The Self-Mirroring Mind in Milton and Traherne

ALVIN SNIDER The Self-Mirroring Mind in Milton and Traherne I The high point of the poetic sequence titled 'Divine Reflections on the Native Objects of an Infant-Ey,' and one of Thomas Traherne's most widely anthologized pieces - many would say his best - is 'Shadows in the Water.' The poem describes a childhood experience, the perceptual error or 'sweet Mistake' of the poet's younger self upon seeing his own image reflected in a puddle of water. In a primal scene of instruction, the child imagines (or images forth) the existence of another world canopied under an inverted heaven and inhabited by a tribe of 'Water People.' The child's error becomes a source of visionary understanding that he carries over into adulthood; he learns of the existence of a duplicate, inward, and seemingly insubstantial world that suddenly impinges upon reality: In unexperienc'd Infancy Many a sweet Mistake doth Iy: Mistake tho false, intending tru; A Seeming somwhat more than View; That doth instruct the Mind In Things that Iy behind, And many Secrets to us show Which afterwards we com to know. (1-8)' The poem records a moment when the familiar is invested in a cloak of strangeness, affording the poet a profound insight, in the most literal sense of that word, into a suprasensible and immaterial beyond. In many ways the experienceTraherne describes bears comparison with a famous episode in book IV of Paradise Lost, the scene in which the newborn Eve wakes from her creation to hear murmuring waters, and to see her image reflected in a lake 'Pure as th' expanse of Heav'n': I thither went With unexperienc't thought, and laid me down On the green bank, to look into the clear Smooth Lake, that to me seem'd another Sky (4:456-9).' In a reworking of the Narcissus myth, Eve falls in love with the figure in UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 55, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 11)86 )14 ALVIN SNIDER the lake, pining 'with vain desire' (4:466) for her watery double. Eve, however, avoids Narcissus's fate of hopeless longing and eventual extinction through the intervention of an admOnitory voice, which convinces her to abandon her self-fixation and seek fulfilment in conjugal union. Led by this invisible presence, Eve is brought to Adam, and, after an initial moment of hesitation, surrenders herself to Adam's society and to future motherhood. Like the woman in the Richard Strauss-Hugo von Hofmannsthal opera Die Frau alme Schalten, Eve undergoes a quasimystical union with her 'shadow' that marks her final separation from a world of pure spirit and preludes a cycle of creative and procreative fecundity. Scholars have noted the general resemblance between Milton and Traheme's two archetypal episodes of initiation, yet two pOints of obvious dissimilarity seem to have prevented them from pressing the comparison further. First, the mistake of Eve's 'unexperienc't' eye prefigures a fatal character flaw that will bring about our collective ruination, 'all our woe: But the error that Traheme commits 'in unexperienc'd Infancy' has the opposite value; it vouchsafes his visionary blessedness, his knack for transcendence. Traheme, who is sometimes branded a Pelagian, takes a decidely heterodox view of childhood innocence: infant purity is not so much tainted by original sin as vitiated by habit and dulled perception. Milton's theodicy, on the other hand, reflects a relatively orthodox view of 'natural pravity: and attempts to rationalize our fall from grace by pointing to events occurring at some remote stage of human pre-history. Secondly, while the framework of Milton's passage is Ovidian - although stripped of Ovid's auto- and homoerotic content - Traheme seems to have Neoplatonic doctrines in mind.' When Traheme's child contemplates his own likeness, and, like Alice through the looking glass, passes into another plane of existence, he enacts the Neoplatonic ascent from introspection to direct apprehension of the divine, from the visible to the intelligible. These differences dissolve, however, when we view both texts as allegories of cognition and the individual's quest for knowledge. Eve progressesfrom the perfectlyliteral, but mistaken, testimony ofthesenses to an outer-directed engagement in a paradisal world, a world...