involves a problem of not knowing, or at least not acknowledging, the difference between “reach and grasp.”58 In trying to collapse this distinction, dramatic monologue speakers such as St. Simeon Stylites attempt to bypass the between state of being “unfit for earth, unfit for heaven” (line 3), a holding pattern that constitutes the central condition of growth in purgatory and also the suspended form of the dramatic monologue itself. But whereas Tennyson and Browning channel suspension and gradual revelation into doubt through dramatic irony, Newman tells us that Gerontius is saved from the beginning. This certainty of salvation marks an important difference between Newman’s poem and Tennyson’s and Browning’s dramatic monologues, a contrast more starkly realized when considering a work such as “Tithonus,”59 given Tennyson’s emphasis on immortality without redemption and stasis without the promise of progress, however imperceptible. In its structure, The Dream consequently operates quite differently than dramatic monologues by Tennyson and Browning, for The Dream instead works as a reassurance against doubt, using the soliloquies first to entertain apprehension and doubts and then turning to the explicatory dialogue with the Angel to dispel them. In this way, doubt of a spiritual nature is shifted to doubt of an experiential kind: the uncertainty of an individual in unfamiliar circumstances, not the doubt of someone on the brink of damnation. Angels accordingly take a leading hand and demons are relegated to the sidelines, where they appear comical and impotent as Satan’s cheerleaders, speaking in a doggerel reminiscent of Christina Rossetti’s goblin men: “What’s a saint? / One whose breath / Doth the air taint” (28).
The main threat in the poem instead comes from the isolation and fear of solipsism Gerontius experiences after first arriving in the afterlife, an anxiety that the poem itself performs by briefly collapsing into “the unconstrained lyrical ‘I’” of the dramatic monologue.60 Gerontius’s experience as a lone speaker is one of “deep rest” but also of strenuous “pain” in having his “thoughts” driven back “upon their spring” (14). His initial meditations are portrayed not restfully but as an act of self-cannibalism: “I now begin to feed upon myself, / Because I have nought else to feed upon” (15). This negative isolation is remedied by the Angel’s eventual appearance and the poem’s expansion into dramatic forms; thus, conversation rescues Gerontius from the social vacuum imagined at the core of his soliloquies. In relief, his soul says,
Now know I surely that I am at length
Out of the body: had I part with earth,
I never could have drunk those accents in,
And not have worshipped as a god the voice
That was so musical; but now I am
So whole of heart, so calm, so self-possessed,
With such a full content, and with a sense
So apprehensive and discriminant
As no temptation can intoxicate.
(20)
Only by losing self-possession—the transition from “Gerontius” to nameless “Soul” in purgatory—can the central speaker become fully “self-possessed” and “full content.” The pun on “content” as both an emotional state and one of repletion points up the paradox of feeling substantial only when removed from the world of earthly substance, but it also reconfigures the earlier cannibalism imagery as benign self-satisfaction: instead of eating away at oneself through depleting rumination, the Soul now feels “whole of heart,” a strangeness of eating one’s cake and having it too. This sense of paradoxical fullness counteracts the smug contentment of speakers such as Browning’s Johannes Agricola, who asserts that he was made by God “because that love had need / Of something irreversibly / Pledged solely its content to be” (lines 28–30). Newman illustrates a contentment that comes only with the loss of one’s physical body—a paradox at the heart of his ideas about purgatory as a place of disembodied substance.
Extremity: The Body in the Afterlife
To capture his speaker’s newly disembodied contentment, Newman develops various techniques for representing the experience of complete sensory loss—a state that would seem to defy representation. In Gerontius’s opening, the prayer “Be with me, Lord, in my extremity!” is echoed in his first concerns in the afterlife when he fears the loss of his body, this state of “extremity” involving a lack of his own physical extremities:
’Tis strange; I cannot stir a hand or foot,
I cannot make my fingers or my lips
By mutual pressure witness each to each,
Nor by the eyelid’s instantaneous stroke
Assure myself I have a body still.
(15)
At first Gerontius mistakenly thinks that he has maintained all of his senses except for sight, and this blindness functions as a synecdoche for complete sensory loss. As the Angel explains to him:
Hast thou not heard of those, who after loss
Of hand or foot, still cried that they had pains
In hand or foot, as though they had it still?
So is it now with thee, who has not lost
Thy hand or foot, but all which made up a man.
(33)
The Angel’s metaphor of having a phantom limb is one that Newman extends to help readers understand the implications of having a phantom body. In Newman’s clever poetic strategy, this phantom body is represented as an absence of sense perceptions that can be understood only through the uncanny continuance of perception. He therefore makes the task of representing this loss one that can in fact be understood in earthly terms. This retentive illusion allows his character to recount experiences that readers can comprehend while they can still interpret them as otherworldly. Absent senses are thus invoked through synesthesia, or as a ghostly presence recalled only through other senses, notably, hearing and touch, which act as surrogates for a full range of sensation: “I hear a singing; yet in sooth, / I cannot of that music rightly say / Whether I hear or touch or taste the tones” (16).
In addition to describing the sensation of having a “phantom body,” Newman also presents this disembodiment as a feeling of being physically enfolded in God’s giant palm.
Another marvel: someone has me fast
Within his ample palm; ’tis not a grasp
Such as they use on earth, but all around
Over the surface of my subtle being,
As though I were a sphere . . .
(16)
Gerontius finds himself safely in the womb-like palm of God, a divine and surprisingly literal realization of God being with him in “extremity,” Gerontius’s lack of physical extremities being soothed by God’s celestial hand. Worries of exhaustion and depletion are now replaced with images of gestation, later echoed in the final scene of immersion in the prenatal waters of purgatory. Gestation, with its creative rather than destructive potential, functions as an analogous temporal model for Newman’s idea of purgatorial progress and proves central to the poem’s appeal as a work focused on regeneration as consolation.
From Consolation to Conciliation
