Three Minutes with Newman
“The Trance of Time” in honor of St. John Henry Newman’s 224th birthday
February 22, 2025
We know that St. John Henry Newman found birthdays to be important, not only because he wrote a poem about his own birthday but also because he wrote poems for others on their birthdays, the anniversary of their death, and saint’s days. Birthdays caused him to think of the passing of time, and of course, in the age when he lived, a long life was not to be expected. He would experience the fragility of life in a painful firsthand way in the sudden quick death of his dear sister, Mary, who died at a young age. In this early poem Newman incorporates the theme of time and also his love of nature. He begins in the first two stanzas by describing the four seasons with lovely imagery.
IN childhood, when with eager eyes
The season-measured year I view’d,
All garb’d in fairy guise,
Pledged constancy of good.
Spring sang of heaven; the summer flowers
Bade me gaze on, and did not fade;
Even suns o’er autumn’s bowers
Heard my strong wish, and stay’d.
In the third stanza, Newman makes a bit of a change from his fond description of the seasons by stating that as a young man, nature had a claim on his heart.
They came and went, the short-lived four;
Yet, as their varying dance they wove,
To my young heart each bore
Its own sure claim of love.
His love of nature will be a recurring theme with him; however, St. John Henry was aware of the danger of worshiping nature for itself. The Victorian Age’s Romanticism gave nature an exalted place, sometimes even without acknowledgment of a creator God. With Newman nature was veil for the invisible world and its Creator, a loving God.
In the fourth and fifth stanza, Newman notes how the passing of time seems to go faster and faster, so much so that he doesn’t notice the changing seasons as he once did. Instead, he has become fond of more interior pastimes. He is realizing that his youthful love of the outdoors brought a pleasure that can also be found in other pursuits. He didn’t become disenchanted with the natural world as much as realize it must be viewed sub specie aeternitatis (under the view of eternity).
Far different now;—the whirling year
Vainly my dizzy eyes pursue;
And its fair tints appear
All blent in one dusk hue.
Why dwell on rich autumnal lights,
Spring-time, or winter’s social ring?
Long days are fire-side nights,
Brown autumn is fresh spring.
In the following sixth stanza, Newman is desiring to be detached from not only nature, but worldly things because they are all fleeting.
Then what this world to thee, my heart?
Its gifts nor feed thee nor can bless.
Thou hast no owner’s part
In all its fleetingness.
The final two stanzas bring home the saint’s powerful message. Nature and all its power and glory should bring us to contemplate God.
The flame, the storm, the quaking ground,
Earth’s joy, earth’s terror, nought is thine,
Thou must but hear the sound
Of the still voice divine.
O priceless art! O princely state!
E’en while by sense of change opprest,
Within to antedate
Heaven’s Age of fearless rest.
(Highwood. October, 1827).
Newman realizes that the soul, as immortal, ultimately does not belong in the earthly world, but in heaven. In his sermon, “The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life”(Vol. 4, no.14) he writes of glory, the true and lasting beauty:
All that we see is destined one day to burst forth into a heavenly bloom,
and to be transfigured into immortal glory. Heaven at present is out of
sight, but in due time, as snow melts and discovers what it lay upon, so
will this visible creation fade away before those greater splendours which
are behind it, and on which at present it depends. In that day shadows will
retire, and the substance show itself (224-25).
On this his birthday commemoration, we can think of St. John Henry now in Heaven. He is enjoying “those greater splendours” as he dwells in the presence of the perfect uncreated beauty God and His heaven. In His poetry, his sermons, and in all his writing, his guiding of souls was to the purpose of pointing to the Invisible World of which he believed and for which he yearned. His love of Nature, his love of friends, his love of the Catholic Church were all because he loved God, for whom they were intimations.
