You can read this poem here.
In ‘The Salutation’ Traherne writes as if he were newborn, recently landed in his body and looking in wonder at what it has for him—limbs, tongue, eyes, hands—as well as at the amazing world he’s arrived in. The poem is such a celebration of the wonder and mystery of our being—that is to say, the simple fact that we are incarnate beings, alive and experiencing on this dazzling earth.
I don’t know that it matters if you agree with Traherne’s theology. For me, what comes shining and streaming out of the poem is Traherne’s joy at the surprise, the sheer, gratuitous, random, un-plannable gift of being alive. Whether you see yourself as a god-created being, loved into existence, or a mere, brief accident of time and biology, still, here you are inhabiting a body—’the limbs…/ In which a soul doth dwell’— and able to experience the joys of the natural world—’the earth, the seas, the light, the day, the skies,/ The sun and stars’. From the no-thing-ness of stardust (‘nothing from eternity’) into the glory of this world, then back to dust again. We are so lucky to have our time in ‘these brighter regions’; and I treasure the way this poem speaks to me, across nearly four centuries, and reminds me of that.