Henry Charles Beeching, ed. (1859–1919). Lyra Sacra: A Book of Religious Verse. 1903.

By John Henry Newman (1801–1890)

The Elements


A Tragic Chorus MAN 1 is permitted much
To scan and learn
In Nature’s frame;
Till he well-nigh can tame
Brute mischiefs, and can touch	5
Invisible things, and turn
All warring ills to purposes of good.
Thus as a God below
He can control
And harmonise what seems amiss to flow,	10
As severed from the whole
And dimly understood.

But o’er the elements
One Hand alone
One Hand has sway.	15
What influence day by day
In straiter belt prevents
The impious Ocean, thrown
Alternate o’er the ever-sounding shore?
Or who has eye to trace	20
How the Plague came?
Fore-run the doublings of the Tempest’s race?
Or the Air’s weight and flame
On a set scale explore?

Thus God has willed	25
That man when fully skilled
Still gropes in twilight dim;
Encompassed all his hours
By fearfullest powers
Inflexible to him;	30
That so he may discern
His feebleness,
And even for earth’s success
To Him in wisdom turn,
Who holds for us the keys of either home,	35
Earth and the world to come.

Note 1. Most of Newman’s poems previous to the “Dream of Gerontius” were written on a voyage to the Mediterranean in 1833 in company with Hurrell Froude. They appeared under the title of “Lyra Apostolica” in the British Magazine with poems by Keble, Froude, and a few other writers, and were afterwards collected into a volume bearing the same name. An edition with an introduction by Canon H. S. Holland, and a critical note by the present editor, has appeared in the “Library of Devotion” (Methuen). One of the most beautiful of Newman’s poems, which is too personal to take its place in a “Lyra Sacra,” may be quoted here. It refers to the comfort he received when sick and weary at Palermo by frequenting the Roman churches.

	O that thy creed were sound!
	For thou dost soothe the heart, thou Church of Rome,
	By thy unwearied watch and varied round
	Of service, in thy Saviour’s holy home.
	I cannot walk the city’s sultry streets,
	But the wide porch invites to still retreats,
	Where passion’s thirst is calmed, and care’s unthankful gloom.

	There on a foreign shore
	The home-sick solitary finds a friend:
	Thoughts, prisoned long for lack of speech, outpour
	Their tears; and doubts in resignation end.
	I almost fainted from the long delay
	That tangles me within this languid bay,
	When comes a foe, my wounds with oil and wine to tend.

[back]

Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD