The Columbia History of British Poetry (114 page)

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry

5.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads

Page 458

the Oxford Movement began. While the immediate occasion of the sermon was the relation between the established Church and the state, the movement soon grew into an effort to revive the flagging principles and practices of the High Church. The intellectual vehicle of this renovation was a series of publications entitled
Tracts for the Times
, which presently gave the Tractarian movement its name. Themselves part of an inchoate but distinct set of developments commonly referred to as the Catholic Revival (comprising both the Roman Catholic restoration in England and catholicizing movements within the Anglican High Church establishment or "Anglo-Catholicism"), the Tractarians sought to revivify in the Church of England all that had grown lifeless and lukewarm since the Reformation, particularly in the eighteenth century.

Six years before the assize sermon, Keble had published anonymously a cycle of poems entitled
The Christian Year, or Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year
. By 1872 it had passed through 158 editions and had won the ears and touched the hearts of countless readers in the English-speaking world. Indeed, G. B. Tennyson is able to suggest plausibly that
The Christian Year
"has had a greater impact on the character of English-language Christian worship in the past century and a half than any other single influence." Quite the contrary of the emphatic Evangelicals, the Tractarians adhered to the complementary principles of Reserve and Analogy, principles that find expression in their poetry.

Translated into modern terms, Reserve is that supplement of meaning and presence that always escapes human efforts to grasp God, who can therefore be known only incompletely and by indirection. Analogy, based ultimately on the mechanism of medieval typology, asserts an essential likeness between individual things and creatures on the one hand and their creator on the other. In G. B. Tennyson's words, "Tractarian Analogy means quite simply that the entire universe is a symbol of its creator. . . . Analogy governs the subject matter of [Tractarian] poetry, Reserve the style." Taken together, Analogy and Reserve sacramentalize the world and, a fortiori, nature.

Keble expounded his ideas on poetry in the series of forty lectures that he delivered in Latin as the Professor of Poetry at Oxford between 1831 and 1841 and published under the title
Praelectiones Academicae
. These he dedicated to Wordsworth, "True Philosopher and Inspired Poet [
vati sacro
], who by the special gift and calling of Almighty God . . . failed not to lift up men's hearts to the holy things . . . [and who] was raised up to

Page 459

be a chief minister, not only of the sweetest poetry but also of high and sacred truth. . . . '' Clearly, poetry was, for the Tractarians, the privileged discourse of religion. Insofar as Keble asserts that poetry is sacramental, however, he is at odds with the notion of poetic autonomy underlying Romanticism. What develops from this, in practice more than in theory, is a poetry written primarily not for its own virtues but for those it can incite in its readers. Hence poetry and religionthe aesthetic and the devotionalare not only complementary and mutually enriching; they are essentially homogeneous.

The Christian Year
consists of 109 devotional poems that are linked to the
Book of Common Prayer
, in conjunction with which it must be read: for each day of the liturgical year and for all special services in the Prayer Book there is a designated poem. Deeply tinged with a Wordsworthian view of nature, it offers a poetry of simplicity and sincerity, the doctrine of Reserve expressing itself in plainness and lack of emphasis. Conspicuously unoriginal in verbal texture, it seeks to draw no attention to itself but rather to lead the reader beyond the text to its higher subject. The poems are, in a sense, pre-texts to prayer.

If the Tractarian movement began in 1833 with Keble's sermon on national apostasy, it ended in 1845 with Newman's apostasy in favor of Rome. A greater prosaist than a poet, Newman nevertheless contributed the lion's share to a volume of Tractarian verses entitled
Lyra Apostolica
and intended as a proselytizing adjunct to
Tracts for the Times
. On the title page stands a motto from the
Iliad
that announces the volume's militant intent: "Let them learn that I have stayed too long out of the fight." The contributions of R. I. Wilberforce and J. W. Bowden are entirely negligible; those of R. H. Froude occasionally rise to a certain dramatic solemnity (see nos. 36, 133, 139, and 159). Keble, temperamentally unsuited to polemical verse, rarely is able to reach or sustain the rhetorical tension it requires: aside from "The Winter Thrush," the sole nature poem in the volume, only two or three of his poems stand out (see nos. 76, 98, and the Herbertian no. 100). Newman's idea,
Lyra Apostolica
was also Newman's vehicle. The best known of his contributions, called variously "Light in the Darkness," "The Pillar of Cloud," and "Lead, kindly Light" (no. 25), achieves its dramatic effect by a deft alternation of long and short lines and periods. Greek choric meters stiffen the stanzas of "The Elements" (no. 71) and "Judaism" (no. 106) and influence those of

Page 460

"Rest" and "Knowledge" (nos. 52 and 53). Many of the poems are indeed a call to arms.

Isaac Williams, whose tracts 80 and 87 developed the notions of Reserve and Analogy, went on to produce four volumes of poetry that were widely appreciated
Thoughts in Past Years, The Cathedral, The Baptistery
, and
The Altar
.
Thoughts in Past Years
moves from devotional poetry in the manner of Keble to poems on Tractarian topics and reflections on the Church. In
The Cathedral
,
The Baptistery
, and
The Altar
, however, Williams develops the medievalizing strain that was giving rise to the Gothic revival in architecture.

The Cathedral
draws its subject matter from the architectural plan of a Gothic churchthus resembling in form the image of Wordsworth's poetic work projected in the preface to
The Excursion
moving from the exterior through the nave and the choir to the pillars and the windows; before each section are engravings of those architectural elements which organize that section thematically. Each element is then further broken down to provide the themes of the individual poems. G. B. Tennyson observes that Williams is "teaching the nineteenth century how to 'read' a cathedral, much as he and Keble had tried to teach it how to read the book of nature."
The Cathedral
is thus not only a book of poetry but a guide to Gothic church architecture and a devotional vademecum.
The Baptistery
and
The Altar
advance the same procedure, now even more highly organized. Although his poems rarely strike a spark, Williams is remarkable for having pursued radically the integration of poetry with practical worship.

Newman's
Dream of Gerontius
, written long after his conversion and in apprehension of death following a doctor's (mistaken) prognosis, bears the impress of his strong personality, already perceptible in his earlier poetry. Daringly conceived and sustaining a remarkable degree of dramatic intensity, the poem contains the terrified prayer of the dying Gerontius, his death and the parting of his soul from his body, a dialogue between his soul and an angel, and oratorical or choric sections in which figure his soul, angels, demons, angelic choirs, and the voices of souls in Purgatory, where Gerontius's soul has begged to sojourn. In the last line of the poem the angel assures him, "Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here, / And I will come and wake thee on the morrow." Edward Caswall and Frederic W. Faber, two other noteworthy Tractarian poets, followed Newman into the Roman Catholic Church. At his best, in
Cherwell Water-lily
, Faber often outstrips his spiritual guide.

Page 461

Other Voices

There were of course many voices of the Catholic revival that were unconnected to the Tractarians. Aubrey Thomas de Vere, who (in the phrase of the time) went over to Rome in 1851, is today somewhat unjustly remembered for his excessively tranquilizing Wordsworthian manner. De Vere's taste for Romantic poetry ran deep, extending to Byron and Shelley, whom he attempts to refute in the light of Christian truth. Robert Stephen Hawker was well known as a poet of Cornwall before publishing a volume of devotional verse entitled
Ecclesia
. Hawker draws successfully on the Romantic discovery of the mystery that dwells in places, a mystery to which he adds holiness. Through such religious genius loci the present touches the past, bridged by sanctity.

Digby Mackworth Dolben is an extraordinary figure by virtue of both his flamboyant personality and his youth. Precocious, Dolben joined the ritualist High Church Puseyites at Eton. He wrote easily and prolifically both imitative verses in the manner of Herbert and the Pre-Raphaelites and poems in which an individual voice is seeking form through experimentation. Both his barely concealed homoeroticism and his equally bold flirtation with Roman Catholicism earned him expulsion. His accidental death at the age of nineteen, before he could pursue his increasingly serious leanings towards Rome, makes the promise of his talent a matter of speculation; but some of what he left behind is worthy to stand with the work of all but a few of the writers so far considered. He is perhaps best remembered for his somewhat equivocal erotico-religious "Homo Factus Est"; but there can be no doubt of the authenticity, if not the maturity, of his religious impulse.

Like Dolben and Hopkins, Richard Watson Dixon owes much of his latter-day currency to the editorial labors of Robert Bridges, his rather dry, scholarly bent being little suited to wide readership; indeed, he is perhaps best known today for his correspondence with Hopkins. A member of the "Birmingham group" at Oxford in the 1850s, Dixon immersed himself on the one side in the middle ages and on the other in Tennyson and Ruskin, drawing from this atmosphere and these readings, and from the Pre-Raphaelite movement in which they merge, an aesthetic medievalism and a rather pallid mystery. The poetry of his first volume of verse,
Christ's Company
, is refined in tone, rhythmically correct, and elaborately decorative, religious themes and moments serving largely as pretexts for a tapestry of poses and images.

Page 462

Judaism

The series of legal acts and adjustments that began in the mid-1830s resulted in the emancipation of Jews, making possible the emergence of a voice hitherto unheard in the history of English religious poetry. Grace Aguilar is among of the first exponents of this new voice. Born in London in 1816, she moved with her family to Devonshire at the age of twelve and so grew up as the only Jewish child in a rural English village whose tolerance and gentleness appeared to bear no resemblance to the triumphal and aggressive Catholicism of Portugal and Spain of the Inquisition and Expulsions engraved in her family's memory. Cynthia Scheinberg argues that Aguilar nevertheless saw herself as an exiled Jew caught in a Christian culture. Aguilar sought, therefore, to create a literary identity that would permit her to exist and function in both the Christian majority and the Anglo-Jewish minority literary cultures. In a sequence of poems entitled "Sabbath Thoughts," she seeks to establish in literature an identity that is at once Jewish in a Christian world and feminine in a doubly patriarchal world. In one of its aspects, this is a poetry of private spiritual suffering that, since it is inexpressible in language, "God alone should read" (sonnet I). The deepest feeling is unspeakable and is readable only by the unspeakable God.

Aguilar thus so radicalizes the private world of lyric in general and of the devotional lyric in particular that the genre appears to annul itself essentially. It becomes instead a speakable shell enclosing a mute essence. She asks a remote God whether He will ever abandon her, and tenders the mild reproach that "this fair earth has never given / To yearning hearts an answering word" (sonnet III). In keeping with the nonlinguistic character of this essential communication, she asks that God should "breathe" to her his reply. Elsewhere she dwells on the ahistoricity and nonspatiality of prayer, again defining by negation. But if prayer is ahistorical, religious community is profoundly felt in its historical dimension. "Song of the Spanish Jews" and "The Hebrew's Appeal'' trace postbiblical Jewish history and by this very gesture implicitly introduce the historicity of her own moment and the extraordinary ambiguities that follow from it: on the one hand, the freedom that makes a cultural flowering again possible, on the other its precariousness.

Unlike most Christian religious writers, Aguilar tends to treat the Bible literally and not typologically. This leads her to reject the Roman-

Page 463

tic inheritance of the poet as vatic symbolizer for a poetic identity based on parable, as in "A Vision of Jerusalem" and "While Listening to a Beautiful Organ in One of the Gentile Shrines." Landscape, in a poem such as "The Rocks of Elim," consequently functions quite differently than it does in Wordsworth. First, like Keats's vision of the Pacific from a peak in Darien, its origin is in a booka book not of poetry, however, but of "Letters on the Holy Land." Next, the landscape resonates not with personal history and subjective experience as in "Tintern Abbey'' but with biblical history and, as it were, tribal memory. This landscape is also, and significantly, that of the song of Miriam and so a point of departure for women's poetry in the "West." Landscape is not, therefore, a place where the individual finds herself as an individual in communion with God but one where she finds the biblical past whose authority is divine.

Amy Levy deserves mention for her contribution to the lineaments of a contestatory religious position at the heart of Christian religious poetry. Little of Levy's poetry is religious in the sense adopted here; she regards religion as a social phenomenon. The irony implicit in the title of
A Minor Poet and Other Verses
works itself out radically in the dramatic monologue of one of its minorthat is, minority and marginalizedpersonas, Mary Magdalene. In Scheinberg's view, one of Levy's aims in "Magdalen" is to raise to consciousness the terms of Christian domination of poetic identity. Magdalen speaks to Jesus as to an oppressor, reversing the authorized norm of reverence. Her love of Jesus is physical, and he has betrayed it knowingly; for what Revelation reveals is that the outcome was never in doubt. The whole weight of Christian hermeneutics bears against this representation, and she must deflect its powerful machinery. The conventional image of the rose that she draws on to figure to Jesus her love for him brings with it those of thorns and bleeding fleshher own. Magdalen is the martyr, and she refuses the sublimation of sexual in divine love. Thus, she will refuse not only Jesus but his status as the Messiah, in this way repeatingbut also rejectingthe Jewish betrayal. Levy's intervention at the nodal point of Christian religious drama and discourse represents the position of a quasi-alien voice.

Elizabeth Barrett (Browning)

In 1826, at the age of twenty, Elizabeth Barrett published her second volume of verse,
An Essay on Mind and Other Poems
. Its title work, a long

BOOK: The Columbia History of British Poetry

5.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads