The Closet Professor

We hurry on, nor passing note
By Digby Mackworth Dolben

We hurry on, nor passing note
The rounded hedges white with May;
For golden clouds before us float
To lead our dazzled sight astray.
We say, ‘they shall indeed be sweet
‘The summer days that are to be’—
The ages murmur at our feet
The everlasting mystery.

We seek for Love to make our own,
But clasp him not for all our care
Of outspread arms; we gain alone
The flicker of his yellow hair
Caught now and then through glancing vine,
How rare, how fair, we dare not tell;
We know those sunny locks entwine
With ruddy-fruited asphodel.

A little life, a little love,
Young men rejoicing in their youth,
A doubtful twilight from above,
A glimpse of Beauty and of Truth,—
And then, no doubt, spring-loveliness
Expressed in hawthorns white and red,
The sprouting of the meadow grass,
But churchyard weeds about our head.

About the Poet

During the 19th century the gay British poet Digby Mackworth Dolben was little known. He owes his poetic reputation to his cousin, Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1913 to 1930, who edited a partial edition of his verse, Poems, in 1911. Bridges guaranteed Dolben’s reputation with Three Friends: Memoirs of Digby Mackworth Dolben, Richard Watson Dixon, Henry Bradley (1932), as well as the careful editing of his poetry. Bridges said that the poems Dolben left behind were equal to “anything that was ever written by any English poet at his age.” Hopkins’ infatuation for Dolben and Dolben’s tragic death feature in Simon Edge’s 2017 novel The Hopkins Conundrum.

Dolben was born February 8, 1848, in Guernsey and brought up at Finedon Hall in Northamptonshire. He was educated at Cheam School and Eton College. At Eton, his distant cousin Bridges was his senior and took him under his wing. Dolben caused considerable scandal at school by his exhibitionist behavior. He chronicled his romantic attachment to another pupil a year older than he was, Martin Le Marchant Gosselin, by writing love poetry. He also defied his strict Protestant upbringing by joining group of studetns of the Oxford Movement, a movement of high church members of the Church of England which began in the 1830s and eventually developed into Anglo-Catholicism. He then claimed allegiance to the Order of St Benedict, affecting a monk’s habit. He was considering a conversion to Roman Catholicism. On June 28, 1867, Dolben drowned in the River Welland when bathing with the ten-year-old son of his tutor, Rev. C. E. Prichard, Rector of South Luffenham in Rutland. Dolben was then aged 19 and preparing to go up to Oxford.

According to Simon Edge, the English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins was “so captivated by a brief meeting [with Dolben] that he spent the rest of his life mourning him.” In a letter to Bridges after Dolben’s death, Hopkins said “there can very seldom have happened the loss of so much beauty (in body and mind and life) and of the promise of still more as there has been in his case.” Hopkins also asked Bridges whether Dolben’s family had considered publishing his poems. Fortunately, the independently wealthy Bridges later published books of poems by both Dolben and Hopkins, or their poetry might have been lost to the world forever. Dolben’s poems were published in a single volume by Bridges in 1911; the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says that his work stands “among the best of the poetry of the Oxford Movement.” Dolben’s death, it adds, “was the end of a life of exceptional poetic promise.” 

In his biography of Dolben, Bridges identifies Dolben’s ardent affection for another of his Eton classmates, a particularly attractive (if in Bridges’s estimation somewhat vacuous) member of their high church circle. Bridges calls this an “idolization”, but infatuation is a better term; the poems are plainly homoerotic. While editing the book Bridges refused the suggestion put forth by mutual friends that he rewrite Dolben’s poems to read as though they had been written for a girl: but he did agree to suppress the identity of Gosselin, the seemingly oblivious young man who had so enamored Dolben.  Gosselin, the British Minister to Lisbon and a knight, had himself died a few years before Bridges began his memoir. (His widow requested the suppression after denying access to his diary.) Bridges does not ignore Dolben’s sexuality. However, he is never direct, and his discussion of his sexuality is hesitant, extremely guarded without any direct or conclusive statement.