The Nun: An Elegy

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Edward Jerningham and his Monastic Poems

At the outset of his literary career, Jerningham mixed with the circle about Thomas Gray, although he never met the poet himself. However, like many at the time, he began by writing a close imitation of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard in “The Nunnery” (1762).

Jerningham then followed it up in successive years with other poems on similar themes in which the connection with Gray’s work, though less close, was maintained in theme, form and emotional tone: “The Magdalens: an elegy” (1763); “The Nun: an elegy” (1764); and “An Elegy Written Among the Ruins of an Abbey” (1765), which is derivative of similar use of the ruin theme in elegiac works such as Edward Moore’s “An elegy, written among the ruins of a nobleman’s seat in Cornwall”.

Monastic themes were an obvious choice for a Catholic raised in Europe, but they are singular for being penetrated by notes of erotic passion. What is left unfulfilled in “The Nunnery”, wasting its sweetness on the desert air, is any chance of married life or sexual dalliance. And where the latter had been irregularly fulfilled, then it found a retreat in the recently opened refuge for reformed prostitutes, the setting of “The Magdalens”. There the religious connotations are intensified by Jerningham’s description of its inmates “kneeling at yon rail” in “Nun-clad Penance” in the church where men of fashion such as himself went to hear them sing.