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,
Jesu, Maria—I am near to death,
And thou art calling me; I know it now.
Not by the token of this faltering breath,
This chill at heart, this dampness on my brow,
(Jesu, have mercy! Mary, pray for me!)
’Tis this new feeling, never felt before,
(Be with me, Lord, in my extremity!)
(5)
Observations about his personal condition, “This chill at heart, this dampness on my brow,” alternate with lines that echo hymns and biblical lamentation, “Mary, pray for me! . . . Be with me, Lord, in my extremity!” This division between personal reflection and ceremony becomes more pronounced later in the poem when the ritualism of part 1 meets the soliloquies of part 2. As part 1 proceeds, Gerontius’s life ends and the poem increasingly yields to a full quotation of Catholic ritual, including a chorus of Assistants chanting the rite for commending a departing soul to God, “Kyrie eleïson, Christe eleïson, Kyrie eleïson,” followed by “Holy Mary, pray for him,” all taken from the Catholic mass (6). Newman here exceeds the ritualism ascribed to devotional writers of the period who were also influenced by Tractarianism, for example Christina Rossetti.52 Although her poems include an array of ritualistic elements that invoke the Anglo-Catholic mass, including “Great mitred priests,” “incense turned to fire / In golden censers,” and “lamps ablaze and garlands round about,” unlike Newman, she does not quote from religious services verbatim and at length.53
In contrast, Newman’s direct, lengthy inclusions from the Roman Catholic mass in the first section could potentially be controversial content for Victorian readers and might give a staunch Evangelical Christian like Gordon pause. And indeed, pausing is most likely what happened for many readers of the poem—pausing, that is, and skipping. Tellingly, in his copy, Gordon marks the lines that precede the introduction of Roman Catholic rites and Gerontius’s words “Pray for me, O my friends,” but then skips over the rites themselves and the following parts where the Priest and Attendants speak. The next passage that he marks at length is the soliloquy following Gerontius’s death that opens section 2, which gives the speaker’s first impressions of the afterlife as a disembodied soul. This is the same passage cited by Doyle as being the best part of the poem: “The finest thing it contains is the early soliloquy of Gerontius when he finds himself, as he believes at first, alone with infinity” (115). Doyle further says that he prefers “the blank verse; the speeches rather. The lyrical portion are, in my judgment, less successful . . . [and] do not move me much more than those average hymns which people, who certainly are not angels yet, sing weekly in church” (117). By the “lyrical portion” Doyle means the more overtly religious parts that partake of Roman Catholic liturgy. Therefore, either implicitly or explicitly, Doyle and Gordon both recommend a strategy of reading around the most openly Catholic parts of the poem.
In thus reading along with Gordon and Doyle, as Victorian readers themselves did, contemporary readers can gain a new understanding of the poem’s early reception history, and more specifically, of how Newman’s demarcated structure allowed Victorian readers to skip, skim, and otherwise exclude the most overtly ritualistic elements of the poem. This insight into Victorian reading practices affords crucial new information about the poem’s success, for it helps to explain how readers rationalized their own, seemingly perverse, delight in the poem; they did so through a strategy of selective reading based on the belief that they could excise the “Catholic parts” of the poem, in particular, the rites and rituals of part 1. But the question remains, is such an extraction really possible? By skipping or critically dismissing part 1, could Victorians truly quarantine themselves from the poem’s Catholic content, as they so claimed? The answer, quite simply, is no.
Upon closer investigation, one finds that the most beloved parts of the poem, the soliloquies that readers gave themselves full license to enjoy, in fact contain the most controversial views in the poem. Indeed, in the soliloquies, Newman again sets forth the views on purgatory he had articulated in Tract 90. Yet for some reason, when presented in soliloquies in The Dream—and not in Tracts for the Times—these views passed muster. Newman had succeeded in fostering the illusion that readers could read around the Catholic parts of the poem, while in fact smuggling his most controversial eschatology in plain sight by embedding these views in the most accessible, comforting, and seemingly nondenominational parts of the poem: the soliloquies.
Progressive Suspension: The Soliloquies
The soliloquy that opens part 2 is especially pivotal in bringing Catholic ritualistic elements into a larger narrative of conversion between life and the afterlife. Lines assigned to “Gerontius” are now spoken by the “Soul of Gerontius” and soon after by a “Soul” after an Angel comes down to assure him that he is saved, a precondition for entering purgatory. By the end of the poem, Newman takes this process of deindividualization to its limit when Gerontius becomes one of a chorus of undifferentiated “Souls in Purgatory.” Using the soliloquy, an introspective and self-revelatory form employed in dramatic monologues,
