Born: March 21, 1785, Not­ting­ham, Eng­land.

Died: Oc­to­ber 19, 1806, Cam­bridge, Eng­land.

Buried: Cam­bridge, Eng­land. The grave­yard is op­po­site St. John’s Coll­ege, in an area now of­ten used as a mark­et; on­ly slab grave­stones sur­vive.

Son of a butch­er, White was a gift­ed po­et. His Clif­ton Grove, A Sketch In Verse With Other Po­ems, pub­lished when he was 17, re­veals his teen­age skep­ti­cism. After read­ing Wal­ter Scott’s Force of Truth, he un­der­went a con­ver­sion de­scribed me­ta­phor­ic­al­ly in his po­em “The Star of Beth­le­hem” (now sung as “When Mar­shaled on the Night­ly Plain”). White en­rolled at St. John’s Coll­ege, Cam­bridge, plan­ning to be­come a min­is­ter, but he fell ill and died be­fore grad­u­a­tion. Some said he de­stroyed his health by over ap­pli­ca­tion to his stu­dies; By­ron wrote a la­ment to White in Eng­lish Bards and Scotch Re­view­ers:

Unhappy White! while life was in its spring,
And thy young muse just waved her joyous wing,
The spoiler came; and all thy promise fair
Has sought the grave, to sleep for ever there.
Oh! what a noble heart was here undone,
When Science’ self destroy’d her favourite son!
Yes, she too much indulged thy fond pursuit;
She sow’d the seeds, but Death has reap’d the fruit.
’Twas thine own genius gave the final blow,
And help’d to plant the wound that laid thee low.
So the struck eagle, stretch’d upon the plain,
View’d his own feather on the fatal dart,
And wing’d the shaft that quiver’d in his heart.

Sources

Lyrics

  1. Christ­ians, Breth­ren, Ere We Part
  2. Lord Our God Is Clothed in Might, The
  3. Oft in Dan­ger, Oft in Woe
  4. When Mar­shaled on the Nigh­tly Plain