John Keble’s “The Christian Year” (1827)

A Review by The Rev. Ben Jeffries, ’14

Historians commonly date the beginning of the Oxford Movement to Keble's Assize sermon of 1833, but Pusey dated the beginning to the publication of The Christian Year five years prior. It was the Christian Year, Pusey said, that adumbrated and inspired the true spirit that led to the catholic revival of the mid-nineteenth century, during which time it was tremendously popular: by the time the copyright expired in 1873, it had been printed in over 150 editions, and sold nearly 400,000 copies in England alone. 

Produced during the Romantic era of poetry, many of the poems utilize a reflection on Nature as a means of exploring higher truths. While some of the poems can be a little hard to follow on a first read, many are truly sublime. The spirituality of the poems is one of complete and total resignation to the will of God, reminiscent of that guiding theme of counter-reformation spirituality. 

Poems for every feast of the Christian year, by John Keble. The “heart” that animated the spirit of the Oxford Movement. Available from Nashotah House Press.

The characteristically English gentleness and modesty that pervades the volume renders a collection that is a subtle delight and a gentle prompt to the soul of the reader. Any Christian who would like to engage in profound metaphysical poetry in a Victorian key, and any student of the Oxford movement who desires to become acquainted with the heart of the movement, would do well to dig into this collection.

John Keble (1792-1866), Church of England priest, theologian, and poet who originated and helped lead the Oxford Movement which sought to revive in Anglicanism the High Church ideals of the later seventeenth-century church. Centred at Oxford, the movement sought at first to respond to government efforts to appropriate church funds and property but gradually expanded its activities to a more general theological and pastoral agenda. Keble wrote nine of the Oxford Movement’s 90 Tracts for the Times, which were intended to rally the clergy against the theory of a state-controlled church and which caused the movement’s advocates to be known pejoratively as Tractarians. The Tractarians encouraged study of the early Church Fathers, edited their works, and arranged and paid for their translation. 

The Rev. Ben Jefferies, '14, is the first rector of The Good Shepherd Anglican Church, Opelika, Alabama, co-founder of the Cellar of St. Gambrinus and an honorary member of the Society of St. Moses the Jacked. He is married to Carrie and they have three adorable daughters. His heroes are E.B. Pusey and The Rev. Lars Skoglund, ’14.