Newman's poem tells the story of a soul's journey through death. It is thinking about the unseen world of Roman Catholic theology. The name Gerontius comes from the Greek word "geron", "old man". The name "Gerontius" is not sung in the work, and not everyone agrees on how it is pronounced. The Greek "geron" has a hard 'g' (like in “grass”), but English words that come from it often have a soft 'g', as in "geriatriac". Elgar did not use all the words of Newman’s poem. He leaves out a lot of the meditations in Part 2 which would otherwise have made it very long.