During this month of devotions for the Holy Souls in Purgatory--who are indeed holy and bound for Heaven--Anna Mitchell or Matt Swaim and I will discuss themes and imagery from St. John Henry Newman's poem, The Dream of Gerontius on the Son Rise Morning Show each Monday in November.
So on Monday, November 7, at about 6:50 a.m. Central Time/7:50 a.m. Eastern Time (don't forget to Fall Back this weekend!), we'll start the series. Please listen live here, and remember that you may subscribe to the Son Rise Morning Show website for a reminder of the daily broadcasts here.
First, some background on the poem:
The plot of Newman's poem The Dream of Gerontius is simple:
1) Gerontius is on his deathbed and receives Last Rites and prays before he dies
2) Gerontius dies and experiences the afterlife as a disembodied Soul
3) Gerontius' Soul meets his Guardian Angel
4) His Soul encounters the demons of Hell on his way to Judgment
5) The Soul hears the choirs of heavenly Angels on his way to Judgment
5) The Soul is judged and sent to Purgatory
6) The Soul's Guardian Angel deposits him in Purgatory and promises to come back to convey him to Heaven
Newman wrote this poem, the longest he'd ever written, on 52 scraps of paper between January 17 and February 7, 1865. One of his biographers, Wilfrid Ward, describes its composition:
Now, after the abandonment of the Oxford scheme* gave him leisure for it, he set down in dramatic form the vision of a Christian's death on which his imagination had been dwelling. The writing of it was a sudden inspiration, and his work was begun in January and completed in February 1865. "On the 17th of January last," he writes to Mr. Allies in October, "it came into my head to write it, I really can't tell how. And I wrote on till it was finished on small bits of paper, and I could no more write anything else by willing it than I could fly." . . .
*The Oxford Scheme mentioned by Ward (son of William George Ward, the ultramontanist) was the plan to found an Oratory in Oxford to serve Catholic men attending one of the Colleges of the University of Oxford.
The Dream of Gerontius was then published in The Month, a periodical founded in 1864 by the convert Frances Margaret Taylor (Mother Magdalen of the Sacred Heart, Poor Servants of the Mother of God). The Jesuits in England bought The Month in 1865 and Father Henry James Coleridge, another convert (great nephew of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge), became the publisher and editor. Read more about the rather surprising response to the poem here, as Anglicans like Charles Kingsley, William Gladstone, and General George Gordon admired it greatly!
But the focus in our discussion Monday is on the content of the poem itself, not that background!
Gerontius is an old man, a faithful and practicing Catholic, and he is experiencing both the dread of death and the promise of eternal life:
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!)
That I am going, that I am no more.
'Tis this strange innermost abandonment,
(Lover of souls! great God! I look to Thee,)
This emptying out of each constituent
And natural force, by which I come to be.
He asks for his friends and the priest with him to pray for him and they do, beginning with the Litany of the Saints:
Holy Mary, pray for him.
All holy Angels, pray for him.
Choirs of the righteous, pray for him.
Holy Abraham, pray for him.
St. John Baptist, St. Joseph, pray for him.
St. Peter, St. Paul, St Andrew, St. John,
All Apostles, all Evangelists, pray for him.
All holy Disciples of the Lord, pray for him.
All holy Innocents, pray for him.
All holy Martyrs, all holy Confessors,
All holy Hermits, all holy Virgins . . .
Hearing their prayers, he can pray as he thought he could not:
And through such waning span
Of life and thought as still has to be trod,
Prepare to meet thy God.
And while the storm of that bewilderment
Is for a season spent,
And, ere afresh the ruin on me fall,
Use well the interval.
Gerontius then prays what will become one of the popular hymns taken from this poem, "Firmly I believe and truly" as he confesses and professes a summary of Catholic belief:
Sanctus fortis, Sanctus Deus,
De profundis oro te,
Miserere, Judex meus,
Parce mihi, Domine.
Firmly I believe and truly
God is three, and God is One;
And I next acknowledge duly
Manhood taken by the Son. . . .
But then he weakens again ("I can no more") and indeed, he senses and fears the presence of something evil:
Some bodily form of ill
Floats on the wind, with many a loathsome curse
Tainting the hallow'd air, and laughs, and flaps
Its hideous wings,
And makes me wild with horror and dismay.
O Jesu, help! pray for me, Mary, pray!
Some Angel, Jesu! such as came to Thee
In Thine own agony …
Mary, pray for me. Joseph, pray for me. Mary,
pray for me.
So the attendants intercede for him again ("Rescue this Thy servant in his evil hour") and after he dies, the priest intones the traditional prayer as I find it in my 1962 Roman Missal (or you may find it here):
Proficiscere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo!
Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul!
Go from this world! Go, in the Name of God
The Omnipotent Father, who created thee!
Go, in the Name of Jesus Christ, our Lord,
Son of the living God, who bled for thee!
Go, in the Name of the Holy Spirit, who
Hath been pour'd out on thee!
So what Newman has accomplished in this section is to convey even a faithful Catholic's human fear of death, describing both the physical and spiritual weakness that comes upon Gerontius. He cannot pray for himself as he wishes, so he asks others to do it for him. Gerontius faces the great mystery of death--he does not know what it is to not be alive and so he faces it with trepidation, even as he has faith in God and in the Church's prayers for him.
And these prayers are both on earth and in heaven, as the "assistants" at his deathbed and the priest call upon Jesus Christ our Lord to have mercy on Gerontius, and implore the angels and saints to pray with them for him. Since Newman poetically adapted prayers that many a Catholic had heard while at a loved one's deathbed, this was familiar scene to them. They had made the responses in the Litany of the Saints and watched their mother or father, brother or sister, die; seen the Sacrament of Anointing, and heard the priest's commending prayers for their loved one:
| Receive, Lord, Thy servant (handmaid) into the place of salvation, which he (she) hopes to obtain through Thy mercy.R.Amen. Deliver, Lord, the soul of Thy servant (handmaid) from all danger of Hell; and from all pain and tribulation.R.Amen . . . Let the heavens be opened to him (her), and the angels rejoice with him (her). Let the archangel St. Michael, whom Thou didst appoint the chief of the heavenly host, conduct him (her). Let the holy angels come out to meet him (her), and carry him (her) to the city of heavenly Jerusalem. Let blessed Peter the apostle, to whom God gave the Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, receive him (her). Let St. Paul the apostle, who was a vessel of election, assist him (her). Let St. John the beloved disciple, to whom the secrets of Heaven were revealed, intercede for him (her). Let all the holy apostles, who received from Jesus Christ the power of binding and loosing, pray for him (her). Let all the saints and elect of God, who in this world have suffered torments in the name of Christ, intercede for him (her); that being freed from the prison of his (her) body, he (she) may be admitted into the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who with Thee and the Holy Ghost, lives and reigns, world without end. Amen. |
Newman had dramatized it and brought to their imaginations afresh. In next week's highlight from The Death of Gerontius, we''ll see how Newman imagined the Soul of Gerontius after death and its meeting with its Guardian Angel!
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!
Image Source (Public Domain): Deathbed Scene from a 16th century Office of the Dead.
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