Queer Places:
Harrow School, 5 High St, Harrow, Harrow on the Hill HA1 3HP, UK
University of Cambridge, 4 Mill Ln, Cambridge CB2 1RZ, UK
Hauptfriedhof Mainz, 55131 Mainz, Germany
Roden
Berkeley Wriothesley Noel, also known as Noël (27 August 1834 – 26 May
1894), was an English poet.[1]
He was part of the Cambridge
Apostles. He was a friend of
John Addington Symonds
and Symonds dedicated Many Moods to him. Symonds wrote a friendly introduction
to some of Noel's poem and Noel's friend,
Robert Buchanan, a successful
popular writer of the time, introduced a selection of Noel's poetical work.
Buchanan came of proletarian stock with a socialist backgrounf, his father a
friend of the Chartists. Ganymede (1868) and Comrade, my Comrade (1891) are cited as examples in Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English
Literature from 1850-1900, by Brian Reade.
The son of Charles Noel, 1st Earl of Gainsborough and Lady Frances Jocelyn.
Roden Noel's great-uncle Percy Jocelyn, the
Bishop of Clogher, in 1822 was discovered in the arms of a soldier in a tavern
at St Alban's Place, London, and subsequently broke bail and fled to Scotland
to escape imprisonment. In Noel's brief sexual autobiography contributed to
Havelock Ellis's Sexual Inversion
(published in 1897), he obliquely refers to this incident, claiming that his
homosexuality was therefore "hereditary and inborn," and that, in fact, his
whole family tended toward it. He also states, rather candidly, that he was
"immensely vain of my physical beauty."
He was educated at Windlesham House School, Harrow School (where he was a
pupil of Charles Vaughan) and Trinity
College, Cambridge, where he obtained his M.A. in 1858.[2][3]
He then spent two years travelling in the East.
Noel was married, with three children, and he seems to have been
indifferently bisexual, though his earliest fond memory was "the caresses of
my father's footmen when I was quite a little boy." In 1863, he married Alice
de Broë, daughter of the director of the Ottoman Bank in Beirut. Their third
child, Eric, who died aged five, is commemorated in Roden Noel's best-known
book of verse, A Little Child's Monument (1881).
He did not particularly enjoy heterosexual intercourse. Legend has it that
he was the first man to sleep with John Addington Symonds, the famous
scholar-critic-poet, a genius and the most important figure in the Victorian
sexual reform movement. Whether or not this legend is true, it is certain that
they were lovers for a time, and together they became active disciples of
Walt Whitman's theory of
comradeship.
The latter part of his life was spent at Brighton, but he died in the train
station of Mainz in Germany. His son Conrad Noel became a Christian Socialist,
famous as the "turbulent priest of Thaxted".
Roden Noel's versification was unequal and sometimes harsh, but he has a
genuine feeling for nature, and the work is permeated by philosophic thought.
His other works include a drama in verse, The House of Ravensburg
(1877), an epic on David Livingstone's expedition in Africa, a Life of
Byron (1890,
Great Writers series), an edition of Edmund Spenser's poems, a selection of
Thomas Otway's plays (1888) for the Mermaid series, and critical papers on
literature and philosophy.
His Collected Poems were edited (1902) by his sister, Victoria
Buxton, with a notice by
John Addington Symonds, which had originally appeared in the Academy
(January 19, 1899) as a review of The Modern Faust.. The selection
(1892) in the series of Canterbury Poets has an introduction by
Robert Buchanan.
His poem "Sea Slumber Song" was set to music by Sir Edward Elgar as the
first song of his song-cycle Sea Pictures.
One of Noel's finest poems is a lament upon the death of an unidentified
friend with whom he made frequent trips to the seashore:
To. J. H.
Nay, we may never more climb waves together
In bounding
boats, nor ply the limber oar
Among those bounding billows; but I roam
Heart-wounded in chill twilight by the shore,
Like him of old of whom
blind Homer sang,
How, reft of one he loved, disconsolate,
He went in
silence by the sounding sea:
I hear that rhythmic breathing of the sea
And evermore the surge repeats thy name.
Even so Achilles mourned his
friend Patroclus,
So Alexander wept Hephaestion.
Noel was a spiritualist and interested in parapsychology. He was a founding
vice-president of the Society for Psychical Research.[4]
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roden_Noel
- http://rictornorton.co.uk/noel.htm
- Homosexuals in History, A Study of Ambivalence in Society, Literature
and the Arts, by A.L. Rowse, 1977
- Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from
1850-1900, by Brian Reade