The small and rather squat cathedral of Hereford sits in its peaceful garth in the old centre of town; in the evening sun, the local sandstone turns a honey gold. Little here now betrays, to the untrained eye, the tumultuous history of this city and this building. Yet the cathedral’s architecture reflects its varied past, with examples of Norman, Early English, Perpendicular and neo-Gothic; the building has known looting, structural collapse, and unsympathetic restoration. Its chained library is the largest in the world and its most famous single treasure the 13th-century Mappa Mundi. All of these facts bear witness to the centuries of the town’s strategic and religious importance in the border country of the Welsh marches.

In 2007 another treasure was added to the cathedral’s fabric: the Traherne windows in the late 15th-century Audley chantry. Their artist-maker is the contemporary stained-glass artist, Thomas Denny, and the craftsman who cut, leaded and fixed them is his long-term associate, Patrick Costeloe; their subject matter is the 17th-century poet and theologian, Thomas Traherne, who was born in the city. Denny’s style is always densely allusive; he steeps himself in the texts, physical contexts and histories of his themes, which have included subjects as diverse as the composer Gerald Finzi [/], the Benedictine abbey builders of Tewkesbury [/], the Free Miners of the Forest of Dean, and the rehabilitated Richard III (see video right or below). This immersion allows him to bring an interpretative freshness to his work that is never slavishly illustrative. His ‘reading’ of Traherne reaches a pitch of intensity and subtlety of symbolism perhaps unequalled in any of his other work.

The Discovery of Traherne

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Before we look at the windows, the remarkable tale of how we come to know the name of Traherne at all is worth a little telling, for he was almost lost to future generations several times over. The only work he had published in his lifetime was an anti-Catholic polemic, Roman Forgeries (1673), and of the two more works now known to be by him – published later in the 17th century after his death – neither carried their author’s name. But in the winter of 1896, the bibliophile W.T. Brooke bought two manuscripts from an antiquarian barrow book dealer on the Farringdon Road in London. Initially the manuscript poems were thought to be by Henry Vaughan, but eventually some inspired literary detective work by the second-hand bookseller, Bertram Dobell, correctly located them as being by the same author as the Roman Forgeries.

The astounding process of discovery has just grown and grown in the 110 years since. Works by Traherne have been pulled from burning rubbish tips in Lancashire, identified in Canada and America, extracted from the labyrinthine fastnesses of the British Library and unearthed in Lambeth Palace by an academic sheltering from the rain. Nor is the work over, as Traherne scholars confidently predict more findings in the future. (For more on this extraordinary story, click here [/].)

The Windows

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In his poetry, and his prose meditations, Centuries of Meditations, Traherne presents a vision of the holy life in which the incarnate world is already our door to heaven if we perceive and attend to it aright: 

The world shall be a grand jewel of delight unto you; a very Paradise; and the gate of Heaven. It is indeed the beautiful frontispiece of eternity, the temple of God, the palace of His children. [1, p.193]

In this approach to the divine, Traherne stands in a long tradition of what is known as ‘cataphatic theology’, from the Greek meaning ‘affirmative’, the knowing of God through how He has revealed His love in and for Creation:

Since God therefore was infinitely and eternally communicative, all things were combined in him from all eternity. [1, p.259]

This perception is experiential, sensual and spiritual all at once, and it is also relational.

Accordingly, the only appropriate response from humankind is a reciprocal love. All of these facets of love are beautifully realised in Thomas Denny’s windows. There are two of them, each with two lights, with above them both a central quadrifoil-form piercing flanked by two smaller ones – these last all depicting the different seasons and weathers of Britain. The main windows are surprisingly small, as their frame is the lower storey of the chantry, itself tucked away on the south side of the Lady Chapel. They are also at eye level so the visitor can easily see their minute detail, which is something normally denied by the very placement of stained-glass windows. So there is a kind of intimacy about them. This is admirably suited to Traherne’s vision, which prefigures Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ (‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And Heaven in a Heaven in a Wild Flower/ Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/ And Eternity in an hour’) in a most astonishing way: infinity, he says, of course knows no bounds and

… yet it must be expressed in a finite room… be infinitely expressed in the smallest moment by making me able in every moment to see them all. It is in both ways infinite, for my soul is an infinite sphere in a centre. [1, p.220]

What strikes you upon arrival at the windows, in a vision worthy of the poet, is a simultaneous burst of colour imprinted with form, an intricacy of form infused with colour. Denny creates these effects by the superposition of flashed glass, which he then acid etches to remove as much of the original colours as he wishes for a particular effect; he will then paint on details of form, such as figures or landscapes, in black, and may also use silver stain in different densities to create anything from a deep bronze to almost white yellow light. The result is windows of astonishing complexity and richness.

Modern technologies have accustomed us in some degree to the phenomenon of colour separated from form, but this never occurs in the natural world. Colour in creation is therefore always incarnate; and traditionally it has often been associated with the living spirit of a thing, an attribute through which life glows. It is not without significance that, in the Anglo-Saxon Bible, ‘transfigured’ is rendered by the word ‘gehiwod’ or ‘hued, coloured’. Denny has suffused his windows with just that spirit, which is one of dynamism, fluidity and reciprocity, big movements of colour and minute observations of contour. Taken together, the four windows reveal a down-up, up-down flow – to use the word ‘structure’ might suggest a rigidity where there is none.

Let us move from west to east (there is theology even in the orientation of the windows). The first light is dominated at the top by a great cream sun which sheds light in sparks and streams downwards in a central column through the window like a divine firework:

The sun, that gilded all the bordering woods,
_________Shone from the sky
______              To beautify
        My earthly and my heavenly goods;
              Exalted in his throne on high
____              He shed his beams
____              In golden streams…
      Those floods of light which he displays
___          Did fill the glittering ways… [1, pp. 89–90]

As the light descends, it illuminates two elements in particular: the first is a standing man, his palms turned outwards towards the spectator in a gesture both of reverence and revelation. He is dressed in 17th-century clothes and clearly represents Traherne as we find him in the poem ‘The Salutation’:

___            And out of nothing now awake,
_These brighter regions which salute mine eyes,
________           A gift from God I take.
_The earth, the seas, the light, the day, the skies,
     The sun and stars are mine; if those I prize. [1, pp.3–4]

The figure is backlit by a kind of halo. This then turns into a golden river that leads away into the landscape and upwards into the window. It is, like all the landscapes depicted in Denny’s work, both specific and universal, the river Wye at Hereford and the river that flowed out of Eden; it is also, quite literally in this window, the water that connects humankind with God:

The love from which it [love] floweth, is the fountain of love; the love which streameth from it is the communication of love… and the love which resteth in the object is the love which streameth to it. [1, pp.204–5]

The borders that surround this epiphanic centre are deep reds, turquoises, a green of especial viridity: beetles, moths, stones and precious minerals, fruits and trees and bushes, all bespeak the abundant, overflowing creation that Traherne celebrates.