SOURCE: “The Christian Year,” in John Keble, Saint of Anglicanism, Mercer University Press, 1987, pp. 57-76.

[In the following essay, Griffin provides a thematic analysis of The Christian Year, explaining the purpose behind Keble's collection of religious poetry.]

The Christian Year was first published anonymously in 1827. A complete edition was published the following year when Keble added a series of poems in honor of certain state “feast days.” Most of his friends knew that Keble was the author of the book. Newman remarked briefly, “Keble's hymns are just out … they seem quite excellent.”¹ As I have earlier remarked, sales of the volume came to be one of the great success stories of the nineteenth century. The Christian Year was certainly important to the reader of poetry in the Victorian age.² Yet no one wrote about Keble's poetry during his lifetime. It was only with the edition of 1866 (the year of his death) and later that reviewers began to discuss the significance of Keble's volume.

At the time of writing and publishing his first volume, Keble was not yet what might be called an Anglo-Catholic, and it is therefore questionable whether the work can be regarded as a “Tractarian” text. Throughout the poetry we find references to “principles” of religion that the Oxford Movement later opposed. Yet there is a link between the poetry and the ideology of 1833, for one of the ideas in The Christian Year is that the clergy of the Church of England should reform itself. Indeed, the reform motif of the poetry is one of its most interesting elements.

If Keble's poetry does not readily accommodate itself to the later ideals of “National Apostasy” or the Tracts for the Times, it is even more of a mistake to suggest that he was working under the influence of George Herbert or William Wordsworth. Keble denied that Herbert had been an influence on his poetry, and in various places apologized for the “quaint” imagery of his supposed mentor. The influence of Wordsworth is even more suspect if we remember Keble's earlier review of Wordsworth's first two volumes of poetry; but even at a much later date, when he was writing his “Dedication” of the lectures to Wordsworth, he expressed a concern to J. T. Coleridge that he did not wish to seem to give approval to the “pantheistic air” in Wordsworth.³ Keble's approach to Nature, I will argue, is wholly different from that of his supposed mentor, and the phrase used to describe Keble's approach—“sacramental imagination”—is very different in the uses it makes of the created world.⁴

THE PURPOSE OF THE CHRISTIAN YEAR

In his “Advertisement” (actually a brief preface) to the volume, Keble declared that his purpose in writing and publishing The Christian Year was to promote a “sober standard of feeling in matters of practical religion” at a time when “excitement of every kind is sought after with a morbid eagerness.” He concluded his brief preface by noting that his intention was to recommend the “soothing” tendency of the Anglican Prayer Book.

The object of the present publication will be attained if any person finds assistance from it in bringing his own thoughts and feelings into more entire unison with those recommended and exemplified in the Prayer Book. … Something has been added at the end concerning the several Occasional Services: which constitute, from their personal and domestic nature, the most perfect instance of the soothing tendency in the Prayer Book, which it is the chief purpose of these pages to exhibit.

In these brief comments, we can understand why Keble's poetry has been so generally ignored by twentieth-century readers. The idea of poetry being used to soothe or quiet the emotions is completely alien to a modern reader's expectations of what poetry, including religious poetry, should do for the reader. Yet it was this quality that Keble admired most of all in the poetry of Wordsworth, and one of the feelings that Keble sought to promote was a proper attitude towards poverty.

I have [he told Wordsworth] many thoughts in my mind of the desirableness of engaging all ranks of people more immediately in the service of the Church … nothing would lead more securely to such a purpose than enducing them [the poor] to feel rightly about poverty.⁵

Such was Wordsworth's great achievement. As Keble wrote in the dedication to his Lectures on Poetry, Wordsworth was a poet who had described the “manners and religion of the poor … in an celestial light.” While it is easy to dismiss such a tribute, Keble was in earnest in his praise of the quieting power of Wordsworth's poetry. The great lesson of the Prayer Book was “cheerful obedience”; Wordsworth, almost alone of the Romantic poets, had nurtured just that spirit in his descriptions of the country poor.

Yet The Christian Year is more than a complacent description of English rural society and religion. As we will see, the most important link between Keble's poetry and the Oxford Movement of 1833 is its quiet call for a reformation in the lives of the English rural clergy and in the poetry of his own age.

The major theme in The Christian Year is the love of God for the whole of the created world. That love created in man an obligation to reciprocate, either by a more zealous performance of his duties or a cheerful acceptance of his place in life. Nature is the best example of God's love for mankind, and in Keble's frequent poems about Nature we find a very different approach to his subject from that which is commonly called “Romantic.” In Keble's poetry, the beauties and varieties of Nature provide the most striking proof for the existence of God. Keble's argument, so far as it may be called such, derives from Butler's Analogy of Religion and personal experience. Nature presented a link between God and Man, and Keble's poetic meditations of Nature always lead the reader upwards to a contemplation of God. The poet's method, however, is seldom direct, for it is the analogy between religion and Nature that Keble finds so instructive.

There are exceptions to this method, and the reader should not be misled by Keble's comments on the “soothing” tendency of either the Prayer Book or his own poetry. Several of the poems are concerned with the low spiritual state of the Anglican clergy and “the ruler of the Christian land”—the king or his representatives. In the poems about the clergy Keble sometimes sounds like a contributor to some of the “liberal” or radical journals of his day, for he witnessed the apparent laziness of his clerical brethren on a firsthand basis. In his frequent poems on poetry, Keble was severe with the egotism and sensuality of his fellow poets.

Yet the reforming motif in Keble's poetry is urged so gently that it does not take away from Keble's ideal as expressed in the Advertisement. Each of the poems sustains the major theme in The Christian Year. Keble, as a rule, followed the scriptural text of the service for the day, and the poems might be read as a meditation on the text. Occasionally, the poet did throw off some of his natural restraint, and it was no accident that one of his closest friends warned him of sounding very like a “methodist” in his response to scripture or Nature.⁶ Yet Keble was able to balance his own natural piety and simplicity by constantly appealing to the beauties of creation. As a recent scholar has noted, Nature in the eyes of Keble was the instrument by which we gained our knowledge of God; it was “the handmaiden to divine truth.”⁷ It should be added that such a view was largely Keble's own and not that of Oxford or the Oxford Movement. Both of Keble's closest friends, Newman and Froude, were unmoved by Keble's proofs for the existence of a benevolent God.

THE POETRY

The Christian Year opens with a set of companion poems, “Morning” and “Evening,” an idea taken perhaps from the method of Bishop Ken's Hymns for All the Festivals of the Year, published after Ken's death in 1721. (Ken was a nonjuring bishop whom Keble referred to frequently in his letters and in several places throughout his sermons.) Both of Keble's poems set the tone for the volume as a whole in that each was to be read as a meditative prayer or hymn. Two lines from “Morning” serve to illustrate what Keble's critics and admirers believe is most attractive or sentimental in the poetry.

And help us, this and every day,
To live more nearly as we pray.

Simple, direct, and possibly banal—the lines and the sentiments conveyed in them are almost too much for a modern reader or critic. Of course, there is nothing startling or original in the idea, but it is the very opposite of “simplistic” or insipid. To follow the mandates of the Lord's Prayer is surely the most challenging task that a Christian can undertake.

The diction of “Morning” has its closest affinities with Neo-Classicism, especially, one might suggest, with the odes of Collins and shorter poetry of Samuel Johnson. And in its emphasis on the basics of the Christian life, the ideology is much closer to the eighteenth century. Keble directly advised against a life of excessive zeal. The Christian life was not to be found in “the cloistered cell.”

We need not bid, for cloistered cell
Our neighbor and our work farewell,
Nor strive to wind ourselves too high
For sinful man beneath the sky …

Rather, Keble emphasized, the saintly life was to be found in “each returning day,” in “the trivial round, the common task,” and “in our daily course.” The Christian spirit could adorn the most humble aspects of life.

Old Friends, old scenes, will lovelier be,
As more of Heaven in each we see:
Some softening glean of love and prayer
Shall dawn on every cross and care.

“Evening” uses the same verse form and stanzaic pattern, and its message is closely parallel to the above: the love of God can make the most prosaic activity into a religious exercise. But Keble introduced an idea into “Evening” that was one of the major themes in The Christian Year—the reform of the lower clergy. Such a theme in itself explicitly challenges the idea that Keble was an establishment man and indifferent to the highly visible problems in the Church of England. Towards the end of the poem, we read,

Oh, by Thine own sad burthen borne
So meekly up the hill of scorn,
Teach Thou Thy Priests their daily cross
To bear as Thine, nor count it loss!

Keble, in the above and in other poems, was encouraging the clergy to look more critically at itself and its performance of priestly duties. The concluding line, “… nor count it loss,” served as a comment on the social climbing clergy who neglected humbler duties in pursuit of a better living or an episcopal see.

As in the opening poem, Keble argued that the real basis for the Christian life, and the standard by which each of us will be judged, is to be found in the performance of our daily duties.

There is another idea in “Evening” that is important because it marks the religious difference between the poems and the Oxford Movement (1833-1845). The idea was that the king, or his agents (Prime Minister and Parliament), was head of the Church of England.

The Rulers of this Christian land,
’Twixt Thee and us ordained to stand,—
Guide Thou their course, O Lord, aright
Let all do all as in thy sight.

My reading of these lines, placed as they are between the comments on the Anglican clergy, suggests that in 1827 Keble upheld the traditional notion that the king (or his representatives) was the “head” of the English church and people an idea confirmed by Keble's later description of the English monarch as “nursing father” of the church (a metaphor taken from the Old Testament, and the topic of Keble's sermon of 5 November 1835). Based on these lines and the description of the king as a “nursing father” to the church, I would suggest that Keble was an upholder of the Erastianism that he and his colleagues in the Oxford Movement were to later challenge.

In the first poem of the text proper, “The First Sunday after Advent,” Keble returned to his comments on the lower clergy in the church. The poem opens,

Awake! again the Gospel-trump is blown

This almost stern note is reiterated in the body of the poem where we find the poet criticizing his colleagues for their lack of faith and charity.

Awake! why linger in the gorgeous town,
Sworn liegemen of the Cross and thorny crown?
Up from your beds of sloth for shame

Following this indictment of the clergy, Keble offered a long commentary on hypocrisy in the national church. Yet the poem is not an indictment of the clergy in the style of Milton. The church has always been a mixture of “the chosen few” and the hypocrites. In all likelihood Keble's poem was based on direct observation and, notwithstanding his complaints about an indolent clergy, the real thrust of the poem is against the political liberals of the day with “the changeful burden still of their rude lawless cry.”

There is one more idea in this poem that might be noted. Having surveyed the disastrous episodes—“decaying ages”—of church history, Keble advised his readers to turn aside from the controversies of the moment in favor of waiting patiently for the final moment.

Thus bad and good their several warnings give
Of His approach, whom none may see and live:
                              Faith's ear, with awful still delight
                              Counts them like minute-bells at night,
Keeping the heart awake till dawn of morn,
While to her funeral pile this aged world is born.

The reforming impulse is throughout The Christian Year. For the most part it is directed against the clergy of the Church of England, but on one occasion (“Thursday Before Easter””) Keble seems to attack the king.

Oh! grief to think that grapes of gall
          Should cluster round thine healthiest shoot!
God's herald prove a heartless thrall,
          Who, if he dared, would fain be mute!
          Even such in this bad world we see. …

The answer to the widespread corruptions in the government and in the church was not revolution. The lesson of bad clergy was that men should turn away from such problems, “… and trembling strive / To keep the lingering flame in thine own heart alive.”

There are other themes in Keble's first volume that might be noted, for they also are quite peculiar to either the Church of England or Keble's ancestral background. The most striking of these is the recurrent praise of virginity as the highest state of the Christian life. In several poems Keble praised in an extraordinary way Mary, as the Virgin Mother of God, the supreme object of veneration in the Christian life. In the poem “Wednesday Before Easter” the praise of virginity is amplified to be slightly lower than that of martyrdom in the kingdom of God. I quote from the fourth and following stanzas:

They say, who know the life divine,
And upward gaze with eagle eyne,
That by each golden crown on high,
Rich with celestial jewelry
Which for our Lord's redeemed is set,
There hangs a radiant coronet,
All gemmed with pure and living light,
Too dazzling for a sinner's sight,
Prepared for virgin souls, and they
Who seek the Martyr's diadem.
Nor deem, who to that bliss aspire,
Must win their way through blood and fire.
The writhings of a wounded heart
Are fiercer than a foeman's dart.
Oft in Life stillest shade reclining,
In Desolation unrepining,
Without a hope on earth to find
A mirror in an answering mind,
Meek souls there are, who little dream
Their daily strife an Angel's theme,
Or that the rod they take so calm
.....Shall prove in Heaven a martyr's palm.
By purest pleasures unbeguiled
To idolise a wife or child;
Such wedded souls our God shall own
For faultless virgins round his throne.

The ideal of celebate priesthood was later posited during the Oxford Movement as one of the remedies for a lethargic, caste-conscious clergy—“pampered aristocrats,” as Froude later put it—but the ideal survived only in the person of Newman.

Another important subject in The Christian Year was the state of poetry in the early nineteenth century. It is fairly obvious that Keble was unhappy with the work of most nineteenth-century poets. He may have been referring only to Byron and the “miserable school” of Mr. Leigh Hunt, but the indictment of Romantic poets sounds much more comprehensive.

In several of his poems Keble commented on what he thought was the essential task of a poet living in a Christian society. “Palm Sunday” is a fair example of Keble's theory. The poem resembles Gray's “Progress of Poesy” with its mixture of Hebrew and Greek influences, but Gray's poem of course celebrates the rise of poetry, while Keble's was an extended lament over the decline of poetry in his own time. Both poets were heavily indebted to the Psalms of David. Keble's argument, in part, was that the God who inspired David should inspire the modern poet. Both poets regarded poetry as a kind of sacred rite, yet Keble's comments on poetry transcend two ideas in Gray's “Progress.” All that was necessary for the inspiration of the Christian poet was scripture and Nature.

The epigraph to the poem, “If these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out,” (Luke 19: 40) provides a clue to Keble's meaning and method. The relevant stanzas are:

Ye whose hearts are beating high
With the pulse of Poesy,
Heirs of more than royal race,
Framed by Heaven's peculiar grace,
God's own work to do on earth,
(If the word be not too bold,)
Giving virtue a new birth,
And a life that ne’er grows old—
Sovereign masters of all hearts!
Know ye, Who hath set your parts?
He who gave you breath to sing,
By whose strength ye sweep the string,
He hath chosen you, to lead
His Hosannas here below;—
Mount, and claim your glorious meed;
Linger not with sin and woe.
Then waken into sound divine
The very pavement of Thy shrine
Till we, like Heaven's star-sprinkled floor,
Faintly give back what we adore
Childlike though the voices be,
And untunable the parts,
Thou wilt own the minstrelsy,
If it flow from childlike hearts.

The poet was like a priest who was failing to perform his sacred task. The phrase, “Heaven's peculiar grace,” suggests that Keble had come to accept the Romantic premise that the poet was different from the rest of humanity. Yet in Keble's insistence that the mission of the poet was religious we find a significant distance that separates him from most Romantic poets. In the comments, “Linger not with sin and woe,” Keble expressed his concern for the subject matter of so many of his contemporaries, particularly the work of Lord Byron.

In another poem Keble raised the topic of the proper material for the poet in a Christian society. “The Fourth Sunday after Trinity” proposes the idea that all poems about Nature are religious poems. In a series of quatrains he celebrates the poetic impulse and its finest expression—the praise of God and the world that God created.

It was not then a poet's dream,
An idle vaunt of song,
Such as beneath the moon's soft gleam
On vacant fancies throng;
Which bids us see in heaven and earth,
In all fair things around,
Strong yearnings for a blest new birth
With sinless glories crown’d;
Which bids us hear, at each sweet pause,
From care and want and toil,
When dewy eve her curtain draws
Over the day's turmoil;
In the low chant of wakeful birds,
In the deep weltering flood,
In the whispering leaves,
these solemn words—
“God made us all for good.”

Keble's argument in brief was that Nature and the positive aspects of life were the essential materials for the poet. The theme of these poems, especially those on Nature, imply a criticism of nineteenth-century poets who concerned themselves with the darker aspects of Nature and life itself.

A final example of Keble's theory of poetry is “The Sixth Sunday after Trinity,” a poem about the repentance of David. Poetry was almost an instrument of grace for the poet because it inspired love and hope in the reader who might, being so inspired, 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.

The grace of contrition, in keeping with Keble's general appeal to the analogies of Nature, is likened to a “silent April rain,” and the poetry of David was, in part, a means of his conversion.

The poems about Nature and the analogies of Nature to grace are throughout the whole of The Christian Year, but “Septuagesima Sunday” is a convenient starting point, in spite of its “piety.” The theme of the poem is illustrated in its scriptural epigraph:

The invisible things of Him from the creation
of the world are clearly seen, being understood
of things that are made. (Romans 1:20)

The poem has been described as Wordsworthian in its style, but its method is rather different. The opening stanzas emphasize Keble's theme.

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 show
          How God Himself is found.
The glorious sky embracing all,
Is like the Maker's love,
Wherewith encompass'd, great and small,
In peace and order move.
The Moon above, the Church below,
A wondrous race they run,
But all their radiance, all their glow,
Each borrows of its Sun.

In addition to the epigraph, which provides the theological basis for the poem, the use of the material of Nature suggests to me an essential difference from Wordsworth. All of created Nature—its beauties and its terrors—were analogues of God's power and mercy.

Keble's method was to approach God through the evidences of Nature with what he described as the “eye of faith,” which enabled man to trace, in spite of human frailties, the hand of God. Keble seemed to urge that it was only through such a process that we could come to know God, Nature, and, by implication, true poetry. It was this method that enabled Keble to find out all that he wished to know about God in even the most prosaic subject matter.

From a naturalistic point of view Keble's approach or method might seem to be unsatisfactory. For Keble Nature, while beautiful in itself, is never viewed alone. Its function is to serve as a stepping stone to something higher.

Such an approach to God and Nature is not without its weaknesses. Keble was not what we would call an optimist about the human condition or even Nature itself, but the reader does get the impression that Keble was somewhat diffident about the painful episodes of the Christian life, in particular the crucifixion. The poems on the subject of Passion Week are among the least satisfying in the The Christian Year.

At the same time, however, I cannot deny the impression that Keble's shyness or reserve, from a religious point of view, is sometimes preferable to the direct approach of the Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. Dr. Johnson was far from being the only critic to complain of the ease and familiarity with God that the metaphysicals sometimes exhibit. The reader may not always think on the religious subject that was, ostensibly at least, the reason for the poem.

It would be wrong to assume that Keble's faith was complacent, as opposed to the complexities of belief in other religious poets. Several of the poems in the collection exhibit the dark side of human consciousness—the possibility that there may be no God and that faith is no more than a delusion.

“The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany” is one of the most perfect in The Christian Year to exhibit this problem. The poem presents no grave problems of interpretation, and a careful reader might trace out the influence of this poem on two more celebrated poets, Matthew Arnold (“Dover Beach”) and Emily Dickinson (“Success is Counted Sweetest”). The poem addresses those who wished for an absolute knowledge of God or the knowledge that God does not exist. The middle state of obscure knowledge, “doubt's galling chain,” was more oppressive than even a complete negation of God's existence.

Keble was sympathetic to the question and his poem provides his own method of answering that question.

There are, who darkling and alone,
Would wish the weary night were gone,
Though dawning morn should only show
The secret of their unknown woe:
Who pray for sharpest throbs of pain
To ease them of doubt's galling chain:
Only disperse the cloud, they cry,
And if our fate be death, give light and let us die.
Unwise I deem them. Lord, unmeet
To profit by Thy chastenings sweet,
For Thou wouldst have us linger still
Upon the verge of good or ill,
That on Thy guiding hand unseen
Our undivided hearts may lean,
And this our frail and foundering bark
Glides in the narrow wake of Thy beloved Ark.

Keble argues that the lack of direct evidence for the existence of God is not itself a mystery. Man knows of the existence of God through the exercise of conscience, “Thy guiding hand unseen.” That the evidence of God's existence is so frail to “gross mortal” eyes (as he wrote in “Baptism”) makes faith a much greater possession. The Christian holds to his “dim” and limited vision through the power of love. Such a vision is worth more than empirical proof, which does not require love or faith.

The scarcity of doctrinal ideas in The Christian Year is one of the most significant clues to the work's popularity in the Victorian Age. Doctrine was the religious equivalent of a quality that Keble disliked in poetry—“metaphysics”; and we find him closely following his own precepts in his poetry. General readers did not read poetry for direct instruction in either religion or philosophy. The most notable exception to this rule is Keble's lovely poem on baptism, for the poem anticipates Keble's later activity on behalf of the Catholic principles of Anglicanism. A few of the relevant stanzas are:

Where is it, mothers learn their love?—
In every Church a fountain springs
O’er which th’ eternal Dove
Hovers on softest wings.
What sparkles in that lucid flood
Is water, by gross mortals eyed;
                              But seen by Faith, ’tis blood
                              Out of a dear Friend's side
A few calm words of faith and prayer,
          A few bright drops of holy dew,
                              Shall work a wonder there
                              Earth's charmers never knew

So far as I have been able to discern, the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration as suggested in the above is the only Catholic doctrine in the whole of The Christian Year. His version of the Eucharist was not.

There are several poems in The Christian Year that celebrate the Eucharistic service. None of these suggest a belief in the Real Presence; and in “Gunpowder Treason,” (one of the state feast-day poems), Keble offered a version of the Eucharist that seemed to deny such a belief. The critical lines occur towards the end of the poem:

O come to our Communion Feast:
There present in the heart,
Not in the hands, th’eternal Priest
Will His true self impart.

The controversy in the poem centers on Keble's apparent denial of the Real Presence in the above stanza. Keble's biographers and historians of the Oxford Movement have insisted that Keble really meant “Not only in the hands” instead of the apparent denial contained in the original.

In the first edition of The Christian Year, which was published after Keble's death in 1866, the lines were changed to read “as in the hands.” A controversy greeted the changed version. In the Quarterly Review, the Bishop of Oxford (Samuel Wilberforce) published an essay on the poetry in which he denounced the change, while the Guardian, an Anglo-Catholic weekly, defended it. The question remains as to who made the change. The accepted version is that Keble approved of it on his deathbed, but there is no record of any significance to justify that explanation. The rest of the poem is filled with other forms of anti-Catholic statements. It therefore seems unlikely that Keble would have accepted anything like a “high position” on the Eucharist at that stage in his life. Even in his later years Keble was strong in his condemnation of Roman doctrines, including the Real Presence, and his readers were content with the idea that the Eucharistic ritual was only commemorative. Newman did not believe in the doctrine of the Real Presence until his conversion, and then only because the church taught such a doctrine. Further, he was severe in his criticisms of Pusey and the other Anglo-Catholics for their promoting of the doctrine since they violated the Anglican consensus on the subject.⁸ It would have been most unlikely that Keble had come up with anything approaching a Catholic teaching on the subject of the Eucharist since he was prone to criticize the eucharistic views of one of his friends for his tendency to “turn good young Protestants into Papists.”⁹

Pusey tried to defend the revised version of the lines in a letter to Newman.

What do you think was the original meaning of the Not in the hands. Do you think that it was really written under the influence of Hooker? … Dear J. K's leaving it for so many years is more accountable, if he always understood in the sense of I will have mercy and not sacrifice as he did in later years.¹⁰

Newman answered Pusey's letter:

Certainly I have always thought dear Keble meant that verse in an anti-catholic sense, when he wrote it. First, the draft of that poem shows it—Next, Hurrell Froude always thought so, and expressly attacks Keble for it in one of the Letters in his Remains. Thirdly, Hooker, though tolerant of the Catholic view does surely himself take the Calvinistic; and Keble was especially a disciple of Hooker. According to my own idea, it was Jewel … whose writings first opened Keble's eyes to the unsatisfactory doctrine of the Reformers as such, in contradistinction to the high Anglican school; and from that time Keble took a much higher line of theology. …¹¹

Froude (a younger pupil of John Keble and one of the first members of the Oxford Movement) had complained bitterly about the “Protestantism” of the stanza,¹² but Keble had not responded to the criticism and had left the lines unchanged. He was apparently content with the obvious meaning of the lines and the poem as a whole until some period beyond 1854. There are many other reasons to suggest that Keble was content with the literal meaning of the early editions. The later correspondence with John Taylor Coleridge is filled with references to The Christian Year—certain lines, words, the copyrights, illustrations, and so forth—but there is no mention of these lines or any change. If Keble were unhappy with the stanza or with the poem as a whole, he did not tell Coleridge.¹³

However, what Keble did mention about the poetry in his letters to Coleridge is interesting and perhaps relevant to this discussion. Pusey, it appears, had twice offered Keble a thousand pounds for the copyright to the volume; Keble had remarked that he did not trust Pusey on this matter.¹⁴

It would not be a complete surprise, therefore, if Pusey had obtained the copyright through some agreement with Parker (Keble's publisher) and made the change to suit himself and what he believed would have suited Keble. The letter to Newman, cited above, seems to seek approval for the changed version. Moreover, Pusey's silence, when the controversy was going on in the press is striking if we remember that Pusey's method was usually just the opposite: his published letters to the Anglo-Catholic and secular press would easily fill a volume.

The suggestion that Keble approved of the change on his deathbed comes from Dr. Pusey, who did profess a belief in the Real Presence (though never in the Roman sense of the word). In 1879 Pusey wrote and published a small “letter” (actually a pamphlet) to H. P. Liddon on the subject of the revised version. In his letter Pusey admitted that the idea for the changed lines was originally his own.

I remember saying strongly, “Explanations are useless: they have been made over and over again, and are ignored.” [Then, Keble wrote to Liddon] “I have made up my mind, that it will be best when a reprint is called for, to adopt E. B. P's emendation and note with a few words pointing out that it does but express the true meaning of the printed text.” The line then, after all, is neither yours nor mine [i.e., neither Pusey's nor Liddon's but Keble's].¹⁵

Following this, an extract from the Journal of the Rev. Thomas Keble (Keble's younger brother) is cited, in which Pusey is told by Thomas Keble's wife to make the change right away.

I have never heard of the journal mentioned by Pusey, and there is reason to suggest that the changed lines and the defense of the change is pretty much of an invention. One of the later Tractarians, who did profess a belief in the principle of the Real Presence (G. A. Denison) and whose interpretation of the Eucharist was rejected by the Privy Council in 1854, noted a difference between himself and Keble on this subject.¹⁶ Certainly the other poetry in The Christian Year derives from a generally Protestant view of the English church and its teachings.

Quite apart from the many questions about Keble's personal faith or his relationship to either the Neo-Classic or Romantic theory of literature, there is a larger context in which The Christian Year ought to be read. The poems, taken as a whole, represent one of the last major, or “widely-read,” expressions of a philosophic and religious system once known as “cosmic toryism.” This system has been interpreted as a form of complacent conservatism for its resistance to change in the political and social spheres. Keble was deeply embued with that kind of conservatism, but it was not primarily a matter of “looking out for number one.” He was a conservative in the sense that St. Paul was a conservative: the established order was the best instrument for promoting the common good.

A second aspect of this “philosophy” is to be found in the domain of mysticism, and it is ultimately beyond human description. It predicates a belief that all human enterprises, including evil itself, tend towards a final good; and it includes an “extinction of one's separate individuality” and “an acceptance of all existence as a part of the divine pattern.”¹⁷ The alleged simplicity of The Christian Year is most certainly scriptural in its essential premise that, in spite of evil and the general decay of the world, there is a provident God who rules the world.

There is scarcely an item in this system that has not been challenged in our own time. Even in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the various forms of “cosmic toryism” were rejected in favor of an often extreme form of pessimism. It is no accident, as one scholar has pointed out, that three of the major Victorian poems are apocalyptic. In each instance the validity of the Christian promise is directly questioned.¹⁸

The enduring popularity of Keble's first volume is especially significant, for it represents a continuous reminder that, with all of the many evils of the nineteenth century, there were still reasons for hope. Such a “solution” must always appear complacent. Even so great a man as Cardinal Newman remarked that the data of human experience tended to deny rather than confirm the existence of God. Yet Newman would have been the first to insist that the theological virtue of hope was also a Christian duty. It is the virtue of hope that is written so large in Keble's poetry.

Every reader must decide for himself about the merits of The Christian Year; but the relevance of Keble's poetry to our own time is especially intense if we remember that many theologians and writers have insisted that the one virtue so lacking in modern man is hope.

CONCLUSION

In this [essay] I have suggested a series of reasons why Keble's first volume is at once good and important. The value of the poems, as in the case of all poetry, is the most difficult part of my argument. The very merits of clarity and simplicity would tend to cause a modern reader to be suspicious, if not contemptuous, of their content. The Christian Year was based on a system of belief not so far removed from our time as to attract the antiquarian; but it is based on one that is clearly dated in its essential optimism. It would require a major revolution in theology and philosophy to bring back that belief in a providential Creator who controlled the world and punished evil. For this reason, future students of nineteenth century poetry may find Keble to be the most complex and strange of the Victorian poets.

What might be noted, however, is that Keble was almost a “pure” original in his composition of The Christian Year. His limited borrowings were based on a desire to complement those from whom he had learned; but he was always independent and, while such a remark tends to turn us away from the idea that he was a saint, it might help us appreciate the poetry more. The Christian Year was not a high-church collection of hymns. It was a collection of the most elevated sentiments belonging to the common experience of Christians.

Notes

1. Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Gerald Tracey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) 2:20.

2. Thomas Mozley, Reminiscences Chiefly of Oriel College and the Oxford Movement, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1882) 1:219.

3. Keble to Coleridge, April 1844, CC.

4. Cf. George B. Tennyson, “The Sacramental Imagination,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. George B. Tennyson and U. C. Knoepfimacher (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1977) 370-75; also, Gerald Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1981) 72.

5. Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965) 2:542-43.

6. Remains of Richard Hurrell Froude, ed. John Henry Newman and John Keble, 4 vols. (Oxford: James Parker, 1838-1839) 1:232.

7. Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry, 96.

8. John Henry Newman, Difficulties Felt by Anglicans, 2 vols. (Westminster MD: Christian Classics, ed. 1969) vol. 1, ch. 4.

9. Keble to Arthur Perceval, June 1832, Keble-Perceval Correspondence, Pusey House, Oxford.

10. Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Charles Dessain, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973) 23:43.

11. Ibid., 43-44.

12. Remains of Richard Hurrell Froude, 1:403.

13. For example, Keble wrote to James Parker in 1847 to express his satisfaction with the latest edition of The Christian Year: “I am extremely well satisfied with the style of the book.” Keble to James Parker, 28 October 1847, in Lewis Collection, Yale University.

14. Keble to Coleridge, 19 June 1854, CC.

15. Postscript on the Alteration of a Line in The Christian Year (Oxford: James Parker, 1878) 2; see also Liddon Diaries, 5 September 1856: “A great deal of conversation with Keble. He told me that he had frequently wished to withdraw the words ‘Not in the hand but in the heart’: but that his friends had prevented him.” Liddon House, London.

16. George A. Denison, Notes of My Life (London: Macmillan, 1878) 254.

17. Basil Willey, Eighteenth-Century Background: Studies on the Idea of Nature in Thought of the Period (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961) 43.

18. John Rosenberg, The Fall of Camelot (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973) 36.