has his protagonist reflect on becoming part of a general pool of unnamed souls. This diffusion of the protagonist’s identity jars with the sense of character development as a process of increasing specification and self-exposure over time. In The Dream, the protagonist instead sheds character as the poem progresses, becoming less individualized as a character with a marked disposition. The soliloquies therefore help Newman to enact a central principle of his conception of purgatory, the cleansing of self-interest and the purging of individual persona, while working through a more seemingly secular form usually devoted to revealing character and presenting persona.
They also allow Newman to achieve a balance between suspension and progression that lies at the heart of his idea of purgatory as a state of productive waiting. After partaking of the suspended effect of apostrophe—exemplified by the lamentations, prayers, and spoken rites of the opening section—the poem further inducts readers into a purgatorial mode of progress with its soliloquies.54 The apostrophic quality of Gerontius’s cries—“Jesu, have mercy! Mary, pray for me!”—works much like his subsequent soliloquizing in providing lyric suspension while still contributing to the overall narrative of a man journeying to the afterlife. By definition, this narrative in verse must continue moving forward though Newman uses poetic devices to help suspend narrative elements and to create a sense of change that is internalized, reflective, and discursive in nature. As Jonathan Culler writes, “Apostrophe resists narrative because its now is not a moment in a temporal sequence but a now of discourse, of writing.”55 Newman, accordingly, employs apostrophe and soliloquy to resist narrative’s pull, thereby capturing gradual development on the level of poetic plotting. But it is important to realize that he employs this model of poetic plotting with a larger goal in mind: that of making purgatorial gradualism understandable, despite its seeming contradiction between suspension and movement. Newman’s use of devotional poetry thus allows him to perform purgatorial gradualism rather than simply explain it as he did in Tract 90.
Exploring the tension between narrative and lyric modes in the long Victorian poem, Morgan shows how verse meditations can yield this subtle form of narrative movement. She makes the case that the dramatic monologue especially exemplifies a “seamless blend of lyric and narrative temporalities” (160). Soliloquies can be said to function similarly in combining lyric with narrative elements to achieve equipoise between stasis and movement. This balance between lyric and narrative modes is the temporal essence of purgatory—a state caught between progress and suspension. Fittingly, this temporal paradox of progressive suspension is the subject of Gerontius’s first soliloquy:
. . . How still it is!
I hear no more the busy beat of time,
No, nor my fluttering breath, nor struggling pulse;
Nor does one moment differ from the next.
I had a dream; yes:—someone softly said
“He’s gone;” and then a sigh went round the room.
And then I surely heard a priestly voice
Cry “Subvenite;” and they knelt in prayer.
I seem to hear him still; but thin and low,
And fainter and more faint the accents come,
As at an ever-widening interval.
(14)
Time has not stopped; the “interval” between Gerontius’s moment of death and his reflections is “ever-widening.” The speaking of “Subvenite,” the responsorial recitation in the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, marks a countertime, reappearing at intervals to offset a subjective, lyrical, and discursive time of meditation from earthly time marked by ongoing spoken rites and the poem’s meter.56 He is reassured that change will continue unfolding even though it cannot be measured by even the smallest narrative unit, the moment, let alone more dramatic narrative markers such as events and turning points. As the Angel next explains, Gerontius’s sense of time passing slowly is irregular and does not correspond to the actual speed of his journey between death and purgatory.
Thou art not let; but with extremest speed
Art hurrying to the just and Holy Judge:
For scarcely art thou disembodied yet.
Divide a moment, as men measure time,
Into its million-million-millionth part,
Yet even less than that the interval
Since thou didst leave the body. . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Precise and punctual, men divide the hours,
Equal, continuous, for their common use.
Not so with us in th’ immaterial world;
But intervals in their succession
Are measured by the living thought alone,
And grow or wane with its intensity.
And time is not a common property;
But what is long is short, and swift is slow,
And near is distant, as received and grasped
By this mind and by that, and every one
Is standard of his own chronology.
(22–23)
The “hurrying” that immediately follows Gerontius’s death appears as stasis to him, and this sense of uneventful reflection is crucial to Newman’s ideas about conversion as a gradual rather than revolutionary process. Depicting the ultimate conversion from life to the afterlife, Newman attempts to have the best of both worlds: the temporality of the earthly poet—“precise,” “punctual,” and metered—and the temporality of suspended time in which the “fruit of grace” can go through a process of “maturing” (“Intermediate State,” 377) without being hurried and without conforming to measurable standards. This contradiction of a seemingly timeless duration is one of the central paradoxes Newman strives to represent. In his conception, purgatory occurs outside of earthly time, but it remains finite and telos-oriented. The goal of purgatory is to prepare souls for their exit from this state and their entrance into paradise. Yet despite unfolding in time, one’s duration in purgatory is indefinite, immeasurable, and not for “common use.” In trying to represent this temporal paradox, Newman uses soliloquies to explain his concept of the timeless duration while at the same time performing it, an effect uniquely achieved through poetic means. In other words, the soliloquies allow Newman to perform suspended contemplative action in the very act of describing it to readers, thereby uniting form and content in a way previously unavailable to him in his sermons and tracts.
Converting the Dramatic Monologue
Yet if Newman uses soliloquies to capture the “seamless blend of lyric and narrative temporalities” associated with the dramatic monologue, he also uses soliloquies to turn the dramatic monologue on its head. In featuring a lone central speaker, The Dream reframes the conflict between spiritual progress and egoism that Tennyson and Browning imagine in poems including “St. Simeon Stylites” and “Johannes Agricola in Meditation,” respectively.57 Johannes Agricola declares, “For I intend to get to God, / For ’tis to God I speed
