Finedon’s Famous Poet

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Digby Augustus Stewart Mackworth Dolben was born on 8th February 1848 on the island of Guernsey but spend most of his short but formative years at Finedon Hall.

He was the son of William Harcourt Isham Mackworth, 1806-1872, himself the younger son of Sir Digby Mackworth, (the third baronet) who added the additional surname Dolben following his marriage to Frances, heiress of Sir John English Dolben.

Digby was educated firstly at Cheam School and subsequently at Eton College under the influential Master William Johnson Cory. Cory both inspired and nurtured Digby’s poetic aspirations by having produced a collection of poems himself entitled ‘Ionica’. 

Perhaps a more significant source of inspiration was derived from that of his cousin Robert Bridges, who would later hold the prestigious accolade of Poet Laureate from 1913 to 1930. Being older than Digby, Bridges took him under his personal tutelage so to speak.

A Song

The world is young today:

Forget the gods are old,

Forget the years of gold

When all the months were May.

A little flower of Love

Is ours, without a root,

Without the end of fruit,

Yet ― take the scent thereof.

There may be hope above,

There may be rest beneath;

We see them not, but Death

Is palpable ― and Love.

Digby’s behaviour during his early schooldays and adolescence was both controversial and to some degree rather scandalous. He developed a romantic attachment to another older boy, Martin Le Marchant Gosselin and wrote several love poems to him. He also began to follow the doctrine of an English theologian, Dr E B Pusey, who advocated the revival of the Catholic doctrine in the Church of England. This being totally opposite to Digby’s staunchly Protestant upbringing. 

However, perhaps Digby’s most outrageous affectation was his assumed allegiance to the Order of St Benedict and a considered conversion to Roman Catholicism which occasionally entailed him wearing a monk’s habit, going barefoot and calling himself Brother Dominic, which obviously caused much embarrassment to his family.

Sadly, around this time, 1863, Digby, in an unfathomable fit of pique, destroyed all his poems by burning them, in what Robert Bridges called a “holocaust.”

Poppies

Lilies, lilies not for me,

Flowers of the pure and saintly―

I have seen in holy places

Where the incense rises faintly,

And the priest the chalice raises,

Lilies in the altar vases,

Not for me.

Leave untouched each garden tree,

Kings and queens of flower-land.

When the summer evening closes,

Lovers may-be hand in hand

There will seek for crimson roses,

There will bind their wreaths and posies

 Merrily.

From the corn-fields where we met

Pluck me poppies white and red;

Bind them round my weary brain,

Strew them on my narrow bed,

Numbing all the ache and pain.―

I shall sleep nor wake again,

But forget.

It was on his seventeenth birthday in 1865 that Digby Dolben’s poetic journey reached an important milestone. Robert Bridges introduced Digby to Gerard Manley Hopkins, nowadays considered to be one of England’s greatest poets of the Victorian era. In the words of Hopkins’s biographer Robert Bernard Martin, Hopkins’s meeting with Digby Dolben, “was, quite simply, the most momentous emotional event of his undergraduate years, probably of his entire life”.

Hopkins was completely taken with Digby, who was nearly four years younger than he, using his private confession journal to illustrate his suppressed erotic thoughts of him.

He maintained a correspondence with Digby, writing about him in his diary, also composing two poems about him, “Where art thou friend” and “The Beginning of the End.”

Two years later on May 2nd 1867, Digby Dolben fainted during his Oxford University entrance exams thus, failing them. In order to re-attempt qualification he travelled to meet a new tutor. Digby Dolben tragically drowned on the 28th June 1867 in the River Welland whilst bathing with the ten-year-old son of his new tutor, Rev. C. E. Prichard, the Rector of South Luffenham in Rutland. Digby was then aged only 19 and never completed his preparations to go up to Oxford University.

Enough

When all my words were said,

When all my songs were sung,

I thought to pass among

The unforgotten dead,

A Queen of ruth to reign

With her, who gathereth tears

From all the lands and years,

The Lesbian maid of pain;

That lovers, when they wove

The double myrtle-wreath,

Should sigh with mingled breath

Beneath the wings of Love:

‘How piteous were her wrongs,

Her words were falling dew,

All pleasant verse she knew,

But not the Song of songs.’

Yet now, O Love, that you

Have kissed my forehead, I

Have sung indeed, can die,

And be forgotten too.

Robert Bridges guaranteed Digby Dolben’s reputation by publishing a book simply called Poems by Digby Mackworth Dolben (1911) all of which must have been written in only a three-year period following the burning of his previous collection and with his inclusion in the publication of Three Friends: Memoirs of Digby Mackworth Dolben, Richard Watson Dixon, Henry Bradley (1932). Subsequently, a publication titled The Poems and Letters of Digby Mackworth Dolben 1848–1867 was produced in 1981