If the essay on the Poetics accomplishes any central goal, it is to privilege poetry, and specifically, poetic suspension, as the means through which to understand slow changes that underlie dramatic turning points. The essay comes as a discursive rally against representing change through purely discursive means, for Newman urges that poetry can give readers access to understanding the afterlife in ways that are unavailable in sermons and tracts. It is no surprise, then, that later in his career Newman avails himself of poetry to explain his own model of the afterlife. In the case of Newman’s Dream, his chosen poetic form allows him to accomplish something that proved out of reach in Tract 90; a quarter of a century after Tract 90, Newman turned to a new form that could allow him to explain and, moreover, to perform the eschatological conundrums he had previously discussed in tract form. Eschewing the purely explanatory (not to mention inflammatory) nature of the tract, Newman instead turned to devotional poetry. In taking a new, lyrical approach to the subject matter, he chose a poetic model that borrowed from both the circularity of liturgy and the suspended quality of dramatic monologues, thereby achieving a difficult balance between foregrounding Catholic concerns over death and the afterlife while still generating greater reader receptivity in his use of the soliloquy.
II. Victorians in Purgatory: The Dream of Gerontius and Poetic Conciliation
Although The Dream of Gerontius is fabled for finding its way into the hands of men of action like General Gordon, the poem imagines change as the product of radical inaction, the result of bodiless contemplation occurring in a sensory deprivation chamber. As the poem in recent times is rarely considered outside of its theological and religious-historical interest, it has been bypassed by a contemporary tradition of literary scholarship focusing on the political work of Victorian poetry. Newman’s prose is often included in considerations of the relation between poetry and politics, such as Isobel Armstrong’s seminal Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, which discusses how Newman’s sermons and tracts illuminate the political concerns of poets such as Arthur Hugh Clough and Matthew Arnold, but his poetry is overlooked in such studies.43 Despite The Dream’s many potential critical points of interest—including the lingering mystery of its success, its controversial content, and the political turnaround it helped achieve—Newman’s most popular poem has received little literary critical attention in our time. As a result, its popularity has yet to be addressed as a phenomenon firmly enmeshed in his poetics.
To understand Newman’s success in The Dream, we must bring the poem into current conversations about the long Victorian poem that rely on narrative theory, from which it has been absent, including recent work on dramatic monologues, explorations of lyric versus narrative modes, and studies of Victorian experimentation with hybrid genres. This approach is embodied by scholars such as Monique Morgan, whose recent work provides a model for the kind of scholarship on the long Victorian poem that could yield new insights into Newman’s approach in The Dream.44 Indeed, The Dream is a worthy example for deeper study given the unusual narrative methods Newman employs to capture individual change over a substantial poetic duration. Considered alongside other long poems of the period, notably Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the work with which it is most frequently compared, The Dream differs radically in its vision of a central speaker’s development.45 In Memoriam is oriented around a central figure whose anguished doubt gives the poem its vital trajectory and intimacy. For example, many passages are devoted to the urgent questioning of Hallam’s existence after death and the possibility for future development.46 In contrast, in Newman’s vision of purgatory, Gerontius’s salvation is ensured upon his entering the realm of Judgment. As a result, his journey is not one from doubt to increasing faith, for he instead undergoes a central process of dispossession of selfhood and the cleansing of self-interest. To put it slightly differently: the poem as a whole is not about personhood but about process, about conversion, not the convert. And just as the speaker’s musings vary from those of Tennyson in In Memoriam, so too does the poetic form in which these musings take shape. The certainty of an afterlife that opens the poem marks an important distinction—a distinction that plays out on a formal level in The Dream. To capture his vision of conversion, Newman undermines a Tennysonian emphasis on the lyrical “I,” found in both the epic melancholia of In Memoriam and Victorian dramatic monologues, borrowing instead from the suspension of liturgy.
This reading of The Dream as a poem that uniquely partakes of liturgy is necessarily situated in the context of poetics movements of the time, notably, the turn toward ritualism in the 1860s. As I contend, The Dream may be understood as part of a renewed interest in ritualism, but it is also something more. In brief, the poem is evidence of Newman’s ability to navigate the shifting terrain of the 1860s and to make death-consolation literature the site of his own brand of subversive orthodoxy. It exemplifies Newman’s ability to craft what I term a “poetics of conciliation,” or a poetic form that accommodates Catholic liturgy and secular verse, as well as formal paradoxes including temporal suspension and narrative progression, sensory description and portrayals of disembodiment. In its interplay between quoted Catholic ritual and soliloquies, The Dream invokes ritual in ways more explicit, and potentially more off-putting, than were pursued by other popular devotional poets of his time, notably, Anglo-Catholic devotional poets such as Christina Rossetti, for Newman quotes directly and at length from rites performed in the Roman Catholic mass. At the same time, he also partakes of provocative dramatic monologues by Tennyson and Browning to upend their madhouse meditations. Newman thereby stages a conversion of the dramatic monologue itself from lyric to liturgy. He uses Gerontius’s monologues to capture a suspended, lyrical quality and simultaneously to critique the “unconstrained lyrical ‘I’” found in works such as “St. Simeon Stylites” and “Johannes Agricola in Meditation.”47 This blend of ritualist poetry and soliloquies allowed Newman to create a devotional drama with many speakers, a hybrid that against all odds effectively appealed to Victorians more disposed to reading Tennyson’s In Memoriam than Catholic liturgy.48 Newman’s hybrid form also allowed him to use poetic methods to accomplish ideological ends: only in crafting a “poetics of conciliation” could he successfully perform, and not simply describe, the theological conundrums at the heart of his conception of purgatory as a place for gradual change.
Reading (Around) Ritual: The Organization of The Dream
On a surface level, The Dream’s clearly demarcated structure may have partly contributed to its success. The poem is divided into seven numbered sections and moves from quoting hymns and Catholic rites to including a greater number of subjective reflections on the state of the soul after death. In the first section, an old man named Gerontius lies on his deathbed. The priest and his assistants administer the final rites, and Gerontius passes into the afterlife. These rites and prayers for the dead, which dominate part 1, give way in part 2 to meditative soliloquies as Gerontius arrives in the afterlife. Gerontius’s Soul then reflects on his disembodied state and his new understanding of time and the lack of senses in the afterlife. He subsequently encounters guiding angels and taunting demons, then glimpses God before finally being laid to rest in purgatorial waters at the poem’s conclusion in section 7. These waters provide a final cleansing period of contemplation that readers glimpse before the poem ends.
As The Dream proceeds through its seven sections, visual divisions (including section breaks and line breaks between speakers) effectively separate the religious rites and liturgy quoted in the poem from the more seemingly secular soliloquies, making it easy to excerpt and favor certain passages—as readers like General Gordon evidently did. Soon after his death, Gordon’s personal copy of The Dream was returned to England, where it found its way into Newman’s hands.49 The copy had Gordon’s pencil notations throughout, and in 1889, reproductions of these selective markings were made available to the public.50 Readers were known to copy these markings into their own editions of the poem, the most famous example being Newman himself.51 Gordon’s personal notations were thus one unofficially sanctioned way for non-Catholics to encounter the poem.
It is interesting that the poem’s opening, which includes religious rites from the Catholic mass, is not marked in Gordon’s personal edition. As Gerontius says in the opening,