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''The Dream of Gerontius'' is a poem written by Blessed John Henry Newman (February 21, 1801 – August 11, 1890) consisting of the prayer of a dying man, and angelic and demonic responses. The poem, written after Newman's conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, explores his new Catholic-held beliefs of the journey from death through Paradise to God and thence to Purgatory. The poem follows the main character as he nears death and then reawakens as a soul, preparing for judgment, following one of the most important events any human can experience: death. Newman uses the death and judgement of Gerontius as a prism through which the reader is drawn to contemplation of their own fear of death and sense of unworthiness before God. His depiction of the overwhelmed Gerontius in Phase Seven of the poem, who begs to be taken for purgatorial cleansing rather than diminish the perfection of God and his courts of Saints and Angels by his continued presence, has become a popular expression of mans desire for healing through redemptive suffering. This scene of the poem has done much for the rehabilitation of the doctrine of purgatory which had previously come to be seen as a fearful terror rather than a state of final purification essentially positive in nature. Newman said that the poem "was written by accident – and it was published by accident." He wrote it up in fair copy from fifty-two scraps of paper between 17 January and 7 February 1865 and published it in May and June of the same year, in two parts in the Jesuit periodical ''The Month''.〔Banfield, Stephen, "The Dream of Gerontius at 100: Elgar's Other Opera?", ''The Musical Times'', Vol. 141, No. 1873 (Winter 2000), pp. 23–31〕 The poem inspired a choral work of the same name by Edward Elgar in 1900. Gerontius owes much of its imagery to the ''Divine Comedy'' of Dante Alighieri, an allegorical depiction of traveling through the realms of the dead. ==Structure== The poem is divided into seven individual "phases", and is Newman's longest written poem. The seven phases are: 1.Gerontius, 2. Soul of Gerontius, 3. Soul, 4. Soul, 5. no title, 6. Angel, 7. Angel. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Dream of Gerontius (poem)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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