Customer Reviews

The Dream of Gerontius

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I heard Father Benedict Groeschel read this on the radio one night, and it had me sitting in my car in front of my house in a state of awe, listening to it for half an hour. Written by John Henry Newman, a nineteenth-century intellectual who converted to Catholicism while he was an Anglican bishop, it is a first-person account of a person who dies surrounded by priests and loved ones (whose prayers he can still hear dimly as he begins his Travels). While he still is aware of himself as fully "himself," he describes rapidly going through changes and passing through an almost unbearable love as he moves into a very intense and loving purification process.

Naturally this is not a "real" account of an experience which anyone who has gone through it has ever come back to describe, but it still solidifies my respect for John Henry Newman and makes me want to read more of him. It's printed off old plates which have written corrections and edits marked on them, but I'm glad Amazon had it in print. The word "awesome" is so over-used that I rarely use it myself (people describe tortilla chips as "awesome"), but that word truly applies to this poem.

This book captured my interest as it is the basis of an oratorio by Sir Edward Elgar. Being a musician, I like to do a bit of research into literary sources of musical compositions.

The book contains a disclaimer that some pages may be missing or that print quality may be less than perfect or that strange paginations may appear. This edition of The Dream of Gerontius contained all of the pages and color quality was fine. There were some checks and X's throughout but nothing that hampered the intelligibility of the text.