SOURCE: “Keble and The Christian Year,” in Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode, Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 72-113.

[In the following essay, Tennyson evaluates the structure and poetic style of The Christian Year, a work he regards as a “practical application of Tractarian poetics.”]

Now through her round of holy thought
The Church our annual steps has brought

—The Christian Year, “Sunday Next before Advent”

Keble's modern biographer, Georgina Battiscombe, uttering a general sentiment, has observed that The Christian Year has become for twentieth-century readers the obstacle rather than the avenue to an understanding of Keble.¹ One could add that The Christian Year has become for twentieth-century readers the obstacle to an understanding of The Christian Year. Few volumes of poetry so influential in their own day can have fallen into such obscurity and even disrepute in aftertimes as the volume that helped launch the Oxford Movement and profoundly colored a large body of poetry for more than two generations. Today it exists only in the spectral half-life of footnotes, along with Marmontel's Mémoires and Senancour's Obermann, except that too frequently the footnotes identifying The Christian Year are in error.² Recent scholarship has gone some way toward rehabilitating Keble, especially in his role as shaper of and spokesman for Tractarian critical principles.³ But recent scholarship has treated gingerly or not at all Keble's chief claim to fame in his own day and his chief contribution to the practical application of Tractarian poetics—The Christian Year.

Victorian laudations of The Christian Year are legion and come from all levels of society and churchmanship, but such modern assessments as exist have generally relegated the volume to a low place on the scale of poetic excellence. Critics find apparent support from Wordsworth, who praised the work backhandedly by remarking that it was so good he only wished he could have written it himself to make it better.⁴ Likewise, A. E. Housman's praise for the volume seems to us appropriately tempered by his conviction that what “devout women” admirers of it really like is not its poetry but its piety and that “good religious poetry, whether in Keble or Dante or Job, is likely to be most justly appreciated and most discriminatingly relished by the undevout.”⁵ The not infrequent acerbity of Hoxie Neale Fairchild seems to the modern mind for once justly evoked when he writes of The Christian Year, “Let no critic accuse me of praising Keble's pious nature-poetry because it is so unromantic: I think it is rubbish.”⁶ Modern critics are convinced that the Victorians were responding to the “sweetly pretty,”⁷ pious sentiments of a volume that extolled the conventional beauties of nature and the primacy of domestic virtues. Modern readers conceive of a mentality rather like that ridiculed by Matthew Arnold in speaking of the Victorian idea of heaven as “a kind of perfected middle-class home, with labour ended, the table spread, goodness all around, the lost ones restored, hymnody incessant.” It comes, then, as a surprise to find Arnold immediately thereafter quoting Keble as an apparent ally in opposition to such sentiments: “‘Poor fragments all of this low earth!’ Keble might well say.”⁸ Arnold is citing a line from The Christian Year to ridicule what twentieth-century critics take to be the essential appeal of the work itself.

Arnold's invocation of Keble to censure the middle-class vision is not a sign of Arnold's misapprehension of Keble's position; rather, it is a sign that Arnold understood Keble's uncompromising orthodoxy better than modern critics and that Arnold understood the point and purpose of The Christian Year better than those who take their cue solely from the conventional Victorian middle-class image of the work. Keble, of course, would not have rejected the gushing Victorian response that comes across to us as a kind of condemnation, nor would he have taken issue with Housman's “devout women” responding to the pious sentiments rather than to the poetry, but even more certainly Keble would have been pleased to find his godson Arnold quoting The Christian Year in a way that uses it to direct the mind to eternal things rather than things of this world. For Keble wrote The Christian Year from an aesthetic quite at variance with our own exaltation of the literary artifact as an autonomous world of its own; he wrote The Christian Year as an act of religious devotion rather than as an act of literary self-sufficiency.

Donald Davie⁹ has rightly chastised modern readers for a disinclination to entertain religious poetry unless it is very far removed in time, generally as far as the seventeenth century or earlier. If, as he argues, this militates against serious reading of Watts and other eighteenth-century poets, it does so even more strongly against Keble and the Victorians. I hope the previous chapter has provided the necessary background against which to view Keble and his fellows, for in order to understand the appeal of The Christian Year, what it was to its more thoughtful admirers, and how it exercised its extraordinary literary, religious, and social influence, we must consider it, not in the light of its later status as the standard confirmation gift or Sunday School attendance prize (these are, after all, the proof of that influence), but in the light of the poetic principles that govern its poetry and its form. Then we can see how it exerted its impact on the Tractarians and their successors.

THE FORM OF THE CHRISTIAN YEAR

The Christian Year is, first of all, a work of devotional poetry, that is, a literary work designed to enhance devotion, to advance Christian truth in a form appropriate to its august character. It is the work of the quintessential Tractarian poet-priest “seeking the Deity in poetry or prayer.” The best way to understand The Christian Year as a Tractarian work is to see it in relation to the worship it was designed to enhance, and that requires an understanding of its most visible, and most overlooked, feature—its subordination to the liturgical year generally and to the Book of Common Prayer specifically. The linkage of poetry to the annual cycle of worship is the premier achievement of The Christian Year. Today this linkage can scarcely be sufficiently emphasized, so far are modern readers from familiarity with the Prayer Book. Yet in a very real sense The Christian Year is its form; without it, it is simply an uneven collection of poems, all of them religious, many on nature, but only a few rising to a high level of poetic distinction. Seen in terms of its form, however, The Christian Year is a highly original poetic document that caused a quiet revolution in prayer and poetry in the Victorian age.

The outward shape and form of The Christian Year came to be taken for granted by mid- and late-Victorian readers, but it will strike most modern readers with even greater novelty than it presented to readers of the earliest editions. That outward form is wholly dependent on the Book of Common Prayer. The Book of Common Prayer in turn is the specifically Anglican formulation of Christian worship based on ancient and medieval practice and organized chiefly around the liturgical year developed over the Christian centuries. In a time of widespread liturgical experiment coupled with even more widespread liturgical ignorance like the present, it is well to remind ourselves of the main outlines of the historical liturgical year and also to look at its presentation in the Book of Common Prayer as received by Keble and others in the nineteenth century.¹⁰

The most accessible points of contact with the liturgical year for the contemporary mind are the organization of the year into weeks and the two great festivals of Christmas and Easter. These three features are still generally familiar and are the irreducible elements in the elaborate structure of the annual sequence of Christian worship. Of the three, the most central, indeed, the anchor of the church year, is the annual recurrence of Easter. This has been so since the very beginnings of Christian worship. Because Easter is linked to the Jewish Passover and hence to the lunar calendar, it is a movable feast, and the changes in its date cause some variation annually in the number of Sundays in other seasons before and after Easter. Moreover, it is the Easter events that constitute the essence of the Sunday eucharistic worship, so that the week itself is seen in terms of a re-enactment every seven days of the central event of Christian history. As Keble wrote in his poem for Easter: “Sundays by thee [that is, Easter] more glorious break / An Easter Day in every week.” The very existence of the seven-day week, although of great antiquity in the east, was in the west a product of Christianity and did not become universal until the late fourth century. It was in the fourth century too that the fixing of the date of Christmas gave the liturgical year its other anchor. From that period on, the weeks of the church year have been disposed and often named in terms of their relationship to one or the other of these two festivals. In time, other festivals also gave their names to liturgical seasons, but their division and occurrence are dependent upon the fixed date of Christmas and the movable date of Easter.

Since the early middle ages, it has been customary to divide the church year into six main seasons, the first two related to the date of Christmas, the other four to the date of Easter. The six seasons are: Advent, Christmastide, Septuagesima, Lent, Eastertide, and Trinity season. The year begins with the Advent season, which in turn begins on Advent Sunday, the Sunday closest to St. Andrew's Day, November 30. Advent is a season of four Sundays of preparation for the celebration of the birth of Christ. That event in turn ushers in Christmastide, with its well-known twelve days beginning December 25 and culminating in the visit of the Magi, the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6, but containing also the following period of two to six Sundays (depending on the date of Easter in any given year), which are reckoned as Sundays after Epiphany. The calendar then moves to the pre-lenten period of Septuagesima, Sexagesima, and Quinquagesima, three Sundays named in terms of the approximate number of days before Easter (seventy, sixty, and fifty, respectively).¹¹ The lenten season proper begins with the Wednesday after Quinquagesima, Ash Wednesday, forty days before Easter, and moves through six Sundays in Lent to Easter, some of these Sundays bearing their own special names, such as Passion Sunday and Palm Sunday, but all part of the lenten season. Easter is followed by five Sundays called Sundays after Easter, and then by Ascension Day, the Thursday falling forty days after Easter. The following Sunday is called the Sunday after Ascension Day. All of the period from Easter day through the Octave of the Ascension is Eastertide or Paschaltide. The next Sunday is Pentecost, or Whitsunday, fifty days after Easter, the day commemorating the founding of the visible Church. In the Roman Church (and increasingly today in the Anglican) all following Sundays up to Advent are reckoned as Sundays after Pentecost, but historically in the Church of England, following medieval Sarum use (that is, the pattern followed at Salisbury), the Sunday after Pentecost is known as Trinity Sunday and all Sundays following it up to Advent are reckoned as Sundays after Trinity. The maximum possible number of such Sundays after Trinity is twenty-six (twenty-seven if reckoned after Pentecost), but again the date of Easter will determine just how many such Sundays actually are observed in any given year. In Anglican use the final Sunday in Trinity (or Pentecost) season is called The Sunday next before Advent. Then the year begins anew.

The foregoing is the main outline of the church year, but there are also other special feasts and observances commemorated on particular, usually fixed, days in the church year. In the Church of England there are relatively more such days than in dissenting churches, but relatively fewer than in Roman or Orthodox churches; in all Christian churches some elements of the liturgical year are observed, at a minimum Christmas, Easter, and the division into weeks. It is an obvious rule of thumb that the “higher” the denomination, the more extensive and elaborated the liturgical year, not only in terms of specific seasons, saints' days, festivals, and other commemorations, but also in terms of the appropriate vestments, colors, and prescribed prayers and procedures for seasons and days within the liturgical year.

In Anglican usage the liturgical year finds its expression in the Book of Common Prayer. From its earliest form as the First Prayer Book of Edward VI in 1549, to the 1559 Elizabethan Prayer Book, through the 1662 revision that held sway to our own times, the Book of Common Prayer adhered more rather than less to the fully elaborated year. In addition to provision for all the main seasons and festivals cited above, the Prayer Book provides also for thirty-two other named saints' days, holy days, and festivals: such days as the feasts of St. Stephen, St. John, and the Holy Innocents, which fall in immediate three-day succession after Christmas day; or the days in Holy Week preceding Easter; and such long-established feasts as the Purification or Candlemas (February 2), the Annunciation or Ladyday (March 25), All Saints (November 1), and the like. In keeping with the historic practice of the Church, the Book of Common Prayer provides for each of these named Sundays, festivals, or saints' days specific readings, normally a collect, epistle, and gospel, to be read at the appointed place in the communion service on the Sunday or holy day in question. These are known as the proper prefaces, or propers, for the day, being the readings proper or appropriate to the particular named celebration. Also in keeping with the medieval missals, breviaries, and service books from which it was derived, the Book of Common Prayer provides forms of worship and orders of procedure for various other sacraments and aspects of Church life. For example, at the beginning, the Prayer Book offers forms for Morning and Evening Prayer (or Evensong), which are Anglican adaptations of medieval matins and vespers, with additions from the other canonical hours. Following the cycle of the Church year and of named feasts and saints' days, the Prayer Book provides forms and prayers for the sacraments of Baptism, Matrimony, Ordination, Burial of the Dead, and then some distinctively Anglican prayers, such as those for the deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot, the martyrdom of Charles I, the Restoration, and so on, for a total of sixteen such forms. Keble included poems for all special services and procedures in the Prayer Book, omitting only poems on purely utilitarian and undevotional Prayer Book inclusions like the Lectionary, the Thirty-nine Articles, and the Tables of Kindred.¹² The result is a series of poems that matches in exact order the sequence of worship in the Book of Common Prayer and that was designed to be read in the light of that book.

The liturgical pattern of the Prayer Book not only dictates the sequence of poems in The Christian Year but in fact gives the volume a coherence and purpose that it would otherwise lack. So overriding is the importance of this shaping element that one can understand why the volume is sometimes referred to as a single poem, though it is in fact a collection of 109 poems, for in one sense the collection is a single poem, a poem on the Book of Common Prayer. Much of the modern misunderstanding of what the volume is stems from the unwillingness or inability to approach it in relation to its model. It is as though the reader came to Paradise Lost without any awareness of its relation to the Bible, or to the Divine Comedy without an understanding of the concepts of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, though such parallels are inexact, for Dante and Milton draw on multiple sources and they structure their poems independently of any single source. The Christian Year not only refers to something outside itself; it exists and is shaped by virtue of the prior existence and form of that outside work. Without it, The Christian Year would not be.

The dependence of The Christian Year on the form of the Prayer Book could be called slavish were it not for the fact that Keble aspired to no originality in the matter. “Don’t be original,” was a Keble watchword often quoted by the young Tractarians with something like approving awe. Yet that same avoidance of originality became in itself a kind of originality; by making it old, Keble made it new. The few anticipations of Keble's pattern that exist in seventeenth-century poetry or among the small number of eighteenth-century collections of hymns must be considered no more than suggestive to Keble, even allowing for the unlikely assumption that he knew of the hymn collections in the first place.¹³ The idea of a collection of poems organized in exact sequence of the order of worship in the Prayer Book turns out to be a strikingly original concept in devotional poetry. But it was an idea whose time had come. Keble, perhaps without fully realizing it, catalyzed a latent sensibility. He was to do something of the same kind in 1833 with the Assize Sermon. Twentieth-century readers view the Assize Sermon with some perplexity, seeing in it the very modest expression of ideas put more vigorously by Newman and others. They are likely to do the same with The Christian Year and to puzzle over its enormous popularity and influence. In both cases the quiet activation of something just below the surface sparked the imagination of the Tractarians and eventually of the population at large. It was Keble's capacity for calling attention to those “long-neglected truths” of Leslie and Sikes that made his Assize Sermon electrifying, and his capacity for looking afresh at so familiar a document as the Prayer Book that made The Christian Year a new departure in poetry.

As has been noted, The Christian Year parallels the Book of Common Prayer throughout, from the opening poems “Morning” and “Evening” (corresponding to the offices for Morning and Evening Prayer at the beginning of the book), through the year and the holy days, to the special offices and provisions of the Prayer Book, and ending with the Ordination Service. This organization is vital to the character and effects of The Christian Year overall, but another formal element in The Christian Year that reflects the shaping influence of the Prayer Book is the structure of the poems themselves as prayers. Perhaps the most common, certainly the most memorable, phrase in the Prayer Book orders for worship is “Let us pray.” Keble's frequent pattern in the poetry of The Christian Year follows this recurring Prayer Book injunction, and it would be possible to specify in the poems the various recognized types of prayer—petitionary, intercessory, prayers of thanksgiving and praise, and the like; Charlotte Mary Yonge has virtually done so in her study of The Christian Year.¹⁴ The most characteristic form for a poem in the collection is a meditation or reflection on nature or daily life seen from a Christian perspective, or a retelling of a Christian story (normally one appointed for the day), both generally concluding with an explicit prayer. The final stanzas of “Morning” and “Evening” illustrate the practice in its simplest form:

Only, O Lord, in Thy dear love
Fit us for perfect Rest above;
And help us, this and every day,
To live more nearly as we pray.

(“Morning”)

and

Come near and bless us when we wake,
Ere through the world our way we take;
Till in the ocean of Thy love
We lose ourselves in Heaven above.

(“Evening”)

The frequency of prayers within and at the end of poems reinforces the Prayer Book identification of the volume and invites the reader to link his own prayerful reflections to the liturgical pattern provided by the Prayer Book.

The structural linkage of The Christian Year with the Book of Common Prayer had several obvious practical consequences. It made possible the use of the volume as a companion to the Book of Common Prayer. Countless Victorian families came to use it in that way, reading aloud the appropriate Keble poem along with family Bible verses throughout the year. These readings tended to reinforce each other, making The Christian Year a kind of extension of the Prayer Book and probably in many minds intermingling the two, transferring even some of the sanctity of the Book of Common Prayer onto Keble's volume. The organization of Keble's collection also served to renew attention to the Prayer Book itself and to the liturgical year, both of which became hallmarks of the Oxford Movement and eventually spread beyond the confines of the Movement. Thus while Keble may have been the recipient of some of the piety and devotion directed to the Prayer Book, he was also the cause of renewed interest in that book and therefore of renewed interest in an ordered, liturgical system of worship. The Christian Year also directed attention to the Church itself as a visible body, for it was the Church that was the source and keeper of the ecclesiastical year and of its observance through the Prayer Book. The Christian Year thus exercised a gentle polemic in favor of the visible Church and her formularies. One of the points on which the Tractarians insisted in all of their arguments and “innovations” was that they were doing nothing more than what was enjoined by the Prayer Book itself. By creating a mirror-effect of influence on and subordination to the Prayer Book, The Christian Year benefited from the authority of the Prayer Book while also reinforcing that authority.

Much has been made in earlier criticism of the fact that the poems in The Christian Year were not originally composed in the sequence they occupy in the volume and that many are not uniquely appropriate to the Sunday or holy day to which they are ostensibly directed. In truth, the period of composition of the poems ranged from 1819 to 1827, and later editions carrying the date of composition next to the poem (these did not appear in the first edition) show clearly how Keble rearranged a gathering of poems written over a long period to correspond to the Church year. Likewise, there are poems attached to a particular Sunday or holy day referring to some other season of the year than the one in which the day falls (an April poem in Epiphany season, for example¹⁵). But these aspects of Keble's arrangement only make the more clear his liturgical and devotional purpose when he collected his poems, and they have the same value (and no more) as the examination of the order (where it can be known) of Tennyson's stanzas in the poem some Victorians held to be a kind of secular Christian Year—In Memoriam.¹⁶ Keble's final arrangement of his poems shows that the idea informing The Christian Year grew on him throughout the 1820s, when he was composing the poems, much as In Memoriam grew on Tennyson. And the arrangement also shows that the final form in which he presented his poems to the public is one in which the sequence is a fundamental part of the presentation and that The Christian Year is what it is because of that sequence.

Yet a further link between Keble's volume and the Prayer Book comes through his prefacing each poem with a biblical epigraph, in most cases a passage from the proper readings for the day from the Prayer Book. Thus the poem for Christmas Day is preceded by the passage from Luke, “And suddenly there was with the Angel, a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God”; the poem for Whitsunday or Pentecost is preceded by the passage from Acts telling of the cloven tongues of fire. And so on. These passages of course appear in the readings for the day appointed in the Prayer Book. One can move from the Prayer Book readings to the corresponding day in The Christian Year with a sense of passing to an elaboration of or commentary on the reading in the Prayer Book.¹⁷

Largely as a consequence of his High Church background and his own clerical experience (Keble was serving as his father's curate during the time of the composition of most of these poems), Keble's mind moved naturally in terms of the Church year, and most of the poems, whenever composed, turn on events commemorated in the ecclesiastical year. Poem after poem in the collection offers reflections on (and therefore reinforcement of) the events of the Christian story and their liturgical commemoration.

With the sequence of the poems, the epigraphs from the propers, and the subjects of the poems themselves directing the reader ever and again to the Prayer Book and to the cycle of worship throughout the year, there would appear to be no further way to emphasize the Prayer Book affinities of The Christian Year. Yet it proved possible to make the Prayer Book connection and the devotional character of the volume even more evident in succeeding editions. The course of this development is extremely revealing of the way in which the collection was received and the way in which its potential was realized, even beyond the presentation of the first edition. It makes us realize how much The Christian Year developed in concert with the Oxford Movement. Margaret Oliphant gives us the flavor of these later editions in Salem Chapel (1863) when the dissenting minister Mr. Vincent ventures into the Anglican bookshop and bends over “the much-multiplied volume … poising in one hand a tiny miniature copy just made to slip within the pocket of an Anglican waistcoat, and in the other the big red-leaved and morocco-bound edition, as if weighing their respective merits.” Shortly afterwards she refers to it as “the Anglican lyre.” She has Lady Western order two gift copies. “I know they are all on the side table, and I shall go and look at them,” says Lady Western. “Not the very smallest copy, Mr. Masters, and not that solemn one with the red edges; something pretty, with a little ornament and gilding: they are for two little protégées of mine. Oh, here is exactly what I want! another one like this please.”¹⁸

What had happened in these succeeding editions of The Christian Year offers the ultimate proof of its symbiosis with the Prayer Book. It offers as well an illustration in miniature of the course of the Anglo-Catholic movement in the Church of England and of the way in which Keble and the Tractarians opened new avenues for religious expression. The Christian Year became in itself a kind of Prayer Book, an Anglican devotional manual complete in physical detail with the features characteristic of devotional publications.

Keble had early toyed with the idea of illustrations to accompany the collection but abandoned the notion before publication. Later editions, especially after the book went out of copyright, put the idea into practice, sometimes with a vengeance. Illustrations ranged from vague pastoral scenes of the sort the Victorians used for editions of Wordsworth, to the sentimental Sunday School style pictures of biblical events, to vivid and very Continental religious iconography of the Crucifixion, the Crown of Thorns, the Sacred Heart, and the like. That is, they range from Evangelical to Catholic. And while the illustrations were growing in frequency and intensity, the physical format of the volume was changing. Increasingly, later editions appeared with gilt edges in the manner of Prayer Books, Bibles, and missals. Colored streamer bookmarks were added; margins were marked in black or red ruled lines, frequently with religious devices at the corners or elsewhere on the page. Bindings went to soft white, red, or black stippled leather with gold crosses on them. The volume was issued, as Mrs. Oliphant makes clear, in a multitude of sizes, from the tiny vest-pocket size to large, almost lecternsized editions. There even appeared individual editions of separate poems from the volume, normally the poems for Morning and Evening, the two from the collection that had the greatest currency as hymns. The great bulk of these decorated editions aimed at the market for religious gifts, and, like the Prayer Book itself, were probably thought of far more in religious than in literary terms.

It is almost impossible today to trace in detail the exact dates of the changes in format of these editions, but from an examination of many library and private copies, I find that the movement toward what we may call the “missalization” of The Christian Year began fairly early in the course of its publication history, was well established before Keble's death, and must therefore have had his approval. By the 1870s, when the volume could be freely reprinted, the decorated style had reached flood tide, rather like the Gothic Revival. Cause and effect cannot be disentangled here to say with confidence that either the Prayer Book or The Christian Year led the way. Both were subject to an increasingly Catholic visual presentation as the Tractarian Movement became more ritualistic. The increasing elaboration of the physical format of The Christian Year must be seen as the bibliographic counterpart to priestly vestments and altar decorations, which are the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual conviction about the nature of worship. The Book of Common Prayer itself appeared in more obviously religious formats throughout the age, in contrast to the publication style of eighteenth-century Prayer Books, which was indistinguishable from that of any other kind of book. That The Christian Year lent itself to ever more Catholic treatment illustrates one of the inherent characteristics of the Tractarian position. The volume was from the start an incitement to devotion; it was inevitable that this quality would find expression in the physical presentation of the book.

None of these developments appears to have dismayed the Tractarians. Nor could they have, given the aesthetic position the Tractarians held. Poetry was the handmaiden of religion, and religious handmaidens were rightly vested in garments suited to their office.

THE POETRY OF THE CHRISTIAN YEAR

Once we recognize that the form of The Christian Year is both its most distinctive feature and an exemplification of the Tractarian poetic, which construed literature as a mode of “seeking the Diety in prayer”—once, that is, we recognize the work as a devotional manual—we are able to take an equally Tractarian approach to the poetry in the volume. Such an approach reminds us that, however necessary it is for critical purposes to isolate a given poem or portion of it for examination, the poem still functions as part of the larger construct of a sequence of poetic devotions keyed to the Church year. The poem takes much of its coloration and force from its setting and from the devotional attitude of the rightly disposed reader. A Tractarian approach offers other pointers to the character of the poetry in The Christian Year, for like the structure of the volume, the poetry also grows out of Tractarian poetics. The poetry exemplifies the two leading Tractarian concepts of Analogy and Reserve; Analogy governs the subject matter of the poetry, Reserve the style.

We have seen that the doctrine of Analogy in Tractarian eyes is more than a kind of nature typology whereby certain objects in nature symbolize and point to truths of both natural and revealed religion, though it is of course at least that. At most, however, Analogy is the doctrine of the sacramental system. Newman put it well in speaking of The Christian Year as one of the main avenues by which he came to understand the meaning of that system:

yet I think I am not wrong in saying, that the two main intellectual truths which [The Christian Year] brought home to me, were the same two, which I had learned from Butler, though recast in the creative mind of my new master. The first of these was what may be called, in a large sense of the word, the Sacramental system; that is, the doctrine that material phenomena are both the types and the instruments of real things unseen,—a doctrine, which embraces, not only what Anglicans, as well as Catholics, believe about Sacraments properly so called; but also the article of “the Communion of Saints” in its fulness; and likewise the Mysteries of the faith. (A, p. 29)¹⁹

It is the sacramental system, Tractarian Analogy, that comprehends the overall subject matter of the poems of The Christian Year. Walter Lock recognized this element in his edition of the volume, though Lock did not specifically link it to Tractarian Analogy. He wrote: “The most striking feature [of The Christian Year] is its width of sympathy, its sense of the consecration of all life” (CY, p. xii). And later he wrote of its “large-hearted sympathy which includes all creation within its embrace, and sees the consecration of God's presence on every side” (CY, p. xiii).²⁰

If the subject matter of the poetry of The Christian Year generally is the sacramental system, specifically that system is most often illustrated through external nature. Nature is the single most visible topic of the poems and the one most likely to be interpreted as a kind of defused Wordsworthianism. Accordingly, we must consider Keble's use of nature, the subject of so many of his poems, in the light of both Wordsworth's work and of Tractarian Analogy.

In 1832 Wordsworth wrote a poem called “Devotional Incitements” that reads almost like a poem from The Christian Year.²¹ One is tempted to speculate that it may have been an instance of Wordsworth's improving upon or even answering Keble. In the poem, Wordsworth urges man to aspire heavenward just as all things in Nature do—the spirits of the flowers, fragrances, the songs of birds and brooks, and so on. He regrets that religious practices that also teach man to aspire—the use of hymns, incense, pictures—have decayed or been spurned. But Nature, he assures the reader, unchangingly teaches, providing in all seasons “divine monition” that we do not live by bread alone and that “Every day should leave some part / For a sabbath of the heart.”

Keble would surely have agreed that nature regularly yields divine monition, and he would have agreed that church forms have been permitted in some quarters to “decay and languish” or to be spurned. But Keble, whose motto was “in medio Ecclesiae,”²² would certainly not have accepted nature as sufficient substitute for the Church, as Wordsworth appears to do in “Devotional Incitements.” It is precisely the willingness to accept nature as sole teacher that renders Wordsworth's poem not quite Tractarian and that points to the peculiar quality Keble brought to nature poetry in The Christian Year.

The locus classicus for Keble's view of nature lies in the poem for “Septuagesima Sunday,” which begins:

There is a Book, who runs may read,
                    Which heavenly Truth imparts,
And all the lore its scholars need,
                    Pure eyes and Christian hearts.
The works of God above, below,
                    Within us and around,
Are pages in that Book to shew
                    How God Himself is found.

These first two stanzas are Wordsworthian and something more. Like Wordsworth, Keble is asserting that nature offers “divine monition,” but Keble makes plain that the lessons of nature require “pure eyes and Christian hearts” for correct understanding. The rest of the poem provides a capsule version of Tractarian Analogy: the sky is like the love of the Maker, for it embraces all; the Church on earth is an analogue of the moon in heaven, for each borrows its radiance from its “sun,” which is both the heavenly body and the Son of God; the saints in heaven are stars; the saints on earth are like trees, having for their root, flower, and fruits, the virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity; dew that falls is like heavenly grace; storms and tempests are analogues of God's power; and the gentle breeze is like the activity of the Holy Spirit.²³

All of this analogizing marks the poem as something more than Wordsworthian, as indeed distinctly Tractarian. And what is done so transparently in the poem for Septuagesima is done with greater or lesser explicitness in the treatment of nature (and other topics) throughout the volume, beginning even with the opening poems corresponding to Morning and Evening Prayer. In the latter, for example, Keble shows the way a Christian heart sees Analogy in nature:

When round Thy wondrous works below
My searching rapturous glance I throw,
Tracing out Wisdom, Power, and Love,
In earth or sky, in stream or grove.

And in the former he assures his readers that they will know the “bliss of souls serene” when they have sworn to see God in everything. Also very much to this point is the poem for the “Fourth Sunday after Advent,” which begins with the assertion that it is not an idle “poet's dream” that we should see messages in nature, that we should hear

In the low chant of wakeful birds,
                    In the deep weltering flood,
In whispering leaves, these solemn words—
                    “God made us all for good.”
All true, all faultless, all in tune,
                    Creation's wondrous choir
Opened in mystic unison
                    To last till time expire.

Numerous other poems in the volume give varied expression to Keble's conviction that “the low sweet tones of Nature's lyre” are meant to instruct us about God's works and ways. For all the love of nature readers discern in The Christian Year, they do not come away from Keble's volume with the same sense of nature as herself a deity that readers of Wordsworth can well take away from his poetry. They see nature rather as a system offering a series of correspondences with qualities of her creator.

Readers come away from Keble not only with a sense of nature offering correspondences but also with an awareness of the Tractarian sense of sin touching even nature. In the recital of the analogy of nature in the poem for Septuagesima, Keble concludes:

Two worlds are ours: ’tis only Sin
                    Forbids us to descry
The mystic heaven and earth within,
                    Plain as the sea and sky.
Thou who hast given me eyes to see
                    And love this sight so fair,
Give me a heart to find out. Thee,
                    And read Thee everywhere,

In the poem for the “Fourth Sunday after Trinity,” Keble dwells at greater length on the way sin beclouds perception of the two worlds:

Sin is with man at morning break,
                    And through the live-long day
Deafens the ear that fain would wake
                    To Nature's simple lay.

The solution he offers is twofold. First, it is Wordsworthian: to hear nature's lay one must remove oneself from the sound of man, from the din of human cities;

When one by one each human sound
                    Dies on the awful ear,
Then Nature's voice no more is drowned,
                    She speaks and we must hear.

But Keble does not stop there:

Then pours she on the Christian heart
                    That warning still and deep,
At which high spirits of old would start
                    E’en from their Pagan sleep.

The “warning” is that behind the appearances of nature stands the creator of nature: “Streaks of brightest heaven behind / Cloudless depths of light.”

Keble's implied reader is thus always a Christian reader. It is not enough to be responsive to nature's beauties as things in themselves, or even as vague pointers to a higher power. One must have a Christian understanding of nature as an analogue of God and a Christian understanding of sin as an impediment to seeing God clearly through nature:

Mine eye unworthy seems to read
                    One page of Nature's beauteous book;
It lies before me, fair outspread—
                    I only cast a wishful look.

(“Fourth Sunday in Advent”)²⁴

The corrective to such a condition is Christian patience and humility:

But patience! there may come a time
                    When these dull ears shall scan aright
Strains that outring Earth's drowsy chime,
                    As Heaven outshines the taper's light.
These eyes, that dazzled now and weak,
                    At glancing motes in sunshine wink,
Shall see the King's full glory break,
                    Nor from the blissful vision shrink:
In fearless love and hope uncloyed
                    For ever on that ocean bright
Empowered to gaze; and undestroyed,
                    Deeper and deeper plunge in light.

(“Fourth Sunday in Advent”)

The insistent theological reminders of human sin and the imperfections of nature give a mournful cast to Keble's nature poetry, but at the same time they give it a peculiar tension quite different from the tension in Wordsworth's poetry, though Keble rarely knows how to exploit it for the best poetic effect. Where Wordsworth, even in a late poem like “Devotional Incitements,” finds a pure delight in nature (“where birds and brooks from leafy dells. / Chime forth unwearied canticles”), Keble's joy in nature usually draws forth somber reflections on the imperfections of this world as a consequence of original sin:

Hence all thy groans and travail pains,
                    Hence, till thy God return,
In wisdom's ear thy blithest strains,
                    O Nature, seem to mourn.

This mournful element on the one hand harks back to the eighteenth-century graveyard school (though Cowper is an even more likely source) and on the other anticipates the sadder and more elegiac character of so much Victorian nature poetry as compared with Romantic. Keble's poetry may have been a contributing factor to the subtle but unmistakable difference between Victorian and Romantic response to nature; and in many an inward ear, when a Victorian contemplated nature, may have been sounding (as it did for Pendennis) the “solemn church music” of The Christian Year. One rather thinks it was in Arnold's ear when he wrote on the occasion of Wordsworth's death of Wordsworth's “healing power.”

Even when Keble and Wordsworth agree in finding epiphanies in nature, they part company in attribution of the source. Wordsworth, especially in his early poetry, is far less specific than Keble in attributing the transcendent experiences of nature to the traditional Christian God. By not doing so Wordsworth lays himself open to charges of pantheism, but perhaps he also commends himself to less theologically inclined readers then and now. Keble insistently relates the glories of nature to a right understanding of Christian truth:

Till thou art duly trained, and taught
                    The concord sweet of Love divine:
Then with that inward Music fraught,
                    For ever rise, and sing, and shine.

(“Fourth Sunday in Advent”)

Nature for Keble is sacramental in the sense that, like a sacrament, it is an “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual truth.”²⁵ The key words in the poetry, however, are not “sacrament” or “sacramental” (neither of which appears in The Christian Year; nor does any form of the word “analogy”), but words like “dew,” “divine,” “light,” “radiance,” “rapture,” “sweet,” and above all “love” (this latter the most frequent word in the volume).²⁶ While he can be overly didactic about the function of nature in a poem like that for Septuagesima, the doctrine of Reserve prevents him from speaking as openly and directly of something as holy as a sacrament. Yet the atmosphere breathed by the volume is precisely that of “consecration of all life,” as Lock put it, or the sacramental system, as Newman recognized. Nature occupies center stage in this system, but it is the system, not nature itself, that the poetry is designed to illuminate. Nature to the Tractarian mind is, like poetry, a handmaiden to divine truth. No wonder that the lines Newman found himself thinking his own were Keble's:²⁷

Every leaf in every nook,
Every wave in every brook,
Chanting with a solemn voice
Minds us of our better choice.

(“First Sunday after Epiphany”)

Nature, like poetry, serves to reinforce Christian truth, not to originate her own. Nature and the analogical system also reinforce the characteristic structure of the poems that moves from contemplation to prayer, for nature leads the Christian mind from observation of physical beauty to reflection on what lies behind the appearances to worship of the creator of all things.

Thus the widespread belief that Keble's poetry is Wordsworth and water is really off the mark, as far as concerns its intellectual content. Keble's nature poetry is rather Wordsworth moraliśe or Wordsworth plus theology. If it is less effective than Wordsworth's nature poetry, this has more to do with Keble's gifts as a poet than with the intellectual assumptions behind the poetry, for those same assumptions—nature as God's creation and sign, nature as fallen with man and yet redeemed through Christ—when exploited so brilliantly by Hopkins, become a basis for transcending Wordsworth and reinvigorating a faded Romantic nature, moving it to something far more deeply interfused with a philosophy and a theology.²⁸ Keble's strong sense of the sacramental system must be counted a bridge between the two. In Keble's case the theological dimension—nature as part of the analogy of creation—is always dominant.

It is mainly as a reflection of the sacramental or analogical system that Keble approaches the other topics of his poetry in The Christian Year. The treatment of nature can stand as a paradigm for Keble's treatment of these other topics: daily life, the home, family relations, work, rural scenes, and, of course, biblical and Christian story in conjunction with saints' days and Church feasts. Like nature, all of these are regularly related to traditional moral and theological teaching, with perhaps an especially Tractarian stress on humility and self-denial:

The trivial round, the common task,
Would furnish all we ought to ask;
Room to deny ourselves; a road
To bring us daily, nearer God.

(“Morning”)

Also especially Tractarian is the emphasis on the role of the Church, though this aspect is less pronounced in the poetry (as opposed to the organization) of The Christian Year than it would come to be in later Tractarian verse.²⁹ Perhaps this is why only the most severe dissenters found the volume too Catholic. The poem for the First Sunday in Lent links both Church and home as forms of God's blessings to humankind. “The Church, our Zoar,”³⁰ Keble calls it. In the poem for Whitsunday (Penetecost) he recalls the founding of the visible Church by the tongues of fire. For Tuesday in Whitsun-week he speaks of the function of the Church to remind one of God: “And yet of Thee from year to year / The Church's solemn chant we hear.” Most arresting in this connection is his poem for Trinity Sunday in which he very modestly anticipates what will provide Isaac Williams with the subject of most of his devotional poetry—the physical structure of the Church as a means of teaching about God:

Along the Church's central space
The sacred weeks with unfelt pace
Have borne us on from grace to grace.
From each carved nook and fretted bend
Cornice and gallery seem to send
Tones that with seraph hymns might blend.
Three solemn parts together twine
In harmony's mysterious line;
Three solemn aisles approach the shrine.(31)

The seven sacraments also appear, but chiefly in the poems especially appointed for them in correspondence with the Prayer Book. The sacramental element is thus conveyed as much through references to nature, daily life, and Christian story as through specific actions of the Church, striking that balance between personal feeling and formal ritual that the Tractarians tried to maintain.

Finally, among topics of poems in the volume, the reader cannot but be struck by the intense Christology of Keble's views. The words “Christ,” “Jesus,” and “Saviour” appear far more often than the word “Church.” Keble's Christ has not the valor and act of a windhover, but neither is he exclusively the gentle Jesus, meek and mild, of so much Evangelical hymnody. He is shown often in suffering and in triumph, while the poems retrace the events in Christ's life that are commemorated throughout the year, and he is especially compared to light and radiance and glory in nature, and, with almost medieval consistency, to the sun. Keble's “Sun of my soul! Thou Saviour dear” from “Evening” is but the best known example of a persistent imagery of light and dazzling radiance associated with Christ in the poems. But Keble's position is encompassing enough to allow for the subsequent illustrations of the text that could be tailored to Protestant or Catholic views.

There are some more or less polemic pieces in the volume, but these are very much in the minority. Discussion of poems like that for Gunpowder Treason, with its jibe at Rome and its much agitated doctrinal change in its lines on the Eucharist,³² should not be allowed to obscure the fact that, for the most part, the volume found favor for its absence of polemics and its capturing of the “soothing tendency” of the Prayer Book that Keble claimed was his purpose in the introduction. The real “polemic,” as I have argued, is far subtler; it comes through the adaptation of the form of The Christian Year to the Prayer Book, providing continual reinforcement of the idea of formal worship through the visible Church. The cumulative effect of the poetry itself is to offer guidance and reassurance to the reader as he goes through the Church year that there is possible in the world about him holiness, devotion, and consecration of life—in other words, Tractarian Analogy made accessible to everyday experience. It is the atmosphere, the ethos, of Keble's own circle, of the so-called Bisley School, and of Tractarianism itself. As Keble remarked, “we are taught to make every scene in nature a topic of devotion.”

THE STYLE OF THE CHRISTIAN YEAR

The Tractarian ethos shapes also those aspects of the poetry of The Christian Year that come under the general heading of style, by which I mean such technical matters as language, diction, imagery, and metrics, as well as such elusive qualities as verbal complexity, ingenuity, ambiguity, irony, and the like. Most modern critics place a higher value on these aspects of poetry than on any others, certainly a higher value than did Tractarian poetic theory, which is notably silent on technical questions. Accordingly, Keble does not fare well when attention is directed exclusively to stylistic issues. Using these criteria alone we cannot but find Keble's poetic achievement a rather modest one, and I have no intention of making extravagant claims for him on purely verbal grounds. But I do believe that even on purely verbal grounds much of what Keble does can be better understood if it is related to Tractarian poetic theory and to the personal ethos that in Keble so thoroughly complements it.

The meditative and contemplative character of the typical poem and pattern of poems in The Christian Year is a consequence of the shaping power of the Book of Common Prayer and a complement to the doctrine of Analogy. The meditative character is also a consequence of another aspect of Tractarian, and especially Kebelian, poetic theory. In the Lectures on Poetry, Keble distinguishes between poetry of action and poetry of contemplation, clearly preferring the latter. Contemplative poetry, as Keble sees it, reminds us of our human limitations; in his view, such poetry nicely coincides with Tractarian ideas of humility and holiness: “The vein of poetry that seeks a life of quiet and tender feelings, that loves to hide in sheltered nooks, may stand as eternal proof how little mortal minds are self-sufficing, whether they betake themselves to worldly business or philosophic contemplation. It might reprove the folly of those who, when the certainties of heaven are offered them, prefer to cling to the uncertainties of earth” (LP, II, 280-281).

Keble's contemplative poetry lends itself to the use of nature as subject, which in turn means a preference for the country over the city, as in Wordsworth, a preference for Keble's own “trivial round, the common task.” Nature inevitably involves the poet, especially the Christian poet, in Analogy and the Sacramental system. And the obverse of the Tractarian coin of Analogy is the concept of Reserve, for Nature both proclaims and conceals her message in something of the manner of Carlyle's Open Secret, that is, the secret of the goodness of the universe, hidden from the vulgar but visible to the poet. Just as Analogy prompts a certain kind of subject matter (and is itself prompted by that subject, hence the inadvertent virtues of pagan nature poetry), so Reserve inclines the poet to a certain kind of style, one that is subdued and humble, both as a means of showing reverence for the sacred truths with which he is dealing and as a discipline for denying the self. Reserve determines what, or how much, the poet will say and how he will say it. Reserve also inclines the poet to be a poet of contemplation rather than action. Once again we can see how remarkably self-consistent and self-contained the Tractarian position is, to say nothing of how much it is a codification of Keble's own methods as a poet and of Keble's own personal style, which by the late 1820s had been stamped on the other Tractarians-to-be.

Reserve, then, dictates that the poet will be guarded and gradual in revealing sacred truth, hence in writing verse at all. While poetry serves as a safety-valve for the expression of intense religious emotion, Analogy and Reserve see to it that the expression will be veiled, indirect, subdued, and self-effacing. Keble versified the concept of Reserve in his poem for the “Fourth Sunday in Lent,” a poem titled “The Rosebud.” In it he notes how one can never actually capture the exact moment when a flower opens:

Fondly we seek the dawning bloom
                    On features wan and fair,—
The gazing eye no change can trace,
But look away a little space,
                    Then turn, and, lo! ’tis there.

The rose is a type of heavenly and human love; these things hide themselves from sight. And it is meet and right that they do:

No—let the dainty rose a while
                    Her bashful fragrance hide—
Rend not her silken veil too soon,
But leave her, in her own soft noon,
                    To flourish and abide.

There can be no question that Reserve is the problematic element in Tractarian poetics, one that will later come to be mainly honored in the breach, but for Keble it was as firm a ruling principle as any in Tractarian poetics. His poetry accordingly is a poetry that hides itself in sheltered nooks, that has as its “chief purpose” to exhibit the “soothing tendency of the Prayer Book.” By design it does not overpower the reader by force of language or compel him by the ingenuity of its technical devices. Rather it stands almost as an antitype to the poetry of the figure with whom Keble was most often compared in his own day, George Herbert.³³ Since it is the devotional poetry of Herbert and Donne that for modern readers provides the paradigm of what devotional poetry is supposed to be, Keble's poetry by comparison seems plain, flaccid, and sedate. One is reminded of the remark about the difference between a biblical angel and a Victorian one. The former strikes terror and appropriately says to the beholder, “Fear not”; the latter seems to say to the observer, “There, there.”

Yet underneath its plain and modest vesture, Keble's poetry contains some elements of novelty and vigor that help explain its appeal and that give it more staying power than one would expect of poems governed by a principle like Tractarian Reserve, especially when Reserve is construed, as by Keble, to require extreme reticence. The chief element of novelty in the poetry is the surprising metrical and stanzaic variety of the verses, surprising because somehow this diversity does not stand out in the reading. Partly, it escapes notice because the stanzaic patterns are not reinforced by physical devices in the manner of emblem verse or by wordplay in the manner of metaphysical verse. Moreover, the metrical and stanzaically varied forms coexist with a good deal of quite conventional verse forms and throughout, use of language avoids calling attention to itself and hence to the form. Like the intellectual virtues of The Christian Year, the technical ones emerge only after repeated and reflective reading, and they are oddly more effective for it, being like the discovery of new facets of something familiar and well known.

B. M. Lott has catalogued the technical data for the poems in The Christian Year.³⁴ Seen against a background of Reserve as a stylistic concept, the data are extremely revealing. On the one hand the most common metrical and stanzaic forms in The Christian Year are long meter and long meter doubled, and ballad or common meter, that is, forms best known through their use in hymns and ballads. On the other hand, these frequent forms, accounting for forty-one, or slightly over a third, of the poems in the collection, are more than balanced by thirty-eight other, different stanzaic patterns in the remaining two-thirds of the poems, for a final total of forty-two stanzaic patterns among the 109 poems in the collection. The thirty-eight other stanzaic forms do not derive from the hymn tradition, nor are they suitable for adaptation as hymns, being usually too complicated for such use. Some of Keble's forms come from the album verse popular in the period, that is, verse in miscellaneous literary collections, usually annuals (The Keepsake is a well-known example), designed especially for female readers. Other of Keble's forms are evidently his own creations. The result in any case is an abundance of stanzaic variety and experimentation, yet its effect is not haphazard because it is cemented by intermixture with hymn and ballad forms and by recurrence of the conventional metrical feet. Here Keble abides very largely with the usual iamb, his most notable departures being extra syllables at the beginnings and ends of lines, and these are not always happy additions. His consistent use of three-, four-, or five-beat iambic lines and of rhyme (there is only one unrhymed poem in the collection) makes his poetry seem immediately easy and familiar and lacking in surprises. The novelty comes only in the rhyme scheme and could pass unnoticed, especially when Keble relies, as he does excessively, on sight rhymes. Yet the variety of rhyme schemes has moved Lott to call Keble the chief stanzaic experimenter in the age until the appearance of Christina Rossetti.

Keble's poetic diction is also a function of Reserve and is as easily misunderstood as his metrics. His language is marked by conventional word choice, by traditional eighteenth-century poetic locutions—“fain,” “vernal,” “lo,” “’tis,” “ere,” and the like, and a heavy use of the biblical “ye” and the second-person familiar, with corresponding archaic verb endings. Such language is designed not to call attention to itself (if it does so today, it is by historical accident), but to blend on the one hand with conventional poetic language and on the other with the language of the Prayer Book and the Bible. This is not to say that Keble was a great lyric poet who denied himself his gifts, but it is to argue that he was not simply faltering or verbally inept and that he designed his language for particular effects. The Victorian concordance to The Christian Year is a substantial volume displaying a large vocabulary. What it contains little of is word coinages or verbal oddities, for these were consciously eschewed by a poet intent on exercising Reserve in his poetry.

To move beyond rhyme and diction to the texture of the poetry itself is to move into the atmosphere that these technical practices undergird. Apart from the novelty of the stanzaic variety and a tendency towards syntactic that Keble's Victorian admirers felt obliged to apologize for because it diminishes his directness and clarity, the texture of the poetry itself is intentionally low-key and subdued. Keble does not aim for the tight expression, the compacted utterance, the surprising verbal turn. From time to time, of course, he attains these, but almost always he fails to stop, pressing on with yet a further elaboration of what seems a point fully made. His aim is not so much to make neat points as to dispose the reader to reflect on certain truths. Some of Keble's most telling lines are embedded within a poem. His sense of an ending is that of bringing the reader gently to a state of mind or condition of prayer that takes him outside of and beyond the limits of the poem. Sometimes, by virtue of his prayer structure, he does end with forceful expressions that are also pointers beyond: “To live more nearly as we pray,” for example, or “For ever rise and sing, and shine,” where each word seems to count, or his particularly telling conclusion to the idea of Nature as God's book: “Give me a heart to find out Thee, / And read Thee everywhere.” But these occasions are outnumbered by those in which the language and sequence are designed to bring the reader to rest rather than to revelation.

None of the foregoing is to say that there are no poems of singular merit in the collection. More than one reader has fixed upon a particular poem as especially beautiful or memorable; Saintsbury on the “Third Sunday in Advent” and “Second Sunday in Lent,” A. E. Housman on the “Second Sunday after Easter,” David Cecil on the “Tuesday before Easter” and the “Twenty-third Sunday after Trinity” are some modern instances.³⁵ Victorian readers too had favorite poems, although more often they seem to have had favorite lines and passages.³⁶ But to join this process of singling out individual poems is to abandon the aid of the aesthetic by which The Christian Year was composed. It is not that here and there the volume throws up an individually good line or even entire poems; it is that the whole work breathes an atmosphere appropriate to its subject. The style of The Christian Year is always at the service of something other than itself. Keble's poetry is not meant to be but to mean, and not to mean in an original and arresting way but in an oddly translucent way. He would have considered his poetry to have performed its service if it succeeded in pointing the reader to something beyond itself; he would have considered it to have performed a disservice if it caused the reader (or the author) to think too much of style and method and too little of what it was designed to do.

In the poems for “Palm Sunday” and the “Sixth Sunday after Trinity” Keble considers the role of the poet in terms of the poet's mission, which is to open the hearts of his readers to eternal truth. Poets, whom he calls “Sovereign masters of all hearts,” should be mindful of the source of their gifts, of who set them “God's own work to do on earth.” And if they fail in their calling, or “in idol-hymns profane / The sacred soul-enthralling strain,” the poet prays that God will show His power and mercy by infusing “noble breath” into these “vile things,” until the poets give back His due to God.

Childlike though the voices be,
                    And untunable the parts,
Thou wilt own the minstrelsy,
                    If it flow from childlike hearts.

(“Palm Sunday”)

In the poem for the “Sixth Sunday after Trinity” Keble admonished poets not to become so concerned with form as to remain poets only. The lines are based on David's repentance, hence the title of the poem “The Psalmist's Repenting,” and the entire poem exhibits most of the characteristics of Keble's style—an eight-line stanza of alternating tetrameter and pentameter couplets with eye and slant rhymes, concluding with a prayerful request. Near the end he entreats those who have been moved to spiritual things by poetry to pray for the poet:

If ever, floating from faint earthly lyre,
Was wafted to your soul one high desire,
          By all the trembling hope ye feel,
          Think on the minstrel as ye kneel:

Keble is concerned above all that the singer may work his magic only on others and be himself indifferent to his own music:

          Think on the shame, that dreadful hour
                              When tears shall have no power,
          Should his own lay the accuser prove,
          Cold while he kindled others' love:
And let your prayer for charity arise,
That his own heart may hear his melodies,
          And a true voice to him may cry,
          “Thy God forgives—thou shalt not die.”

The self-effacing style of Keble's verse is finally the appropriate complement to his organization and intention in The Christian Year. Like the landscape of Gloucester and the west country which is the source for most of the nature description, the poetry of The Christian Year is gentle and initially unremarkable. It grows on the reader by association with the Prayer Book and the Bible, by repetition and reflection; it induces in the reader the very contemplative cast of mind that produced the poetry in the first place. That it was astonishingly effective in touching Victorian readers is testified to by the reverence in which it was held in the age and by the way in which its peculiar music stole upon readers in Wordsworthian quiet or pensive moods. That a taste for such poetry has largely evanesced no one would deny, but something of that taste can be recaptured by an effort of historical imagination. As a historical phenomenon alone, the poetry deserves a permanent if modest place in literary history.

As always in matters relating to Tractarianism, Newman has the last word. His assessment, two decades after the first appearance of The Christian Year, fixes for posterity the high-water mark of that volume and can stand as its epitaph:

Much certainly came of the Christian Year: it was the most soothing, tranquilizing, subduing work of the day; if poems can be found to enliven in dejection, and to comfort in anxiety; to cool the over-sanguine, to refresh the weary, and to awe the worldly; to instil resignation into the impatient, and calmness into the fearful and agitated—they are these (N, Essays, I, 441).

Notes

1. Georgina Battiscombe, John Keble (London, 1964), p. 104.

2. To cite but two examples, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (14th ed., Boston, 1968), p. 567, gives four passages from The Christian Year, but one of them is the first stanza of “Abide with Me,” which was written by Henry Francis Lyte; Michael Hardwick, A Literary Atlas and Gazetteer of the British Isles (Detroit, 1973), p. 70, lists Keble under Gloucestershire with the notice: “His principal work apart from hymns was The Christian Year, a briefly successful collection of sacred poems.”

3. In addition to works on Keble and the Movement already cited, see Brian W. Martin, John Keble: Priest, Professor and Poet (London, 1976). Martin also considers Keble's poetry in relation to his theory and is especially strong on Keble's reflections of earlier poets like Milton; see pp. 119-167. Keble in relation to specifically Anglican devotional attitudes is treated by C. J. Stranks, Anglican Devotion (London, 1961), esp. pp. 236-266.

4. This remark is quoted extensively and in various formulations in the literature. See Battiscombe, p. 104. Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: The Later Years, 1808-1850 (Oxford, 1965), pp. 479-480, also records that Wordsworth thought Keble's verse “vicious in diction.” For the general Victorian response, see Appendix C, below.

5. A. E. Housman, The Name and Nature of Poetry (New York, 1933), pp. 32-33.

6. Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, 4 (New York, 1957), 251. This massive survey contains a wealth of information and has observations on almost all the poets treated in the present study, but Fairchild's critical judgments are marred by an unrelenting hostility to Romanticism that renders him incapable of understanding the Tractarian enterprise.

7. Amy Cruse's term in The Victorians and Their Reading (Boston, 1935), p. 19.

8. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, in Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 6 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1968), 403. The Keble line that Arnold italicized appears in the poem for the “Sixth Sunday after Epiphany” (CY, p. 60).

9. Donald Davie, A Gathered Church: The Literature of the English Dissenting Interest, 1700-1930 (New York, 1978), pp. 15-16.

10. For a contemporary illustrated guide to the Church year, see L. W. Cowie and John Selwyn Gummer, The Christian Calendar (Springfield, Mass., 1974).

11. In most modern usage Epiphany is counted as the season after Christmas, and Sundays up to Lent are now numbered in terms of their distance from Epiphany, thus absorbing the old pre-Lenten period of Septuagesima.

12. The poems for “Gunpowder Treason,” “King Charles the Martyr,” and “The Restoration of the Royal Family” were added to the third and subsequent editions to round out the sequence in the Prayer Book. They were not provided initially because they are not part of the universal Christian calendar. In the Victorian age the commemoration of the martyrdom of Charles I on January 30 was dropped from the Prayer Book to the considerable annoyance of Anglo-Catholics, who, however, continued to keep the day. The Lectionary is the table of Bible readings for the entire year; the Thirty-nine Articles are the Calvinist-inspired statement of principles and beliefs that generated Newman's Tract 90; the Tables of Kindred list family relations among whom marriage is forbidden.

13. See Appendix B on the antecedents of The Christian Year.

14. Charlotte Mary Yonge, Musings over “The Christian Year,” and “Lyra Innocentium” (Oxford, 1871). This now scarce volume contains Yonge's own reminiscences of Keble, contributions from others related to his life and times, and Yonge's extensive individual commentaries on every poem in The Christian Year. It is thus a companion to a companion to the Book of Common Prayer. Charlotte Mary Yonge was Keble's catechumen at Hursley, and her thinking on religious matters was always very close to Keble's own.

15. The First Sunday in Epiphany can never fall later than January 13.

16. James Anthony Froude, the younger brother of Hurrell Froude and himself a quondam Tractarian, made the comparison between Tennyson's poems and The Christian Year. See A. Dwight Culler, The Poetry of Tennyson (New Haven, 1977), p. 156.

17. B. M. Lott, “The Poetry of John Keble, with Special Reference to The Christian Year and His Contribution to Lyra Apostolica” (diss., London University, 1960), p. 210, notes that the Lectionary was changed in the nineteenth century, so that some of the correspondences are not so clear today as they once were in those poems where the readings for the day come from the Lectionary rather than from printed readings in the Prayer Book propers.

18. Margaret Oliphant, Salem Chapel (1863; London, 1907), pp. 53-54. Mrs. Oliphant is here certainly playing on the language of the Book of Common Prayer in the prayer for acceptance of the offering following the consecration of bread and wine: “We beseech Thee to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences.” In the subsequent reference to the “Anglican lyre” she links The Christian Year to the other great Tractarian devotional collection, Lyra Apostolica, and in effect notes the frequency with which the idea of the lyre occurs in Tractarian poetry.

19. The other truth that Keble's poetry brought home to Newman was the doctrine of probability, which, as Newman himself notes in this passage, “runs through very much that I have written.”

20. Similar points are made in other sympathetic Victorian commentaries, a good example of which is the Preface to Keble's Miscellaneous Poems (Oxford, 1869), pp. v-xxv, by G[eorge] M[oberly].

21. Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Hutchinson and Ernest DeSelincourt (London, 1950), pp. 181-182.

22. Used as the motto for Keble's Occasional Papers and Reviews. The full passage reads: “In medio Ecclesiae aperuit os ejus, et implevit eum Dominus Spiritu sapientiae et intellectus” (In the middle of the Church he opened his mouth, and the Lord filled him with the Spirit of wisdom and understanding). I have not been able to trace the source. Keble's motto for The Christian Year was: “In quietness and confidence shall be your strength” (Isaiah, 30:15).

23. The only natural phenomenon missing from this catalogue is the rainbow, but Keble frequently refers to it in other poems. See George Landow, “The Rainbow: A Problematic Image,” in U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson, eds., Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 347-348. Keble's analogues are more or less consistent in The Christian Year but not so rigorously applied as to make possible any kind of allegory.

24. In the original manuscript “wishful” reads “wistful.” Lock in CY records all such changes and variants from the manuscripts at Keble College. There was also a facsimile publication in 1878 of Keble's 1822 manuscript of most of the poems in The Christian Year and many sonnets dating from as early as 1810. The facsimile was titled after Keble's notation on the first page of the manuscript Manuscript Verses, Chiefly on Sacred Subjects. The facsimile was unauthorized and soon suppressed. Copies are now rare.

25. This is the phrasing from “A Catechism” in the Book of Common Prayer defining a sacrament.

26. The ten most frequent words in The Christian Year, with number of times they appear following each in parentheses, are: Love (227), Heart (182), Heaven (180), God (149), Earth (119), Lord (117), Light (98), World (95), Eye (92), High (89). Computed from the entries in A Concordance to The Christian Year (1871; rpt., New York, 1968).

27. Battiscombe, p. 113, quotes Newman: “‘In riding out today I have been impressed more powerfully than before I had an idea was possible with the two lines “Chanting with a solemn voice / Minds us of our better choice.” I could hardly believe the lines were not my own and that Keble had not taken them from me. I wish it were possible for words to put down the indefinable vague and withal subtle feelings with which God pierces the soul and makes it sick.’” The original source is a letter from Newman to his sister Jemima in 1828; see Letters and Correspondence of John Henry Newman, ed. Anne Mozley (London, 1891), I, 183.

28. Wordsworth himself tried to do something of the same sort in the later “Ecclesiastical Sonnets,” especially those that abandon the historical format of the “Ecclesiastical Sketches” to concentrate on Church rites and offices. It is noteworthy that the great bulk of these appeared after the publication of The Christian Year in 1827. See Appendix B.

29. Keble's remark that in The Christian Year he assumed the Church to be in “a state of decay” has been much quoted. See CY, p. xvii. One of his aims was to arrest this decay by revitalizing Church practices.

30. Zoar was Lot's city of refuge when God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.

31. Late Victorian Keble hagiographic works make much of the impact of Fairford Church on Keble's imagination, and in truth the church is an impressive late Gothic structure justly famed for its stained glass windows once believed to be by Dürer. See Yonge, Musings, pp. cxxxviii-cxlvii; J. G. Joyce, The Fairford Windows (London, 1872); W. T. Warren, Kebleland (Winchester, 1900); Oscar G. Farmer, Fairford Church and Its Stained Glass Windows (Fairford, n.d.).

32. The thirteenth stanza of this poem originally read: “O come to our Communion Feast: / There present, in the heart / Not in the hands, the eternal Priest / Will His true self impart.” After repeated requests, Keble changed the third line just before his death to read: “As in the hands … ” in order to make clear that he was not denying the doctrine of the Real Presence. See CY, p. 297, and J. T. Coleridge, Memoir of the Rev. John Keble (London, 1869), p. 163. The anti-Roman lines are actually very mild: “Speak gently of our sister's fall: / Who knows but gentle love / May win her at our patient call / The surer way to prove?”

33. Despite frequent Victorian comparisons of the two poets, modern critics have not found the subject rewarding, but see Elbert N. S. Thompson, “The Temple and The Christian Year,” PMLA, 54 (1939), 1018-1025; and Jean Wilkinson, “Three Sets of Religious Poems,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 36 (1972-73), 203-226.

34. Lott, pp. 66-71. I have taken the statistical data from Lott but not the linkage of it with the stylistic imperatives of Reserve, which is my own interpretation.

35. George Saintsbury in the Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller, 12, pt. 2 (Cambridge, 1917), p. 189; Housman, p. 33; David Cecil includes the two Keble poems I have mentioned in The Oxford Book of Christian Verse (Oxford, 1940).

36. Pusey was especially given to citing passages and lines in letters, and he testified that “scraps of The Christian Year, as they have occurred to me, have been a great comfort, and will be amid whatever He sees best to send” (quoted by Battiscombe, p. 113).