The Poetry of Henry Kirke White

Henry Kirke White was born in Nottingham on 21st March 1785, the son of a butcher, a trade for which his family had hoped he would follow in his father’s footsteps.

However, he was greatly attracted to book-learning. By age seven, he was giving reading lessons (unbeknownst to the rest of the family) to a family servant.

After being briefly apprenticed to a stocking-weaver, he was articled to a lawyer. Whilst here he studied Latin and Greek. Seeing the results of White's study, his master offered to release him if he had sufficient means to go to college.

Capel Lofft, a friend of Robert Bloomfield, encouraged him and helped him to publish in 1803 Clifton Grove, a Sketch in Verse, with other Poems, dedicated to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

In the February 1894 edition of the Monthly Review the work was slated. Encouragingly Robert Southey praised him in a letter to him.

White spent a year with a private tutor in an effort to enter college and he successfully entered St John's College, Cambridge. He over exerted himself in studying and weakened fell prey to consumption.

At the same time many of his friends and colleagues began to question his sanity. In the autumn of 1895 he went into residence at Cambridge, with a view to taking holy orders. Unfortunately, the strain of continuous study proved fatal.

Henry Kirke White died on 19th October 1806.

He was buried in the church of All Saints Jewry, Cambridge.

The genuine piety of his religious verses secured a place in popular hymnology for some of his hymns, in particular the still popular O Lord, another day is flown. Much of his fame was due to sympathy inspired by his early death; but Lord Byron agreed with Southey about the young man's promise. Robert Southey said of him: "...he could not rest satisfied till he had formed his principles upon the basis of Christianity."

Who shall contend with time,―unvanquished time, the conqueror of conquerors and lord of desolation?