Newman as a poet MICHAEL GLOVER
‘I solaced myself with verse-making’
Newman wrote poems – sometimes three a day – as an alternative way of recording the thoughts he would otherwise have expressed in prose. But the author of the grave and ghostly “Dream of Gerontius” was equally skilled at light verse, too
J
ohn Henry Newman, like several of his versifying Tractarian friends (Richard Hurrell Froude, John Keble, Robert Wilberforce and Isaac Williams), was not a great poet – in fact, you could argue
that his poetic impulses found their true form and best expression in the glorious concluding paragraphs of his great autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua – but he valued poetry, read it throughout his life, and was well versed in the poetry of his own and former times. He knew his Homer, and he was well acquainted with the poets of the eighteenth century. The moralist Oliver Goldsmith was a particular favourite. He enjoyed the Greek dramatists, Scott, Robert Southey, Dr Johnson and Edmund Burke. In spite of the fact that poetry was not at the centre of his imaginative life, he wrote it from early youth, often quite copiously, and these poems were later gathered in a collection called Verses on Various Occasions. That word “verse” is a telling one. For
Newman, throughout the greater part of his life, his poems were largely metrical renderings of thoughts which could just have easily been expressed in prose. He regarded the penning of verses as a mode of relaxation, something to turn to away from the more arduous task of the sermon, perhaps. “When I was most qualmish [with seasickness],” he once wrote, “I solaced myself with verse-making.” During a tour of the Mediterranean, he was writing three poems a day. Eighty-five of the poems which would later appear in Verses on Several Occasions were written on that trip. But how truly committed to the art of poetry really was he? Or are the great majority of his verses a form of propaganda on behalf of his own beliefs? In a letter to his friend Frederic Rogers, written in 1833, Newman reveals what an alarmingly relaxed attitude he had towards the practice of verse-making. “Ten thousand obvious ideas become impressive,” he wrote, “when put into a metrical shape; and many of them we should not dare to utter except metrically, for thus the respon-
10 | THE TABLET | 18 September 2010 sibility (as it were) is shoved off of oneself …”
Even the verses for which he is best remem- bered – “Lead Kindly Light”, for example – have been severely criticised for their intellectual confusion, which is somewhat unusual in a man of such intellectual gifts.
And yet he does deserve to be known as a
poet for two quite distinct reasons. The first is – and this is somewhat surprising – that he had quite a talent for light verse. He wrote this, for example, in 1829, when he was 28 years old:
Fair cousin, thy page is small to encage
the thoughts which engage the minds of a sage such as I am;
Twere in teaspoon to take the whole Genevese lake, or a lap-dog to make the white elephant sac- -red is Siam.
The more important reason for regarding him as a poet of some substance is a long poem –the longest that he was ever to write – called “The Dream of Gerontius”, which he wrote in three weeks flat in 1865, and which was later to be set to music in an oratorio by Elgar.
It is the dream of a man who believes him- self to be descending into death – and Newman himself had had a premonition of his own imminent death before he wrote it. In fact, he was to live for another 25 years. The poem is one of a number of long poems of the Victorian era which examine, quite unflinchingly, the prospect of death and dis- solution of which the best-known is Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” which, given that it was published in 1850, Newman would surely have known. “The Dream of Gerontius” is a grave and ghostly poem. Gerontius, supine
Cardinal John Henry Newman in 1865. Photo: CNS/courtesy Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory
on his deathbed, experiences a “strange inner- most abandonment”, an “emptying out of each constituent and natural force”. Shortly he will plunge into that “shapeless, scopeless, blank abyss, that utter nothingness, of which [he] came”. The first part closes with the death of Gerontius. In the second part, the Soul of Gerontius feels strangely refreshed, as if he has just had a good sleep. He approaches the court of judgement with uncharacteristic fearlessness. Then appear the demons, an uncouth gang – and this is probably the least successful part of the poem. Newman was not a natural mem- ber of a gang. The last words that Gerontius speaks are expressed in one of his finest lyrics. The Soul aspires to plunge into the Lake of Purification:
Take me away, and in the lowest deep There let me be,
And there in hope the lone night-watches keep,
Told out for me.
The poem for the most part is written in blank verse, and it proceeds at a slow pace. It has grandeur, a fitting solemnity, and it is undoubtedly the most deeply felt of all Newman’s poems. For once, his poetry feels fully embodied, full of the pressure of human experience.
■Michael Glover is a poet and The Tablet’s poetry editor. His latest book is For the Sheer Hell of Living (San Marco Press, £9).
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