"Traherne's Dialectic in "Shadows in the Water

In order to characterize Traherne's predominant process of thought, more than one commentator has used the word dialectical.' Such a characterization is especially appropriate whenever Traherne appeals to the seventeenth-century theory of the four estates, for he consistently views the relationship among the estates dialectically: the estate of misery negates the estate of innocence; and the estates of grace and glory are the temporal and eternal negations, respectively, of the estate of misery.2 But if this description of his logic is accurate, it is also incomplete. For whereas at times he sees the movement from one estate to the next primarily as the result of external pressures placed on the individual, in other works he assumes that every estate has implicit shortcomings that surface in the normal course of events and lead to the negation of that estate. His well-known poem Shadows in the Water most clearly exemplifies the latter kind of work.3 In order to explicate the underlying logic in this poem, and thereby to observe Traherne's dialectical abilities at their most subtle, this essay briefly describes its dialectic in the abstract, and then traces the functioning of this dialectic in detail in the stanzas themselves

Aesthetics · Art · Dialectic · Epistemology · Literature · American and British Literature Analysis · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Philosophy · Poetry Analysis and Criticism