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The Dream of Gerontius
The Dream of Gerontius, Op. 38, is a work for voices and orchestra in two parts produced by Edward Elgar in 1900, to text from the poem by John Henry Newman. It relates the journey of a pious man's soul from his deathbed to his judgment before God and settling into Purgatory. Elgar disapproved of the use of the term "oratorio" for the work, though his wishes are not always followed. The piece is widely regarded as Elgar's finest choral work, and some consider it his masterpiece.
This edition has been formatted for your Kindle, with an active table of contents. This edition has also been annotated, with additional information about the work and its author, including an overview, history, synopsis, music, recordings, arrangements, biographical and bibliographical information.
This edition has been formatted for your Kindle, with an active table of contents. This edition has also been annotated, with additional information about the work and its author, including an overview, history, synopsis, music, recordings, arrangements, biographical and bibliographical information.
72 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1865
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About the author
John Henry Newman
2,034 books286 followersSaint John Henry Cardinal Newman was an important figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century. He was known nationally by the mid-1830s.
Originally an evangelical Oxford University academic and priest in the Church of England, Newman then became drawn to the high-church tradition of Anglicanism. He became known as a leader of, and an able polemicist for, the Oxford Movement, an influential and controversial grouping of Anglicans who wished to return to the Church of England many Catholic beliefs and liturgical rituals from before the English Reformation. In this the movement had some success. However, in 1845 Newman, joined by some but not all of his followers, left the Church of England and his teaching post at Oxford University and was received into the Catholic Church. He was quickly ordained as a priest and continued as an influential religious leader, based in Birmingham. In 1879, he was created a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in recognition of his services to the cause of the Catholic Church in England. He was instrumental in the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland, which evolved into University College Dublin, today the largest university in Ireland.
Newman was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on 19 September 2010 during his visit to the United Kingdom. He was then canonised by Pope Francis on 13 October 2019.
Newman was also a literary figure of note: his major writings including the Tracts for the Times (1833–1841), his autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865–66), the Grammar of Assent (1870), and the poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865),[6] which was set to music in 1900 by Edward Elgar. He wrote the popular hymns "Lead, Kindly Light" and "Praise to the Holiest in the Height" (taken from Gerontius).
Originally an evangelical Oxford University academic and priest in the Church of England, Newman then became drawn to the high-church tradition of Anglicanism. He became known as a leader of, and an able polemicist for, the Oxford Movement, an influential and controversial grouping of Anglicans who wished to return to the Church of England many Catholic beliefs and liturgical rituals from before the English Reformation. In this the movement had some success. However, in 1845 Newman, joined by some but not all of his followers, left the Church of England and his teaching post at Oxford University and was received into the Catholic Church. He was quickly ordained as a priest and continued as an influential religious leader, based in Birmingham. In 1879, he was created a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in recognition of his services to the cause of the Catholic Church in England. He was instrumental in the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland, which evolved into University College Dublin, today the largest university in Ireland.
Newman was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI on 19 September 2010 during his visit to the United Kingdom. He was then canonised by Pope Francis on 13 October 2019.
Newman was also a literary figure of note: his major writings including the Tracts for the Times (1833–1841), his autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865–66), the Grammar of Assent (1870), and the poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865),[6] which was set to music in 1900 by Edward Elgar. He wrote the popular hymns "Lead, Kindly Light" and "Praise to the Holiest in the Height" (taken from Gerontius).
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
April 23, 2024
Inspiring! I especially liked the prayers of the four Choirs of Angels as Gerontius ascended for his Particular Judgement.* Here is one example:
Fifth Choir of Angelicals
Praise to the Holiest in the height, and in the depth be praise: In all His words most wonderful; Most sure in all His ways! O loving wisdom of our God! When all was sin and shame, A second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came. O wisest love! that flesh and blood which did in Adam fail, should strive afresh against the foe, should strive and should prevail; And that a higher gift than grace should flesh, and blood refine, God's Presence and His very Self, And Essence all divine. O generous love! that He who smote in man for man the foe, The double agony in man; For man should undergo; And in the garden secretly, and on the cross on high, should teach His brethren and inspire to suffer and to die.
*May I be so blessed as to receive such Divine prayers when my time comes, for there is nothing I can do to merit them!
Fifth Choir of Angelicals
Praise to the Holiest in the height, and in the depth be praise: In all His words most wonderful; Most sure in all His ways! O loving wisdom of our God! When all was sin and shame, A second Adam to the fight and to the rescue came. O wisest love! that flesh and blood which did in Adam fail, should strive afresh against the foe, should strive and should prevail; And that a higher gift than grace should flesh, and blood refine, God's Presence and His very Self, And Essence all divine. O generous love! that He who smote in man for man the foe, The double agony in man; For man should undergo; And in the garden secretly, and on the cross on high, should teach His brethren and inspire to suffer and to die.
*May I be so blessed as to receive such Divine prayers when my time comes, for there is nothing I can do to merit them!
December 9, 2019
I read this in November. I had three days to finish it before Schole Sisters, and mentally divided it into three parts to know how many pages I had to read each night. Except that on the first night, I couldn't put it down. What a compelling, beautiful, and theologically rich vision.
December 17, 2017
To a non-Catholic reader, Gerontius's devotion to his Lord Almighty and the halls of heaven—that are made, we are told, not of material but of life itself—must seem puzzling, bizzare even, to say the least.
And the puzzlement does not abate; instead, it balloons, especially when Gerontius's piety blossoms and flourishes in increasingly intoning tones even in the dismal conditions of what turns out to be Heaven, which, in the poem, is essentially a sensory-deprivation tank of divine proportions. We know this when the Guardian Angel tells the Soul of Gerontius that in Heaven, Gerontius has "nor touch, nor taste, nor hearing," "nor power to move thyself, nor limbs to move," and, as a "disembodied soul," he has "by right / No converse with aught else beside thyself." Gerontius only thinks that he can hear and speak but, the metaphysical reality is, he is only granted "some lower measures of perception ... lest so stern a solitude should load and break thy being." Heaven, it seems, can be a living hell as well.
As such, Newman's vision of heavenly bliss is thus the inane bliss of a yawning void, filled only by the sterile purity of spiritual breaths. (Yet, in a pivotal and gorgeous line which supplies the key—or keys—to unlocking the poem, the Guardian Angel tells the Soul of Gerontius that "thou art wrapp'd and swathed around in dreams, / Dreams that are true, yet enigmatical.")
But even under such soul-crushing conditions, Gerontius's soul yearns for nothing else but to glimpse a sight of the Creator. Spoiler alert: this eventually happens, in a particularly climatic sequence which has since then been immemorialised by Elgar in his masterwork of the same name. But, as Gerontius glimpses the Lord's visage, he is so overcome by grief at his own sinful nature that he flees and begs the Guardian Angel to send him straight to Purgatory. Needless to say, the imagery and iconography comes straight out of Dante, from the world of The Divine Comedy, written some 544 years earlier. There is thus a sense of the banality in the poem; a sense that Newman is (re-)doing what Dante had already done, and did better, more than half a millenia ago.
In the end, the Dream of Gerontius as a story is thus a thing truly dark: incomprehensible and ultimately unexplainable, like faith itself. Yet, like faith itself, the poem gushes at times with immensely gorgeous verse. And those were well worth enduring the bizzarement experienced at witnessing the single-headedness of Gerontius's faith.
And the puzzlement does not abate; instead, it balloons, especially when Gerontius's piety blossoms and flourishes in increasingly intoning tones even in the dismal conditions of what turns out to be Heaven, which, in the poem, is essentially a sensory-deprivation tank of divine proportions. We know this when the Guardian Angel tells the Soul of Gerontius that in Heaven, Gerontius has "nor touch, nor taste, nor hearing," "nor power to move thyself, nor limbs to move," and, as a "disembodied soul," he has "by right / No converse with aught else beside thyself." Gerontius only thinks that he can hear and speak but, the metaphysical reality is, he is only granted "some lower measures of perception ... lest so stern a solitude should load and break thy being." Heaven, it seems, can be a living hell as well.
As such, Newman's vision of heavenly bliss is thus the inane bliss of a yawning void, filled only by the sterile purity of spiritual breaths. (Yet, in a pivotal and gorgeous line which supplies the key—or keys—to unlocking the poem, the Guardian Angel tells the Soul of Gerontius that "thou art wrapp'd and swathed around in dreams, / Dreams that are true, yet enigmatical.")
But even under such soul-crushing conditions, Gerontius's soul yearns for nothing else but to glimpse a sight of the Creator. Spoiler alert: this eventually happens, in a particularly climatic sequence which has since then been immemorialised by Elgar in his masterwork of the same name. But, as Gerontius glimpses the Lord's visage, he is so overcome by grief at his own sinful nature that he flees and begs the Guardian Angel to send him straight to Purgatory. Needless to say, the imagery and iconography comes straight out of Dante, from the world of The Divine Comedy, written some 544 years earlier. There is thus a sense of the banality in the poem; a sense that Newman is (re-)doing what Dante had already done, and did better, more than half a millenia ago.
In the end, the Dream of Gerontius as a story is thus a thing truly dark: incomprehensible and ultimately unexplainable, like faith itself. Yet, like faith itself, the poem gushes at times with immensely gorgeous verse. And those were well worth enduring the bizzarement experienced at witnessing the single-headedness of Gerontius's faith.
December 14, 2024
All a bit hard to take too seriously. Just a bit Jesus-y and silly, really:
🙄
A shame, because Elgar’s setting is pretty special. We can’t always win.
“All holy Angels, pray for him.
Choirs of the righteous, pray for him.
Holy Abraham, pray for him.
St. John Baptist, St. Joseph, pray for him.
St. Peter, St. Paul, St Andrew, St. John,
All Apostles, all Evangelists, pray for him.
All holy Disciples of the Lord, pray for him.
All holy Innocents, pray for him.
All holy Martyrs, all holy Confessors,
All holy Hermits, all holy Virgins...”
🙄
A shame, because Elgar’s setting is pretty special. We can’t always win.
October 11, 2024
I think I gotta give the eternal damnation ahh literature a rest holy shit
December 10, 2023
Dear Angel, say, why have I now no fear at meeting Him?
It is because Then thou didst fear, that now thou dost not fear. Thou hast forestalled the agony, and so for thee the bitterness of death is past.
Absolutely incredible
It is because Then thou didst fear, that now thou dost not fear. Thou hast forestalled the agony, and so for thee the bitterness of death is past.
Absolutely incredible
December 25, 2023
A comforting reminder that Purgatory is for souls already saved, and the necessary temporary purification process can only be withstood by that conformity to Love itself which increases as a soul strives toward sanctity
June 9, 2014
My initial reaction was that writers of fine prose don't necessarily make fine poets, and I wrote this off as something I needed to read.
But on rereading, the poem "takes off" once the dreamer has left his body and the journey to judgement takes place. There is some fine material in the alternating stanzas of the soul and the Angel. The heavenly choirs of Angelicals break into variations of what would become the hymn: "Praise to the Holiest in the Height".
Newman does something special in this poem, in that he takes the Catholic idea of Purgatory, and deals with its complexity without preaching a sermon on it or giving a theological lecture.
But on rereading, the poem "takes off" once the dreamer has left his body and the journey to judgement takes place. There is some fine material in the alternating stanzas of the soul and the Angel. The heavenly choirs of Angelicals break into variations of what would become the hymn: "Praise to the Holiest in the Height".
Newman does something special in this poem, in that he takes the Catholic idea of Purgatory, and deals with its complexity without preaching a sermon on it or giving a theological lecture.
May 21, 2020
I loved this! Such a beautiful poem full of thought provoking elements about what happens at our death.
May 6, 2024
Idle curiosity took me to the poem. It is curiously spine-tingling and dramatic. Unmistakably Victorian but devoid of sentimentality. Elgar of course didn't use of all the text and particularly cut a lot of the more meditative verse from the second and subsequent sections of the poem. One can understand why he did but what is strange reading the poem, is that the dramatic flow isn't impeded by the Angel's long speeches to the Soul, which feel neither overlong or out of place.
Analysing the poetic achievement, it's hard to point to anything stellar - a line by line analysis would probably conclude in a 'workmanlike' judgment, and yet both the intellectual and manifestly dramatic aspects of what is being played out somehow seem to elevate the impact of the verse. A really interesting experience and one which has stayed with me in the days since I've read it.
Analysing the poetic achievement, it's hard to point to anything stellar - a line by line analysis would probably conclude in a 'workmanlike' judgment, and yet both the intellectual and manifestly dramatic aspects of what is being played out somehow seem to elevate the impact of the verse. A really interesting experience and one which has stayed with me in the days since I've read it.
October 12, 2021
This book was a beautiful poem that touched on the pains and joys of a soul immediately preceding, during, and succeeding it’s death. With great usage of different poetical stylings for each person (person is loose here as it’s mostly a soul, angels, and demons speaking), it is incredibly clear to the reader not only who is speaking but the very nature of that speaker even without the salutary titles before each. If you are pursuing a short book or long poem for leisurely reading that sparks the soul to dwell on the mysteries of life and death, then this is absolutely the place to begin. One of my favorite poems I have ever read!
January 15, 2026
A beautiful, abstract, metaphysical, and visceral tour of the soul from the point death towards ultimate union with God. Do we think enough about the experiences we will be greeted with as our consciousness transitions from this mortal coil to the land of the dead? What shall it be like? What do we expect to feel, sense, communicate, hear, understand?
This is a meritorious speculative theological exploration as well simultaneous to being a praiseworthy work of art.
(It doesn't hurt it comes from a Doctor and Saint.)
This is a meritorious speculative theological exploration as well simultaneous to being a praiseworthy work of art.
(It doesn't hurt it comes from a Doctor and Saint.)
February 14, 2024
“And thou art wrapp'd and swathed around in
dreams.
Dreams that are true, yet enigmatical;
For the belongings of thy present state,
Save through such symbols, come not home to
thee.
And thus thou tell'st of space, and time, and
size,
Of fragrant, solid, bitter, musical,
Of fire, and of refreshment after fire;
[…]
Though, till that Beatific Vision, thou art blind;
For e'en thy purgatory, which comes like fire,
Is fire without its fight.”
dreams.
Dreams that are true, yet enigmatical;
For the belongings of thy present state,
Save through such symbols, come not home to
thee.
And thus thou tell'st of space, and time, and
size,
Of fragrant, solid, bitter, musical,
Of fire, and of refreshment after fire;
[…]
Though, till that Beatific Vision, thou art blind;
For e'en thy purgatory, which comes like fire,
Is fire without its fight.”
September 10, 2025
I listened to this while working so my review is probably a low one because of my multitasking. The audio version I listened to was done by volunteers who, while I am grateful for their work, became a distraction at some points.
The reality of the invisible world is front and center in this play. The imagery and logic that comes from that setting is worth pondering more than the 52 minutes I gave the audiobook. I’ll definitely be coming back to this.
The reality of the invisible world is front and center in this play. The imagery and logic that comes from that setting is worth pondering more than the 52 minutes I gave the audiobook. I’ll definitely be coming back to this.
July 21, 2019
A beautiful poem of the soul just after death
April 27, 2021
Gerontius dies in bed and is met by his angel, who is bringing him before God for judgement.
June 20, 2021
Truly a must-read.
September 9, 2022
“It is because
Then thou didst fear,
that now thou dost not fear.”
Then thou didst fear,
that now thou dost not fear.”
December 17, 2022
Artistic perfection.
May 24, 2023
Farewell, but not for ever! brother dear,
Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;
Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,
And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.
Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;
Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,
And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.
February 4, 2024
"the flame of the Everlasting Love Doth burn ere it transform"
Sublime
Sublime
May 7, 2024
Amazing!
August 14, 2025
Best and most beautiful poem I’ve ever read.
April 17, 2021
This brilliant man helped me cross the Tiber and enter the Roman Catholic Church. It was a long and tortured journey. I wonder if I could have made it without Cardinal Newman. This amazing poem was not part of the bridge over the Tiber. I discovered it once in the Church. The poem chronicles the soul of a recently departed man, escorted toward God by his guardian angel. Anyone who bristles at the doctrine of Purgatory or anyone who has an elementary idea of the teaching or anyone who wants to be blown away by truth and beauty should ready this 45 minute poem. I’ve read it 4 or 5 times. Each time with tears. God bless you.
August 25, 2022
Listen to Elgar’s musical adaptation as you read along.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews