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Thomas Gordon Hake

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Hake by Rossetti

Thomas Gordon Hake (1809-1895). Crayon drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), 1872. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake (10 March 1809 - 11 January 1895) was an English poet.[1]

Life[]

Overview[]

Hake was born at Leeds, educated at Christ's Hospital; he was a physician, and practiced at various places. His books include Madeline (1871), Parables and Tales (1873), The Serpent Play (1883), New Day Sonnets (1890), and Memoirs of Eighty Years (1893).[2]

Family[]

Hake was born at Leeds, descended from an old Devonshire family who had "lived on the soil for many years without being distinguished in any branch of science, literature, or art." His father, whose usual residence was Sidmouth, possessed considerable musical acquirements. His mother, fourteen years older than the father, was of the Huntly branch of the Gordon family, being eldest daughter of Captain William Augustus Gordon, and aunt of General Charles Gordon.[3]

Youth[]

The father died when Hake was 3 years old; his widow, left with a moderate competence, continued to live in Devonshire, and obtained for her son an admission to Christ's Hospital, where, first at the preparatory school at Hertford and afterwards in London, he received most of his education.[3]

Having determined upon a medical career, he studied at Lewes under Thomas Hodson, "the highest authority in his profession within the bounds of Sussex," afterwards at St. George's Hospital, and at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, at the latter of which he graduated.[3]

Career[]

After travelling for some time in Italy he settled at Brighton, where he was for 5 years physician to the dispensary, then proceeded to Paris for a year's study, and on his return in 1839 published Piromides, a tragedy on the mysteries of Isis, and the "nebulous but impressive romance" (as W.M. Rossetticalls it, Vates; or, The philosophy of madness, 1st issued in 4 incomplete numbers, with illustrations by Charles Landseer (1840, 4to), and afterwards republished in Ainsworth's Magazine as Valdarno; or, The ordeal of Art-Worship. "Towards 1844 it seethed in my brother's head," says Mr. Rossetti, and it ultimately led to a friendship between Dante Rossetti and the author eventful for both.[3]

Hake next settled at Bury St. Edmunds, where he became intimate with George Borrow and J.W. Donaldsom, of both of whom he has given interesting particulars in his autobiography.[3] Between 1839 and 1853 he contributed numerous papers, chiefly of a scientific complexion, to the medical journals. About the latter date he gave up practice at Bury and travelled in America.[4]

On his return he established himself at Roehampton, and, while filling the post of physician to the West London Hospital, became physician to the Countess of Ripon, who was related to his mother's family. The beauty of Lady Ripon's woods at Nocton revived the spirit of poetry within him. He wrote his "Lily of the Valley" and his "Old Souls," which, with other poems, were threaded together as The World's Epitaph, privately printed in 1866 in an edition of 100 copies. One of these came into the hands of Rossetti, who admired it as enthusiastically is Valdarno,' and the 2 poets met in October 1869.[4]

Hake's autobiography depicts him as a shrewd but not unkindly observer of other men; cheerful rather than genial, communicative but not garrulous, and with a confidence in his own powers partaking rather of the nature of pride than of vanity. A veteran as a man, a novice as an author, he held an exceptional position in the literary society of his day. W.M. Rossetti accurately describes him as "a man of more than common height, lithe and straight, with very self-possessed gentle manners, and clear deliberate utterance."[4]

About 1870 Hake wrote another novel, Her Winning Ways, which appeared in The New Monthly Magazine, then, like Ainsworth, a mere refuge for the destitute. His prose as well as his verse wanted every quality of popularity. Nothing could have gained him a hearing during his lifetime except his fortunate naturalisation in the Rossetti circle. Dante Rossetti reviewed him in the Academy and the Fortnigtly Review, an honour he did to no one else..[4]

In Rossetti's darkest days, when in 1872 his life was nearly terminated by laudanum, Hake rendered the greatest service. "He was the earthly providence of the Rossetti family," says Mr. W.M. Rossetti. He took Dante Rossetti to his house during the worst of the crisis, afterwards accompanied him to Scotland, and consented to his own son George acting for a long time as Rossetti's companion and secretary, a position which the derangement of the patient's mental and physical health eventually rendered untenable.[4]

After 1872 Hake spent a considerable time in Italy and Germany, and, returning to England, settled near St. John's Wood, principally occupied in the composition and publication of poetry for the few, difficult rather than obscure in thought and diction, but uninviting to those who cannot appreciate mystical symbolism. In 1871 he published Madeline, and other Poems, reproducing much of The World's Epitaph. In 1872 appeared Parables and Tales, including "Old Souls." In 1876 he published New Symbols; in 1879 Legends of the Morrow; in 1880 Maiden Ecstasy; in 1883 The Serpent Play,' and in 1890 The New Day, a collection of sonnets in the Shakespearean form.[4]

Last years[]

His autobiography, Memoirs of Eighty Years, was published in 1892. A selection from his poems, with a preface by Alice Meynell (and a portrait after Rossetti), appeared in 1894. Hake also published small works On Vital Force; its pulmonic origin, 1867, and The Powers of the Alphabet,' 1883.[4]

During the last 4 years of his life he was confined to his couch by a fracture of the hip, but his faculties and spirits remained unimpaired. He died on ll Jan. 1895.[4]

Writing[]

Hake is a rare instance of a poet nearly all whose work has been produced after 50. "He had," says William Bell Scott, "retired from medicine, determined to cultivate poetry, and he was really accomplishing his object by perseverance and determined study." This character is borne out by Hake's own preface to The World's Epitaph where stress is laid upon the difficulties of poetical expression in a style which proves that, unless when writing of ordinary things, he found it no easy matter to convey his thoughts clearly and accurately even in prose.[4]

There is no poet to whom Tennyson's phrase, "he beat his music out," would be more applicable, and the rather inasmuch as the result really is music, Hake's most artificial verses being usually accompanied by a melody which proves that metrical expression was, after all, natural to him, and that poetry was actually his vocation.[4]

He is nevertheless essentially a poet of reflection, notwithstanding the objective character of most of his poems, and their endeavour to represent ideas by material symbols. Their descriptive power and sense of the mysteriousness of Nature are balanced by frequent lapses into bathos; the total impression they produce is nevertheless one of dignity and intellectual distinction, and they have, at all events, the merit of independence of all contemporary poetry.[4]

Dr. Hake's works had much subtlety and felicity of expression, and were warmly appreciated in a somewhat restricted literary circle. In his last published verse, the sonnets, he shows an advance in facility on the occasional harshness of his earlier work.[1] The comparative fluency and flexibility of Hake's sonnets seem to indicate that he would) have overcome his defects if age had suffered him to go on writing. Not many such volumes have been produced by an octogenarian.[4]

Critical introduction[]

by Thomas Humphry Ward

Thomas Gordon Hake was a man of many experiences, many accomplishments, and many moods. In manner he was “polished and urbane;” in aspect, according to his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton, to whom Hake dedicated his New Day, he was, “with the single exception of Lord Tennyson, the most poetical-looking poet” his friend had ever seen. Till past middle life he was a practising physician, the author of several learned books and papers, and a votary of Nature-study. But from eleven years old he had been a student of Shakespeare, and one side of him, from boyhood onwards, was passionately devoted to poetry; so that when, at the age of nearly sixty, leisure, travels in Italy, and the beauty of some English woods in spring had made him take seriously to the writing of verse, none of his few intimate friends was surprised at the high standard that he reached at once.

One reader, who was as yet a stranger to him, was so charmed that, immediately they were introduced, the two became close friends; and to this friendship Hake may be said to have owed a strong poetic impulse, and the world the enjoyment of many rare and original poems. The new friend was D. G. Rossetti, and for several years after 1869 Hake lived in close touch with the Rossetti circle. As is stated above, his medical services were invaluable during Gabriel’s worst days, in and about 1872, so that the poet-painter’s brother rightly described him as “the Providence” of the family. Gabriel Rossetti went so far in his admiration as to review one of Hake’s books in The Academy: a testimonial which of itself secured for the new poet the allegiance of all Rossettians.

None the less, one clever artist and writer attached to that circle could not resist giving a rather malicious account of Hake’s method of composition. This was W.B. Scott, who in his Autobiographical Notes (ii, p. 178) thus describes Hake at Kelmscott, whither in 1874 he had taken Rossetti for a rest-cure. While young George Hake was attending to the patient,

his father, the doctor himself, was developing "the ideal" in solitude in the room below at about two lines a day. From the clearing away of breakfast there he sat by the fire, a pencil in one hand and a folded piece of paper in the other. On the table near him lay a little heap of other pieces of paper, his failures at the improvement of the same couplet in various transformations, sometimes expressing quite different meanings. The old gentleman in the character of a poet had interested all of us. He had retired from medicine determined to cultivate poetry. But he was really accomplishing his object by perseverance and determined study, utterly pooh-poohing the maxim that if a man has not made a good poem at twenty-five, he never will.

The picture is overdone, but it helps to explain the elaboration which sometimes causes Hake’s poems to be not easy to understand at a first reading. His prose Memoirs of Eighty Years (1892) contains some pages of poetical theory which also, from their very abstruseness, help to explain why the poems are difficult. But their music makes a universal appeal; their reading of Nature has the exactitude to be expected from a trained observer; they are, as Rossetti so often insisted, thoroughly original. The two longer ones here given are from the volume which his literary friends thought the best, New Symbols; two sonnets follow from The New Day, following his beloved Shakespeare in their form and dwelling in thought upon the good things that are to follow when a close study of Nature shall have driven away the clouds with which Ignorance darkens the spirit of man.[5]

Recognition[]

Hake was awarded a Civil List literary pension in 1893.[1]

Publications[]

Hake poems

Poetry[]

Plays[]

Novels[]

  • In Letters of Gold. London: Hurst & Blackett, 1886.
  • Within Sound of the Weir. London: Cassell, 1891.

Non-fiction[]

Edited[]


Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.[6]

Old_Souls,_by_Thomas_Gordon_Hake

Old Souls, by Thomas Gordon Hake

See also[]

References[]

Notes[]

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Hake, Thomas Gordon, Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition 1911, Volume 12, 827. Wikisource, Web, Feb. 10, 2017.
  2. ↑ John William Cousin, "Hake, Thomas Gordon," A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, 1910, 172. Web, Jan. 22, 2018.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 Garnett, 374.
  4. ↑ 4.00 4.01 4.02 4.03 4.04 4.05 4.06 4.07 4.08 4.09 4.10 4.11 Gaarnett, 375.
  5. ↑ from Thomas Humphry Ward, "Critical Introduction: William Johnson Cory (1823–1892)," The English Poets: Selections with critical introductions (edited by Thomas Humphry Ward). New York & London: Macmillan, 1880-1918. Web, Mar. 24, 2016.
  6. ↑ Search results = au:Thomas Gordon Hake, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Aug. 23, 2013.

External links[]

Poems
Books
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PD-icon This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement (edited by Sidney Lee)​. London: Smith, Elder, 1901. Original article is at: Hake, Thomas Gordon

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