SOURCE: Fontana, Ernest. “Patmore, Pascal, and Astronomy.” Victorian Poetry 41, no. 2 (summer 2003): 277-86.

In the following essay, Fontana underscores the influence of the Catholic author Blaise Pascal and his use of extended astronomical metaphors on Patmore's poetry.

In Victories of Love, written three years before Patmore's 1864 conversion to Catholicism in Rome, extended astronomical metaphors begin to appear with such frequency in his poetry that one might consider the later Patmore a rival of Tennyson as the Victorian poet who demonstrates the greatest knowledge of contemporary astronomy.¹ What could have prompted such an emphasis? I contend that Patmore shortly before and after his conversion to Catholicism grapples with the legacy of the great Jansenist Catholic writer, Blaise Pascal, whose Pensées we know Patmore read² and which he conspicuously imitated in his late collection of apothegms, “The Aurea Dicta,” from The Rod, The Root, and The Flower (1895).

Pascal employs astronomical...