I HAVE recently been rereading and reflecting on John Keble’s cycle of poems The Christian Year, one of the books that inspired my own cycle Sounding The Seasons. Published in 1827, Keble’s book had enormous success and influence throughout the 19th century, going through more than 100 editions in its first 100 years, though, somewhat to our loss, it is scarcely read today.

Keble is, of course, most associated with the Oxford Movement. Indeed, Newman credited his Assize Sermon as the starting point of that whole extraordinary renaissance. But that sermon was not preached until six years after the publication of The Christian Year, and Keble’s poetry had a far wider reach and a broader ecumenical appeal than those later tracts.

Rather than pigeonhole him with high Victorian sentiment and Ritualism, it is better to see Keble as he actually was: the contemporary of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, that second generation of Romantic poets who drew on the inspiration of Coleridge and Wordsworth, and took it much further. Indeed, Keble came to Coleridge through the influence of John Taylor Coleridge, the great poet’s nephew, who was Keble’s closest friend as an undergraduate at Oxford.

The wellspring of Keble’s poetry was not the later controversial Ritualism, but a deep immersion in the Romantic Movement itself: the renewed vision of nature, and all that communion with nature might teach us, the willingness to look into our own hearts and be candid about the depths of what we feel, both good and ill, and the confidence that the poetic imagination itself is a truth-bearing faculty.

Through Coleridge, Keble came to understand how, besides the sacred texts of scripture on which he meditated so deeply, God’s Spirit and presence might also be discerned in that other divinely inspired work: nature herself.

Coleridge’s hope for his son Hartley (another contemporary of Keble’s at Oxford) that, in growing up amid the ever-changing beauty of the Lake District, he might “. . . see and hear The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters. . .” was also an inspiration to Keble.

In poem after poem, the meditation on that Sunday’s reading in the Prayer Book lectionary comes to us through, and is intermingled with, this equally devout reading of nature. So, “Morning”, from which the verses of the hymn “New every morning is the love” are taken, begins with three verses (omitted from the hymn) which simply contemplate nature with delight:

Hues of the rich unfolding morn,
That, ere the glorious sun be born,
By some soft touch invisible
Around his path are taught to swell . . .

The next verses go on to celebrate the “rustling breeze” and the “fragrant clouds”. But these are not simply described as objects: they are addressed personally as fellow creatures; indeed, they are not only fellow creatures, but fellow worshippers, offering, with us, their own tribute to heaven:

Ye fragrant clouds of dewy steam,
By which deep grove and tangled stream
Pay, for soft rains in season given,
Their tribute to the genial heaven . . .

This was not only a matter of poetic practice: it was also a matter of mission. The Romantic Movement was beginning to offer a substitute religion, a kind of nature-worshipping alternative to what was seen as stuffy and conventional religion, with its box pews and its plain whitewashed walls. Keble wanted to bring that new sensibility back to Christ, so that it might infuse and enrich our worship, and, perhaps, draw back some wanderers from the fold.