Devotional Verse

Perhaps what best defines the Victorian period are the various fluctuations and developments within religious culture that punctuate its timeline. A dominant and crucial strand within Victorian society, religious culture found many expressions, particularly within the arts. The output of what we can call “devotional verse” is one very rich aspect of this culture. The most common feature of devotional verse is the presence of a speaker who seeks self-definition through a source that is felt to be external to and/or greater or other than the self. It is therefore a flexible and potentially very powerful genre—something that contributed to its wide appeal and usage during the Victorian period. A large body of religious poetry makes up this genre, and this is most frequently situated within the various branches of the Christian tradition. The broad topic of devotional verse also necessarily encompasses the huge corpus of 19th-century hymnody, which, in the Victorian period, was almost exclusively Christian. Devotional verse by general definition is, of course, not limited to the expression of religious devotion. Devotion to political causes of the period was expressed in verse form as much as devotion to a person or an idea, for example. Literary form is an important aspect of criticism on devotional verse. This is as much in the way particular forms, such as the hymn, ode, or sonnet can be identified with the devotional mode, as well as the extent to which the meaning of a poem or hymn can be shaped by its form, or indeed by its deviation from the form and its particular associations. For example, in Christina Rossetti’s Verses (Chiefly collected from her devotional writings) (1893), religious concepts and secular concerns come together in a devotional mode of delivery, and, as such, are classified as “devotional.” Many well-known Victorian poets are associated with the genre of devotional verse, such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Matthew Arnold. Some of these also wrote hymns. However, as scholarship on devotional verse increases in its breadth of interest, more “devotional” aspects of poetic writing, as well as individual poets, are being paid critical attention. In a similar way, as scholarship on hymnody of the period expands beyond the well-known Victorian hymnists such as John Keble, “Mrs.” Cecil Frances Alexander, John Mason Neale, Reginald Heber, and Frances Ridley Havergal, so too do the parameters by which we measure the “traditional” hymn. Although the pursuit of reading and researching Victorian devotional verse is primary a literary one, an understanding of the unique climate of religious culture during the Victorian period is helpful. The devotional verse and hymnody of this era can be said to be characteristically “Victorian” in a number of ways, particularly in the way “devotion” takes its shape, reflecting the religious, familial, political, and sexual aspects of devotion with their particularly Victorian inflections. These features do not easily cohere and are often contradictory and even oppositional in nature, reflecting the mutable aspect and continuing debates surrounding devotional verse of the Victorian period.