—Thomas’s version on the left and Philip’s version on the right. The words appearing in Philip’s inferior, revised version are not included in this concordance. In addition to the twenty-two poems that appear in both the Dobell Folio and the Burney Manuscript, parts of The Apostacy (Burney Manuscript) duplicate parts of Blisse (Dobell Manuscript). In the present work all the words of The Apostacy have been concorded, but the duplicative words of Blisse have not.3

The rest (II, 86-211) of The Poems is made up of additional poetry from the Dobell Folio (fourteen poems) and the Burney Manuscript (thirty-seven poems), from printed books (Christian Ethicks, eight poems; Meditations on the Six Days of the Creation, six poems), and from two minor Traherne manuscripts (The Church’s Year Book, three poems; Philip Traherne’s Notebook, twelve poems). Ann Ridler4 has recently shown that five of the poems (What e’re I have from God alone I have, Oh how injurious is this wall of sin, As fragrant Mirrhe within the bosom hid, To bee a Monarch is a glorious thing, and "a

1 The Salutation, Wonder, Eden, Innocence, The Preparative, The Instruction, The Vision, The Rapture, The Improvment, The Approach, Dumnesse, Silence, My Spirit, The Apprehension, Fullnesse, Nature, Ease, Speed, The Designe, The Person, The Estate, and The Enquirie.

2 Margoliouth (I, xii) considered the poems of the Dobell Folio to be fair copies.

3