2 - Thomas Traherne’s Atoms, Souls and Poems

Summary

For Souls are Atoms too, and simple ones.

Nay less then Atoms, not so firm as Stones,

They are divested not of Bulk and Size

Alone, but of all Matter too, and are

So void, that very Nothings they appear.

Yet for these Souls all Atoms were prepard

Traherne writes these lines in his Commentaries of Heaven, at the end of a long, comprehensive study of the ‘Atom’. In this passage, from the second of two poems in the entry, the fine detail of his meditation on the topic produces a bold conclusion: that ‘Souls are Atoms… / Nay less than Atoms’ (italics mine). The focus of his preceding section was on the definition of an ‘Atom’, its ‘Etymologie’ and ‘Nature’, but the closing verse moves the atom from subject to object, with the rational soul taking its place as the dominant (yet, paradoxically lesser) subject. At this point, Traherne reveals the higher purpose of considering the atom by implying that, through understanding of the one, we come to the other: grasping the atom leads to deeper knowledge of the soul.

Traherne is fond of wordplay. His souls, which have been equated with atoms, are ‘simple ones’ in the sense that they are utterly devoid of matter, but also because they are capacious, pure first principles, entirely ‘at one’ with the divine. In the hierarchy of this spiritual relationship, less is more. Souls ‘are Atoms’ in the sense that the definition of the latter – as indivisible entities – is also applicable to the rational soul. They are ‘less then Atoms’, however, because they are not only incorporeal but entirely immaterial. Earlier in the commentary, Traherne writes that the soul is ‘void’ of itself ‘that it might be full of All Things’ (III, p. 351): the empty, capacious spiritual being has the energy and space to pry into the mysteries of ‘All Things’, natural and divine. He continues the paradoxical association between material ‘Nothing’ and spiritual totality in his poem with another double meaning, emerging from the line ‘So void, that very Nothings they appear’. From one reading the line argues that souls are like ‘Nothings’, but from another it claims that ‘they appear’ from ‘Nothings’. The syntactical structure has been shifted to place the verb ‘appear’ at the end of the line and sentence.