"Syren Strains": Victorian Women's Devotional Poetry and John Keble's The Christian Year

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 world 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.

—— John Keble, "Palm Sunday"¹

John Keble seems to have had very little to say about women, and, at first glance, very little to say to women. He taught no female students. His Lectures on Poetry were delivered and published in Latin, unintelligible to most Victorian women,² and briefly mention only one woman poet, Sappho. Whenever discussing poets—and Christians—Keble uses exclusively the masculine pronoun. However, as Isobel Armstrong and more recently Cynthia Scheinberg have persuasively argued, the Tractarian poetic theory espoused and demonstrated by Keble contributed in important ways to the expressive poetics within which nineteenth-century women could both claim poetic identity and also maneuver to critique the cultural construction of their subjectivity.³ At a fundamental level, Tractarianism's emphasis on feeling and perception in poetry could provide a potent sanction for women to write. The importance of investigating the "distaff side" of Tractarian poetics, and Keble's particular role in its development, has become central to an understanding of female poetics; as Emma Francis argues, "Without a proper appreciation of Keble we will continue to misunderstand several aspects of the role and the extent of the legitimation of the Victorian woman poet."⁴

The subtle and fascinating refractions of Tractarian thought in the work of pre-eminent Victorian devotional poet Christina Rossetti have been meticulously traced by scholars including Kachur, Arseneau, Schofield, and D'Amico.⁵ William Michael Rossetti commented that his sister "thought nothing of Keble as a poet," a suggestive comment in light of her transformations of Keble's Christian Year in the "Some Feasts and Fasts" section of her 1893 Verses.⁶ In this article I address less familiar women poets to assess how and why they copied Keble's poetic model and developed it for their own ends. One aspect of Tractarian poetic theory that remains relatively neglected, and one that has particular significance in assessing the resonance of Tractarian poetics for women, is its concern with issues of originality and imitation. The Oxford Movement dedicated itself to returning the Church of England to the history and tradition that, it believed, had been lost since the Middle Ages; this dedication took form in Tractarian poetics in the various literary changes rung on Keble's famous dictum, "Don't be original!"⁷ This dictum implicitly linked originality—stylistic as well as doctrinal—with heresy. Theologically, the Tractarians sought assiduously to follow the doctrines of the pre-Reformation Church. In terms of rubric, Tractarians insisted that appropriate language with which to discuss religious matters was the same as that authorized and exemplified by the Fathers, in the orthodox, patristic formulations passed down through the Church. And poetically, orthodoxy and correctness was to be ensured by following approved models. Appropriate subject matter, according to Keble, was to be found in the moral lessons taught by Nature (through the process Keble called Analogy) and in the emotional responses of the religious and sincere heart. Furthermore, appropriate examples of treatment were to be found in the works of certain poetic fathers, including Gray, Collins, Cowper, and Wordsworth: departures from proven poetic quality were not encouraged. "Primary poets," writes Keble, "do not strain after novelty."⁸ Keble disparages ambition, effort, and affectation, stating that true poetry is "not in high-wrought subtlety of thought, nor in pointed cleverness of phrase" (Lectures, 2:201). Echoing Keble, John Henry Newman also considered the question of originality in "Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics" (1829), arguing that true...