William Collins: poems [Reader-printable ed] 1903807689, 9781903807682

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T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E

W I L L I A M B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E LI T AIG END AST A B A S E BC R I T IO SH L HER

T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E THE THE

POEMS

T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E THE THE

SEL ECTED, EDITED B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E A N D A N N O TAT E D B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E BY W. B. HUTCHINGS

T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E T H E B R I T I S H H E R I TAG E DATA B A S E

William Collins : Poems Selected, edited and annotated by W. B. Hutchings

Hyperlinked Table of Contents List of Poems

3

The Poems

4

Life and Works of William Collins

67

Note on the Text

71

Select Bibliography

72

Commentary and Notes

73

THE BR ITISH HER ITAGE DATABASE Published by Cultural Resources, Penzance, Cornwall, UK Copyright © 2003 Cultural Resources

All rights reserved

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Hyperlinked List of Poems Sonnet

4

Oriental Eclogues

4

An Epistle : Addressed to Sir Thomas Hanmer, on his Edition of Shakespeare’s Works

13

A Song from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline

18

Song. The Sentiments Borrowed from Shakespeare

19

Written on a Paper, which Contained a Piece of Bride Cake given to the Author by a Lady

20

Ode to Pity

21

Ode to Fear

22

Ode to Simplicity

24

Ode on the Poetical Character

26

Ode, Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746

28

Ode to Mercy

29

Ode to Liberty

30

Ode, to a Lady on the Death of Colonel Ross in the Action of Fontenoy

34

Ode to Evening

36

Ode to Peace

37

The Manners. An Ode

38

The Passions. An Ode for Music

40

Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Thomson

44

Ode to a Friend on his Return etc.

46

Fragment on Restoration Drama

52

Fragment by Two Authors

53

Fragment Addressed to James Harris

54

Fragment Addressed to Jacob Tonson

55

Fragment Addressed to a Critic

56

Fragment Addressed to a Friend about to Visit Italy

57

Fragment on a Female Painter

58

Fragment : ‘Ye genii who in secret state’

59

Fragment : To Simplicity

62

Fragment : ‘No longer ask me gentle friends’

63

Fragment on Greek Music

66

3

Sonnet

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When Phoebe formed a wanton smile,

[]

My soul! it reached not here! Strange, that thy peace, thou trembler, flies Before a rising tear! 5

From midst the drops, my love is born, That o’er those eyelids rove : Thus issued from a teeming wave

[]

The fabled queen of love.

Oriental Eclogues

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ECLOGUE the FIRST SELIM; or, the Shepherd’s Moral SCENE, a Valley near Bagdat

[]

TIME, the MORNING Ye Persian maids, attend your poet’s lays, And hear how shepherds pass their golden days. Not all are blest, whom Fortune’s hand sustains With wealth in courts, nor all that haunt the plains : 5

Well may your hearts believe the truths I tell; ’Tis virtue makes the bliss, where’er we dwell. Thus Selim sung, by sacred Truth inspired; Nor praise, but such as Truth bestowed, desired : Wise in himself, his meaning songs conveyed

10

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Informing morals to the shepherd maid; Or taught the swains that surest bliss to find, What groves nor streams bestow, a virtuous mind. When sweet and blushing, like a virgin bride, The radiant Morn resumed her orient pride,

15

When wanton gales along the valleys play,

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Breathe on each flower, and bear their sweets away;

4

By Tigris’ wandering waves he sat, and sung

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This useful lesson for the fair and young. Ye Persian dames, he said, to you belong, 20

Well may they please, the morals of my song : No fairer maids, I trust, than you are found, Graced with soft arts, the peopled world around! The morn that lights you, to your loves supplies Each gentler ray delicious to your eyes :

25

For you those flowers her fragrant hands bestow, And yours the love that kings delight to know. Yet think not these, all beauteous as they are, The best kind blessings heaven can grant the fair!

[]

Who trust alone in beauty’s feeble ray, 30

Boast but the worth Balsora’s pearls display;

[]

Drawn from the deep we own their surface bright, But, dark within, they drink no lustrous light : Such are the maids, and such the charms they boast, By sense unaided, or to virtue lost. 35

Self-flattering sex! your hearts believe in vain That love shall blind, when once he fires the swain; Or hope a lover by your faults to win, As spots on ermine beautify the skin :

[]

Who seeks secure to rule, be first her care 40

Each softer virtue that adorns the fair; Each tender passion man delights to find, The loved perfections of a female mind! Blest were the days, when Wisdom held her reign, And shepherds sought her on the silent plain;

45

With Truth she wedded in the secret grove, Immortal Truth, and daughters blessed their love. O haste, fair maids! ye Virtues come away, Sweet Peace and Plenty lead you on your way!

50

The balmy shrub, for you shall love our shore,

[]

By Ind excelled or Araby no more.

[]

Lost to our fields, for so the fates ordain, The dear deserters shall return again.

5

Come thou whose thoughts as limpid springs are clear, To lead the train, sweet Modesty appear : 55

Here make thy court amidst our rural scene, And shepherd-girls shall own thee for their queen. With thee be Chastity, of all afraid, Distrusting all, a wise suspicious maid; But man the most—not more the mountain doe

60

Holds the swift falcon for her deadly foe. Cold is her breast, like flowers that drink the dew; A silken veil conceals her from the view. No wild desires amidst thy train be known, But Faith, whose heart is fixed on one alone :

65

Desponding Meekness with her down-cast eyes, And friendly Pity full of tender sighs; And Love the last : by these your hearts approve, These are the Virtues that must lead to love. Thus sung the swain; and ancient legends say,

70

The maids of Bagdat verified the lay : Dear to the plains, the Virtues came along, The shepherds loved, and Selim blessed his song.

ECLOGUE the SECOND HASSAN; or, the Camel-driver SCENE, the Desert TIME, MID-DAY In silent horror o’er the boundless waste The driver Hassan with his camels passed.

5

One cruse of water on his back he bore,

[]

And his light scrip contained a scanty store;

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A fan of painted feathers in his hand, To guard his shaded face from scorching sand. The sultry sun had gained the middle sky, And not a tree, and not an herb was nigh; The beasts, with pain, their dusty way pursue,

10

Shrill roared the winds, and dreary was the view!

6

With desperate sorrow wild, the affrighted man Thrice sighed, thrice struck his breast, and thus began : ‘Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day, When first from Schiraz’ walls I bent my way!’ 15

[]

Ah! little thought I of the blasting wind, The thirst or pinching hunger that I find! Bethink thee, Hassan, where shall thirst assuage, When fails this cruse, his unrelenting rage? Soon shall this scrip its precious load resign;

20

Then what but tears and hunger shall be thine? Ye mute companions of my toils, that bear In all my griefs a more than equal share! Here, where no springs in murmurs break away, Or moss-crowned fountains mitigate the day,

25

In vain ye hope the green delights to know, Which plains more blest, or verdant vales bestow : Here rocks alone, and tasteless sands are found, And faint and sickly winds for ever howl around. ‘Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day,

30

When first from Schiraz’ walls I bent my way.’ Cursed be the gold and silver which persuade Weak men to follow far-fatiguing trade! The Lily-Peace outshines the silver store, And life is dearer than the golden ore :

35

Yet money tempts us o’er the desert brown, To every distant mart and wealthy town. Full oft we tempt the land, and oft the sea;

[]

And are we only yet repaid by thee? Ah! why was ruin so attractive made, 40

Or why fond man so easily betrayed?

[]

Why heed we not, whilst mad we haste along, The gentle voice of Peace, or Pleasure’s song? Or wherefore think the flowery mountain’s side, The fountain’s murmurs, and the valley’s pride, 45

Why think we these less pleasing to behold, Than dreary deserts, if they lead to gold?

7

‘Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day, When first from Schiraz’ walls I bent my way.’ O cease, my fears!—All frantic as I go, 50

When thought creates unnumbered scenes of woe, What if the lion in his rage I meet!— Oft in the dust I view his printed feet : And fearful! oft, when Day’s declining light Yields her pale empire to the mourner Night,

55

By hunger roused, he scours the groaning plain, Gaunt wolves and sullen tigers in his train : Before them Death with shrieks directs their way, Fills the wild yell, and leads them to their prey. ‘Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day,

60

When first from Schiraz’ walls I bent my way!’ At that dead hour the silent asp shall creep, If aught of rest I find, upon my sleep : Or some swoll’n serpent twist his scales around, And wake to anguish with a burning wound.

65

Thrice happy they, the wise contented poor, From lust of wealth, and dread of death secure! They tempt no deserts, and no griefs they find; Peace rules the day, where reason rules the mind. ‘Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day,

70

When first from Schiraz’ walls I bent my way.’ O hapless youth! for she thy love hath won, The tender Zara, will be most undone! Big swelled my heart, and owned the powerful maid,

[]

When fast she dropped her tears, as thus she said : 75

‘Farewell the youth whom sighs could not detain, ‘Whom Zara’s breaking heart implored in vain! ‘Yet as thou goest, may every blast arise, ‘Weak and unfelt as these rejected sighs! ‘Safe o’er the wild, no perils mayst thou see,

80

‘No griefs endure, nor weep, false youth, like me.’ O let me safely to the fair return, Say with a kiss, she must not, shall not mourn;

8

O! let me teach my heart to lose its fears, Recalled by Wisdom’s voice, and Zara’s tears. 85

He said, and called on heaven to bless the day,

[]

When back to Schiraz’ walls he bent his way.

ECLOGUE the THIRD ABRA; or, the Georgian Sultana SCENE, a forest TIME, the EVENING In Georgia’s land, where Tefflis’ towers are seen,

[]

In distant view along the level green, While evening dews enrich the glittering glade, And the tall forests cast a longer shade, 5

What time ’tis sweet o’er fields of rice to stray,

[]

Or scent the breathing maze at setting day; Amidst the maids of Zagen’s peaceful grove, Emyra sung the pleasing cares of love. Of Abra first began the tender strain, 10

Who led her youth with flocks upon the plain : At morn she came those willing flocks to lead, Where lilies rear them in the watery mead;

[]

From early dawn the livelong hours she told, Till late at silent eve she penned the fold. 15

Deep in the grove beneath the secret shade, A various wreath of odorous flowers she made : Gay-motleyed pinks and sweet jonquils she chose, The violet-blue that on the moss-bank grows; All-sweet to sense, the flaunting rose was there :

20

The finished chaplet well-adorned her hair. Great Abbas chanced that fated morn to stray, By love conducted from the chase away; Among the vocal vales he heard her song, And sought the vales and echoing groves among :

9

25

At length he found, and wooed the rural maid; She knew the monarch, and with fear obeyed. ‘Be every youth like royal Abbas moved, And every Georgian maid like Abra loved!’ The royal lover bore her from the plain;

30

Yet still her crook and bleating flock remain : Oft as she went, she backward turned her view, And bad that crook and bleating flock adieu. Fair happy maid! to other scenes remove, To richer scenes of golden power and love!

35

Go leave the simple pipe, and shepherd’s strain; With love delight thee, and with Abbas reign. ‘Be every youth like royal Abbas moved, And every Georgian maid like Abra loved!’ Yet midst the blaze of courts she fixed her love

40

On the cool fountain, or the shady grove; Still with the shepherd’s innocence her mind To the sweet vale, and flowery mead inclined; And oft as spring renewed the plains with flowers, Breathed his soft gales, and led the fragrant hours,

45

With sure return she sought the sylvan scene, The breezy mountains, and the forests green. Her maids around her moved, a duteous band! Each bore a crook all-rural in her hand : Some simple lay, of flocks and herds they sung;

50

With joy the mountain, and the forest rung. ‘Be every youth like royal Abbas moved, And every Georgian maid like Abra loved!’ And oft the royal lover left the care And thorns of state, attendant on the fair;

55

Oft to the shades and low-roofed cots retired, Or sought the vale where first his heart was fired : A russet mantle, like a swain, he wore,

[]

And thought of crowns and busy courts no more. ‘Be every youth like royal Abbas moved, 60

And every Georgian maid like Abra loved!’

10

Blest was the life, that royal Abbas led : Sweet was his love, and innocent his bed. What if in wealth the noble maid excel; The simple shepherd girl can love as well. 65

Let those who rule on Persia’s jewelled throne, Be famed for love, and gentlest love alone; Or wreathe, like Abbas, full of fair renown, The lover’s myrtle, with the warrior’s crown.

[]

Oh happy days! the maids around her say; 70

Oh haste, profuse of blessings, haste away! ‘Be every youth, like royal Abbas, moved; And every Georgian maid, like Abra, loved!’

ECLOGUE the FOURTH AGIB and SECANDER; or, the Fugitives SCENE, a Mountain in Circassia TIME, MIDNIGHT In fair Circassia, where, to love inclined,

[]

Each swain was blest, for every maid was kind; At that still hour, when awful midnight reigns,

[]

And none, but wretches, haunt the twilight plains; 5

What time the moon had hung her lamp on high, And passed in radiance through the cloudless sky; Sad o’er the dews, two brother shepherds fled, Where wildering fear and desperate sorrow led :

[]

Fast as they pressed their flight, behind them lay 10

Wide ravaged plains, and valleys stole away. Along the mountain’s bending sides they ran, Till faint and weak Secander thus began. SECANDER O stay thee, Agib, for my feet deny, No longer friendly to my life, to fly.

15

Friend of my heart, O turn thee and survey, Trace our sad flight through all its length of way! And first review that long-extended plain,

11

And yon wide groves, already passed with pain! Yon ragged cliff, whose dangerous path we tried! 20

[]

And last this lofty mountain’s weary side! AGIB Weak as thou art, yet hapless must thou know The toils of flight, or some severer woe! Still as I haste, the Tartar shouts behind,

[]

And shrieks and sorrows load the saddening wind : 25

In rage of heart, with ruin in his hand, He blasts our harvests, and deforms our land. Yon citron grove, whence first in fear we came, Droops its fair honours to the conquering flame :

30

Far fly the swains, like us, in deep despair,

[]

And leave to ruffian bands their fleecy care.

[]

SECANDER Unhappy land, whose blessings tempt the sword, In vain, unheard, thou call’st thy Persian Lord! In vain thou court’st him, helpless to thine aid, To shield the shepherd, and protect the maid! 35

Far off in thoughtless indolence resigned, Soft dreams of love and pleasure soothe his mind : Midst fair sultanas lost in idle joy, No wars alarm him, and no fears annoy. AGIB Yet these green hills, in summer’s sultry heat,

40

Have lent the monarch oft a cool retreat. Sweet to the sight is Zabran’s flowery plain, And once by maids and shepherds loved in vain! No more the virgins shall delight to rove, By Sargis’ banks, or Irwan’s shady grove;

45

On Tarkie’s mountain catch the cooling gale,

[]

Or breathe the sweets of Aly’s flowery vale : Fair scenes! but, ah! no more with peace possessed, With ease alluring, and with plenty blest. No more the shepherds’ whitening tents appear, 50

Nor the kind products of a bounteous year;

12

No more the date with snowy blossoms crowned! But Ruin spreads her baleful fires around. SECANDER In vain Circassia boasts her spicy groves, For ever famed for pure and happy loves : 55

In vain she boasts her fairest of the fair, Their eyes’ blue languish, and their golden hair! Those eyes in tears their fruitless grief must send; Those hairs the Tartar’s cruel hand shall rend. AGIB Ye Georgian swains that piteous learn from far

60

Circassia’s ruin, and the waste of war; Some weightier arms than crooks and staves prepare, To shield your harvests, and defend your fair : The Turk and Tartar like designs pursue, Fixed to destroy, and steadfast to undo.

65

Wild as his land, in native deserts bred, By lust incited, or by malice led, The villain Arab, as he prowls for prey, Oft marks with blood and wasting flames the way; Yet none so cruel as the Tartar foe,

70

To death inured, and nursed in scenes of woe. He said; when loud along the vale was heard

[]

A shriller shriek, and nearer fires appeared : The affrighted shepherds through the dews of night, Wide o’er the moonlight hills renewed their flight.

An Epistle : Addressed to Sir Thomas Hanmer, [] on his Edition of Shakespeare’s Works SIR While born to bring the Muse’s happier days, A patriot’s hand protects a poet’s lays : While nursed by you she sees her myrtles bloom,

[]

Green and unwithered o’er his honoured tomb : 5

Excuse her doubts, if yet she fears to tell

13

What secret transports in her bosom swell :

[]

With conscious awe she hears the critic’s fame,

[]

And blushing hides her wreath at Shakespeare’s name. 10

Hard was the lot those injured strains endured,

[]

Unowned by Science, and by years obscured :

[]

Fair Fancy wept; and echoing sighs confessed

[]

A fixed despair in every tuneful breast. Not with more grief the afflicted swains appear When wintry winds deform the plenteous year : 15

When lingering frosts the ruined seats invade Where Peace resorted, and the Graces played. Each rising art by just gradation moves, Toil builds on toil, and age on age improves. The Muse alone unequal dealt her rage,

20

[]

And graced with noblest pomp her earliest stage. Preserved through time, the speaking scenes impart Each changeful wish of Phaedra’s tortured heart :

[]

Or paint the curse, that marked the Theban’s reign,

[]

A bed incestuous, and a father slain. 25

With kind concern our pitying eyes o’erflow, Trace the sad tale, and own another’s woe. To Rome removed, with wit secure to please, The comic Sisters kept their native ease.

[]

With jealous fear declining Greece beheld 30

Her own Menander’s art almost excelled!

[]

But every muse essayed to raise in vain Some laboured rival of her tragic strain; Ilissus’ laurels, though transferred with toil,

[]

Drooped their fair leaves, nor knew the unfriendly soil. 35

As arts expired, resistless dulness rose; Goths, Priests, or Vandals,—all were learning’s foes. Till Julius first recalled each exiled Maid,

[]

And Cosmo owned them in the Etrurian shade :

[]

Then deeply skilled in love’s engaging theme, 40

The soft Provençal passed to Arno’s stream :

[]

With graceful ease the wanton lyre he strung, Sweet flowed the lays—but love was all he sung.

14

The gay description could not fail to move;

[]

For, led by nature, all are friends to love. 45

But heaven, still various in its works, decreed The perfect boast of time should last succeed. The beauteous union must appear at length, Of Tuscan fancy, and Athenian strength :

[]

One greater muse Eliza’s reign adorn, 50

And even a Shakespeare to her fame be born! Yet ah! so bright her morning’s opening ray, In vain our Britain hoped an equal day!

[]

No second growth the western isle could bear, At once exhausted with too rich a year. 55

Too nicely Jonson knew the critic’s part;

[]

Nature in him was almost lost in art. Of softer mould the gentle Fletcher came,

[]

The next in order, as the next in name. With pleased attention midst his scenes we find 60

Each glowing thought, that warms the female mind; Each melting sigh, and every tender tear, The lover’s wishes and the virgin’s fear. His every strain the Smiles and Graces own; But stronger Shakespeare felt for man alone :

65

Drawn by his pen, our ruder passions stand

[]

The unrivalled picture of his early hand. With gradual steps, and slow, exacter France

[]

Saw Art’s fair empire o’er her shores advance : By length of toil, a bright perfection knew, 70

Correctly bold, and just in all she drew. Till late Corneille, with Lucan’s spirit fired,

[]

Breathed the free strain, as Rome and he inspired : And classic judgment gained to sweet Racine

[]

The temperate strength of Maro’s chaster line. 75

But wilder far the British laurel spread, And wreaths less artful crown our poet’s head.

[]

Yet he alone to every scene could give

15

The historian’s truth, and bid the manners live.

[]

Waked at his call I view, with glad surprise, 80

Majestic forms of mighty monarchs rise. There Henry’s trumpets spread their loud alarms,

[]

And laurelled Conquest waits her hero’s arms. Here gentler Edward claims a pitying sigh,

[]

Scarce born to honours, and so soon to die! 85

Yet shall thy throne, unhappy infant, bring No beam of comfort to the guilty king? The time shall come, when Gloucester’s heart shall bleed

[]

In life’s last hours, with horror of the deed : When dreary visions shall at last present 90

[]

Thy vengeful image, in the midnight tent : Thy hand unseen the secret death shall bear, Blunt the weak sword, and break the oppressive spear. Where’er we turn, by Fancy charmed, we find

[]

Some sweet illusion of the cheated mind. 95

Oft, wild of wing, she calls the soul to rove With humbler nature, in the rural grove; Where swains contented own the quiet scene,

[]

And twilight fairies tread the circled green :

[]

Dressed by her hand, the woods and valleys smile, 100

And spring diffusive decks the enchanted isle.

[]

O more than all in powerful genius blest, Come, take thine empire o’er the willing breast! Whate’er the wounds this youthful heart shall feel, Thy songs support me, and thy morals heal! 105

There every thought the poet’s warmth may raise,

[]

There native music dwells in all the lays.

[]

O might some verse with happiest skill persuade Expressive Picture to adopt thine aid!

[]

What wondrous drafts might rise from every page! 110

What other Raphaels charm a distant age!

[]

Methinks even now I view some free design, Where breathing nature lives in every line :

16

Chaste and subdued the modest lights decay, Steal into shade, and mildly melt away. 115

—And see, where Antony in tears approved,

[]

Guards the pale relics of the chief he loved : O’er the cold corse the warrior seems to bend, Deep sunk in grief, and mourns his murdered friend! Still as they press, he calls on all around, 120

Lifts the torn robe, and points the bleeding wound. But who is he, whose brows exalted bear

[]

A wrath impatient, and a fiercer air? Awake to all that injured worth can feel, On his own Rome he turns the avenging steel. 125

Yet shall not war’s insatiate fury fall, (So heaven ordains it) on the destined wall. See the fond mother midst the plaintive train Hung on his knees, and prostrate on the plain! Touched to the soul, in vain he strives to hide

130

The son’s affection, in the Roman’s pride : O’er all the man conflicting passions rise, Rage grasps the sword, while Pity melts the eyes. Thus, generous critic, as thy bard inspires, The sister arts shall nurse their drooping fires;

135

[]

Each from his scenes her stores alternate bring, Blend the fair tints, or wake the vocal string : Those Sibyl-leaves, the sport of every wind,

[]

(For poets ever were a careless kind) By thee disposed, no farther toil demand, 140

But, just to nature, own thy forming hand.

[]

So spread o’er Greece, the harmonious whole unknown, Even Homer’s numbers charmed by parts alone. Their own Ulysses scarce had wandered more,

[]

By winds and water cast on every shore : 145

When, raised by fate, some former Hanmer joined

[]

Each beauteous image of the boundless mind; And bad, like thee, his Athens ever claim, A fond alliance with the poet’s name.

17

A Song from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline

[]

Sung by Guiderus and Arviragus over Fidele, supposed to be dead To fair Fidele’s grassy tomb Soft maids, and village hinds shall bring Each opening sweet, of earliest bloom, And rifle all the breathing spring. 5

No wailing ghost shall dare appear To vex with shrieks this quiet grove : But shepherd lads assemble here, And melting virgins own their love. No withered witch shall here be seen,

10

No goblins lead their nightly crew : The female fays shall haunt the green, And dress thy grave with pearly dew! The red-breast oft at evening hours Shall kindly lend his little aid :

15

With hoary moss, and gathered flowers, To deck the ground where thou art laid. When howling winds, and beating rain, In tempests shake the sylvan cell :

[]

Or midst the chase on every plain, 20

The tender thought on thee shall dwell. Each lonely scene shall thee restore, For thee the tear be duly shed : Beloved, till life could charm no more;

[]

And mourned, till Pity’s self be dead.

18

Song. The Sentiments Borrowed from Shakespeare

[]

Young Damon of the vale is dead, Ye lowland hamlets moan : A dewy turf lies o’er his head, And at his feet a stone. 5

His shroud, which death’s cold damps destroy, Of snow-white threads was made : All mourned to see so sweet a boy In earth for ever laid. Pale pansies o’er his corpse were placed,

10

Which, plucked before their time, Bestrewed the boy like him to waste, And wither in their prime. But will he ne’er return, whose tongue Could tune the rural lay?

15

Ah, no! his bell of peace is rung, His lips are cold as clay. They bore him out at twilight hour, The youth who loved so well : Ah me! how many a true-love shower

20

Of kind remembrance fell! Each maid was woe—but Lucy chief, Her grief o’er all was tried, Within his grave she dropped in grief, And o’er her loved-one died.

19

Written on a Paper, which Contained a Piece of Bride Cake given to the Author by a Lady [] Ye curious hands, that, hid from vulgar eyes, By search profane shall find this hallowed cake, With virtue’s awe forbear the sacred prize, Nor dare a theft for love and pity’s sake! 5

This precious relic, formed by magic power, Beneath her shepherd’s haunted pillow laid, Was meant by love to charm the silent hour, The secret present of a matchless maid. The Cyprian queen, at Hymen’s fond request,

10

[]

Each nice ingredient chose with happiest art; Fears, sighs, and wishes of the enamoured breast, And pains that please, are mixed in every part. With rosy hand the spicy fruit she brought From Paphian hills, and fair Cythera’s isle;

15

[]

And tempered sweet with these the melting thought, The kiss ambrosial and the yielding smile. Ambiguous looks, that scorn and yet relent, Denials mild, and firm unaltered truth, Reluctant pride, and amorous faint consent,

20

And meeting ardours and exulting youth. Sleep, wayward god! hath sworn while these remain, With flattering dreams to dry his nightly tear, And cheerful Hope, so oft invoked in vain, With fairy songs shall soothe his pensive ear.

25

If bound by vows to friendship’s gentle side, And fond of soul, thou hop’st an equal grace, If youth or maid thy joys and griefs divide, O much entreated leave this fatal place. Sweet Peace, who long hath shunned my plaintive day,

30

Consents at length to bring me short delight, Thy careless steps may scare her doves away, And grief with raven note usurp the night.

20

Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects Ode to Pity

[]

[]

1. O thou, the friend of man assigned, With balmy hands his wounds to bind, And charm his frantic woe :

[] []

When first Distress with dagger keen 5

Broke forth to waste his destined scene,

[]

His wild unsated foe! 2. By Pella’s bard, a magic name,

[]

By all the griefs his thought could frame, Receive my humble rite : 10

Long, Pity, let the nations view Thy sky-worn robes of tenderest blue, And eyes of dewy light!

[]

3. But wherefore need I wander wide To old Ilissus’ distant side, 15

[]

Deserted stream, and mute? Wild Arun too has heard thy strains,

[]

And Echo, midst my native plains,

[]

Been soothed by Pity’s lute. 4. There first the wren thy myrtles shed 20

[]

On gentlest Otway’s infant head, To him thy cell was shown;

[]

And while he sung the female heart, With youth’s soft notes unspoiled by art, Thy turtles mixed their own.

[] []

21

5. 25

Come, Pity, come, by Fancy’s aid, Even now my thoughts, relenting maid, Thy temple’s pride design :

[] []

Its southern site, its truth complete Shall raise a wild enthusiast heat, 30

In all who view the shrine. 6. There Picture’s toils shall well relate,

[]

How chance, or hard involving fate, O’er mortal bliss prevail : The buskined Muse shall near her stand, 35

[]

And sighing prompt her tender hand, With each disastrous tale. 7. There let me oft, retired by day, In dreams of passion melt away,

[]

Allowed with thee to dwell : 40

There waste the mournful lamp of night, Till, virgin, thou again delight To hear a British shell!

[]

Ode to Fear

[]

Thou, to whom the world unknown

[]

With all its shadowy shapes is shown; Who see’st appalled the unreal scene, While Fancy lifts the veil between : 5

Ah Fear! Ah frantic Fear!

[]

I see, I see thee near. I know thy hurried step, thy haggard eye!

[]

Like thee I start, like thee disordered fly. For lo what monsters in thy train appear! 10

[]

Danger, whose limbs of giant mould What mortal eye can fixed behold? Who stalks his round, an hideous form,

22

Howling amidst the midnight storm, Or throws him on the ridgy steep 15

Of some loose hanging rock to sleep : And with him thousand phantoms joined, Who prompt to deeds accursed the mind : And those, the fiends, who near allied, O’er nature’s wounds, and wrecks preside;

20

Whilst Vengeance, in the lurid air, Lifts her red arm, exposed and bare : On whom that ravening brood of fate,

[]

Who lap the blood of sorrow, wait; Who, Fear, this ghastly train can see, 25

And look not madly wild, like thee? EPODE In earliest Greece to thee with partial choice,

[]

The grief-full Muse addressed her infant tongue; The maids and matrons, on her awful voice,

[]

Silent and pale in wild amazement hung. 30

Yet he the bard who first invoked thy name, Disdained in Marathon its power to feel :

[] []

For not alone he nursed the poet’s flame, But reached from Virtue’s hand the patriot’s steel. But who is he whom later garlands grace, 35

Who left awhile o’er Hybla’s dews to rove,

[]

With trembling eyes thy dreary steps to trace,

[]

Where thou and Furies shared the baleful grove? Wrapped in thy cloudy veil the incestuous queen Sighed the sad call her son and husband heard, 40

[]

[] []

When once alone it broke the silent scene, And he the wretch of Thebes no more appeared.

[]

O Fear, I know thee by my throbbing heart, Thy withering power inspired each mournful line, Though gentle Pity claim her mingled part, 45

Yet all the thunders of the scene are thine!

23

ANTISTROPHE Thou who such weary lengths hast passed, Where wilt thou rest, mad nymph, at last? Say, wilt thou shroud in haunted cell,

[]

Where gloomy Rape and Murder dwell? 50

Or in some hollowed seat, ’Gainst which the big waves beat, Hear drowning seamen’s cries in tempests brought! Dark power, with shuddering meek submitted thought Be mine, to read the visions old,

55

Which thy awakening bards have told :

[]

And lest thou meet my blasted view,

[]

Hold each strange tale devoutly true; Ne’er be I found, by thee o’erawed, In that thrice-hallowed eve abroad, 60

[]

When ghosts, as cottage-maids believe, Their pebbled beds permitted leave, And goblins haunt from fire, or fen, Or mine, or flood, the walks of men!

[]

O thou whose spirit most possessed 65

The sacred seat of Shakespeare’s breast! By all that from thy prophet broke, In thy divine emotions spoke : Hither again thy fury deal, Teach me but once like him to feel :

70

His cypress wreath my meed decree,

[]

And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee!

Ode to Simplicity

[]

1. O thou by Nature taught, To breathe her genuine thought, In numbers warmly pure, and sweetly strong :

[]

Who first on mountains wild, 5

In Fancy loveliest child,

[]

Thy babe, or Pleasure’s, nursed the powers of song!

24

2. Thou, who with hermit heart Disdain’st the wealth of art, And gauds, and pageant weeds, and trailing pall : 10

[]

But com’st a decent maid

[]

In Attic robe arrayed,

[]

O chaste unboastful nymph, to thee I call! 3. By all the honeyed store On Hybla’s thymy shore, 15

[]

By all her blooms, and mingled murmurs dear, By her, whose love-lorn woe

[]

In evening musings slow Soothed sweetly sad Electra’s poet’s ear :

[]

4. By old Cephisus deep, 20

[]

Who spread his wavy sweep In warbled wanderings round thy green retreat, On whose enamelled side

[]

When holy Freedom died No equal haunt allured thy future feet. 5. 25

O sister meek of Truth, To my admiring youth, Thy sober aid and native charms infuse!

[] []

The flowers that sweetest breathe, Though Beauty culled the wreath, 30

Still ask thy hand to range their ordered hues. 6. While Rome could none esteem But Virtue’s patriot theme,

[]

You loved her hills, and led her laureate band : 35

But stayed to sing alone

[]

To one distinguished throne,

[]

And turned thy face, and fled her altered land.

25

7. No more, in hall or bower, The passions own thy power, Love, only love her forceless numbers mean : 40

[] []

For thou hast left her shrine, Nor olive more, nor vine, Shall gain thy feet to bless the servile scene. 8. Though taste, though genius bless,

[]

To some divine excess, 45

Faints the cold work till thou inspire the whole; What each, what all supply, May court, may charm our eye, Thou, only thou can’st raise the meeting soul!

[]

9. Of these let others ask, 50

To aid some mighty task, I only seek to find thy temperate vale : Where oft my reed might sound

[]

To maids and shepherds round, And all thy sons, O Nature, learn my tale.

Ode on the Poetical Character

[]

1. As once, if not with light regard,

[]

I read aright that gifted bard,

5

(Him whose school above the rest

[]

His loveliest Elfin Queen has blessed.)

[]

One, only one, unrivalled fair,

[]

Might hope the magic girdle wear, At solemn tourney hung on high, The wish of each love-darting eye; Lo! to each other nymph in turn applied, 10

[]

As if, in air unseen, some hovering hand, Some chaste and angel-friend to virgin-fame, With whispered spell had burst the starting band,

[]

26

It left unblest her loathed dishonoured side; Happier hopeless fair, if never 15

Her baffled hand with vain endeavour Had touched that fatal zone to her denied!

[]

Young Fancy thus, to me divinest name,

[]

To whom, prepared and bathed in heaven, The cest of amplest power is given : 20

[]

To few the godlike gift assigns, To gird their blest prophetic loins, And gaze her visions wild, and feel unmixed her flame!

[]

2. The band, as fairy legends say, Was wove on that creating day, 25

[]

When He, who called with thought to birth Yon tented sky, this laughing earth,

[]

And dressed with springs, and forests tall,

[]

And poured the main engirting all, Long by the loved Enthusiast wooed, 30

[]

Himself in some diviner mood, Retiring, sat with her alone, And placed her on his sapphire throne, The whiles, the vaulted shrine around, Seraphic wires were heard to sound,

35

[]

Now sublimest triumph swelling, Now on love and mercy dwelling; And she, from out the veiling cloud, Breathed her magic notes aloud :

40

And thou, thou rich-haired youth of morn,

[]

And all thy subject life was born!

[]

The dangerous Passions kept aloof,

[]

Far from the sainted growing woof : But near it sat ecstatic Wonder,

[]

Listening the deep applauding thunder : 45

And Truth, in sunny vest arrayed,

[]

By whose the tarsel’s eyes were made;

[]

All the shadowy tribes of Mind,

[]

In braided dance their murmurs joined,

[]

And all the bright uncounted powers, 50

Who feed on heaven’s ambrosial flowers.

27

Where is the bard, whose soul can now Its high presuming hopes avow? Where he who thinks, with rapture blind,

[]

This hallowed work for him designed? 3. 55

High on some cliff, to heaven up-piled, Of rude access, of prospect wild,

[]

Where, tangled round the jealous steep,

[]

Strange shades o’erbrow the valleys deep, And holy genii guard the rock, 60

Its glooms embrown, its springs unlock,

[]

While on its rich ambitious head,

[]

An Eden, like his own, lies spread.

[]

I view that oak, the fancied glades among,

[]

By which as Milton lay, his evening ear, 65

From many a cloud that dropped ethereal dew, Nigh sphered in heaven its native strains could hear : On which that ancient trump he reached was hung;

[]

Thither oft his glory greeting, From Waller’s myrtle shades retreating, 70

[]

With many a vow from hope’s aspiring tongue, My trembling feet his guiding steps pursue; In vain—such bliss to one alone, Of all the sons of soul was known, And Heaven and Fancy, kindred powers,

75

Have now o’erturned the inspiring bowers, Or curtained close such scene from every future view.

Ode, Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746

[]

1. How sleep the brave, who sink to rest, By all their country’s wishes blest! When Spring, with dewy fingers cold, Returns to deck their hallowed mould, 5

[]

She there shall dress a sweeter sod, Than Fancy’s feet have ever trod.

28

2. By fairy hands their knell is rung, By forms unseen their dirge is sung; There Honour comes, a pilgrim grey, 10

To bless the turf that wraps their clay, And Freedom shall awhile repair, To dwell a weeping hermit there!

Ode to Mercy

[]

STROPHE O thou, who sitt’st a smiling bride By Valour’s armed and awful side,

[]

Gentlest of sky-born forms, and best adored : Who oft with songs, divine to hear, 5

Win’st from his fatal grasp the spear,

[]

And hid’st in wreaths of flowers his bloodless sword! Thou who, amidst the deathful field,

[]

By godlike chiefs alone beheld, Oft with thy bosom bare art found, 10

Pleading for him the youth who sinks to ground :

[]

See, Mercy, see, with pure and loaded hands,

[]

Before thy shrine my country’s Genius stands,

[]

And decks thy altar still, though pierced with many a wound! ANTISTROPHE 15

When he whom even our Joys provoke,

[]

The Fiend of Nature joined his yoke,

[]

And rushed in wrath to make our isle his prey; Thy form, from out thy sweet abode, O’ertook him on his blasted road,

[]

And stopped his wheels, and looked his rage away. 20

I see recoil his sable steeds, That bore him swift to salvage deeds, Thy tender melting eyes they own;

[] []

O maid, for all thy love to Britain shown,

29

Where Justice bars her iron tower, 25

[]

To thee we build a roseate bower, Thou, thou shalt rule our Queen, and share our Monarch’s throne!

Ode to Liberty

[]

[]

STROPHE Who shall awake the Spartan fife,

[]

And call in solemn sounds to life, The youths, whose locks divinely spreading, Like vernal hyacinths in sullen hue, 5

[] []

At once the breath of fear and virtue shedding, Applauding Freedom loved of old to view? What new Alcaeus, Fancy-blest,

[]

Shall sing the sword, in myrtles dressed, At Wisdom’s shrine awhile its flame concealing, 10

(What place so fit to seal a deed renowned?) Till she her brightest lightnings round revealing, It leaped in glory forth, and dealt her prompted wound! O goddess, in that feeling hour,

[] []

When most its sounds would court thy ears, 15

Let not my shell’s misguided power,

[]

E’er draw thy sad, thy mindful tears. No, Freedom, no, I will not tell, How Rome, before thy weeping face,

[]

With heaviest sound, a giant-statue, fell, 20

Pushed by a wild and artless race, From off its wide ambitious base, When Time his northern sons of spoil awoke, And all the blended work of strength and grace, With many a rude repeated stroke,

25

And many a barbarous yell, to thousand fragments broke. EPODE Yet even, where’er the least appeared,

[]

The admiring world thy hand revered; Still midst the scattered states around,

30

Some remnants of her strength were found; 30

They saw by what escaped the storm, How wondrous rose her perfect form; How in the great the laboured whole, Each mighty master poured his soul! For sunny Florence, seat of art,

35

Beneath her vines preserved a part, Till they, whom Science loved to name,

[]

(O who could fear it?) quenched her flame. And lo, an humbler relic laid 40

In jealous Pisa’s olive shade!

[]

See small Marino joins the theme,

[]

Though least, not last in thy esteem : Strike, louder strike the ennobling strings To those, whose merchant sons were kings;

[]

To him, who decked with pearly pride, 45

In Adria weds his green-haired bride; Hail port of glory, wealth, and pleasure, Ne’er let me change this Lydian measure :

[]

Nor e’er her former pride relate, To sad Liguria’s bleeding state. 50

[]

Ah no! more pleased thy haunts I seek, On wild Helvetia’s mountains bleak :

[]

(Where, when the favoured of thy choice, The daring archer heard thy voice; Forth from his eyrie roused in dread, 55

60

The ravening Eagle northward fled.) Or dwell in willowed meads more near,

[]

With those to whom thy stork is dear :

[]

Those whom the rod of Alva bruised,

[]

Whose crown a British queen refused!

[]

The magic works, thou feel’st the strains, One holier name alone remains; The perfect spell shall then avail, Hail nymph, adored by Britain, hail! ANTISTROPHE Beyond the measure vast of thought,

65

The works, the wizard Time has wrought!

31

The Gaul, ’tis held of antique story, Saw Britain linked to his now adverse strand, No sea between, nor cliff sublime and hoary,

[] [] []

He passed with unwet feet through all our land. 70

To the blown Baltic then, they say, The wild waves found another way, Where Orcas howls, his wolfish mountains rounding; Till all the banded West at once ’gan rise,

[] []

A wide wild storm even Nature’s self confounding, 75

Withering her giant sons with strange uncouth surprise.

[]

This pillared earth so firm and wide, By winds and inward labours torn, In thunders dread was pushed aside, And down the shouldering billows borne. 80

And see, like gems, her laughing train, The little isles on every side, Mona, once hid from those who search the main,

[]

Where thousand elfin shapes abide, And Wight who checks the westering tide, 85

For thee consenting heaven has each bestowed,

[]

A fair attendant on her sovereign pride : To thee this blest divorce she owed, For thou hast made her vales thy loved, thy last abode! SECOND EPODE 90

Then too, ’tis said, an hoary pile,

[]

Midst the green navel of our isle,

[]

Thy shrine in some religious wood, O soul-enforcing goddess stood! There oft the painted native’s feet,

[]

Were wont thy form celestial meet : 95

100

Though now with hopeless toil we trace Time’s backward rolls, to find its place;

[]

Whether the fiery-tressed Dane,

[]

Or Roman’s self o’erturned the fane,

[]

Or in what heaven-left age it fell,

[]

’Twere hard for modern song to tell. Yet still, if truth those beams infuse,

32

Which guide at once, and charm the Muse, Beyond yon braided clouds that lie,

[]

Paving the light-embroidered sky : 105

Amidst the bright pavilioned plains,

[]

The beauteous model still remains. There happier than in islands blest,

[]

Or bowers by spring or Hebe dressed,

[]

The chiefs who fill our Albion’s story, 110

In warlike weeds, retired in glory, Hear their consorted Druids sing

[]

Their triumphs to the immortal string. How may the poet now unfold, What never tongue or numbers told? 115

[]

How learn delighted, and amazed, What hands unknown that fabric raised? Even now before his favoured eyes,

120

In Gothic pride it seems to rise!

[]

Yet Græcia’s graceful orders join,

[]

Majestic through the mixed design; The secret builder knew to choose, Each sphere-found gem of richest hues : Whate’er heaven’s purer mould contains,

[]

When nearer suns emblaze its veins; 125

There on the walls the patriot’s sight, May ever hang with fresh delight,

130

And, graved with some prophetic rage,

[]

Read Albion’s fame through every age.

[]

Ye forms divine, ye laureate band,

[]

That near her inmost altar stand!

[]

Now soothe her, to her blissful train Blithe Concord’s social form to gain : Concord, whose myrtle wand can steep Even Anger’s blood-shot eyes in sleep : 135

Before whose breathing bosom’s balm, Rage drops his steel, and storms grow calm; Her let our sires and matrons hoar Welcome to Britain’s ravaged shore,

140

Our youths, enamoured of the fair,

[]

Play with the tangles of her hair,

[]

33

Till in one loud applauding sound, The nations shout to her around, O how supremely art thou blest, Thou, lady, thou shalt rule the West!

Ode, to a Lady on the Death of Colonel Ross in the Action of Fontenoy

[]

1. While, lost to all his former mirth,

[]

Britannia’s Genius bends to earth, And mourns the fatal day : While stained with blood he strives to tear 5

Unseemly from his sea-green hair The wreaths of cheerful May : 2. The thoughts which musing Pity pays, And fond Remembrance loves to raise, Your faithful hours attend :

10

Still Fancy to herself unkind, Awakes to grief the softened mind, And points the bleeding friend. 3. By rapid Scheldt’s descending wave

[]

His country’s vows shall bless the grave, 15

Where’er the youth is laid : That sacred spot the village hind With every sweetest turf shall bind, And peace protect the shade. 4. Blest youth, regardful of thy doom,

20

[]

Aerial hands shall build thy tomb, With shadowy trophies crowned : Whilst Honour bathed in tears shall rove

34

To sigh thy name through every grove And call his heroes round. 5. 25

The warlike dead of every age, Who fill the fair recording page, Shall leave their sainted rest : And, half-reclining on his spear, Each wondering chief by turns appear,

30

To hail the blooming guest. 6. Old Edward’s sons, unknown to yield,

[]

Shall crowd from Crecy’s laurelled field, And gaze with fixed delight : Again for Britain’s wrongs they feel, 35

Again they snatch the gleamy steel, And wish the avenging fight. 7. But lo where, sunk in deep despair, Her garments torn, her bosom bare, Impatient Freedom lies!

40

[]

Her matted tresses madly spread, To every sod, which wraps the dead, She turns her joyless eyes. 8. Ne’er shall she leave that lowly ground, Till notes of triumph bursting round

45

Proclaim her reign restored : Till William seek the sad retreat,

[]

And bleeding at her sacred feet, Present the sated sword. 9. If, weak to soothe so soft an heart, 50

These pictured glories nought impart, To dry thy constant tear :

35

If yet, in Sorrow’s distant eye, Exposed and pale thou see’st him lie, Wild War insulting near :

[]

10. 55

Where’er from time thou court’st relief, The Muse shall still, with social Grief, Her gentlest promise keep : Even humble Harting’s cottaged vale

[]

Shall learn the sad repeated tale, 60

5

And bid her shepherds weep.

Ode to Evening

[]

If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song,

[]

May hope, chaste Eve, to soothe thy modest ear,

[]

Like thy own solemn springs,

[]

Thy springs, and dying gales,

[]

O nymph reserved, while now the bright-haired sun Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts, With brede ethereal wove,

[] []

O’erhang his wavy bed : Now air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat, 10

[]

With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds

[]

His small but sullen horn,

[]

As oft he rises midst the twilight path, Against the pilgrim borne in heedless hum : 15

Now teach me, maid composed, To breathe some softened strain, Whose numbers stealing through thy darkening vale,

[]

May not unseemly with its stillness suit, As musing slow, I hail 20

Thy genial loved return! For when thy folding star arising shows

[] []

His paly circlet, at his warning lamp The fragrant Hours, and elves

[]

Who slept in flowers the day,

[]

36

25

And many a nymph who wreathes her brows with sedge, And sheds the freshening dew, and lovelier still, The Pensive Pleasures sweet Prepare thy shadowy car.

30

[]

Then lead, calm vot’ress, where some sheety lake

[]

Cheers the lone heath, or some time-hallowed pile,

[]

Or upland fallows grey Reflect its last cool gleam.

35

But when chill blustering winds, or driving rain,

[]

Forbid my willing feet, be mine the hut,

[]

That from the mountain’s side, Views wilds, and swelling floods, And hamlets brown, and dim-discovered spires,

[]

And hears their simple bell, and marks o’er all Thy dewy fingers draw 40

The gradual dusky veil. While Spring shall pour his showers, as oft he wont,

[]

And bathe thy breathing tresses, meekest Eve!

[]

While Summer loves to sport, Beneath thy lingering light : 45

While sallow Autumn fills thy lap with leaves, Or Winter yelling through the troublous air, Affrights thy shrinking train,

[]

And rudely rends thy robes. 50

So long, sure-found beneath the sylvan shed,

[]

Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lipped Health,

[]

Thy gentlest influence own, And hymn thy favourite name!

Ode to Peace

[]

[]

1. O thou, who bad’st thy turtles bear

[]

Swift from his grasp thy golden hair, And sought’st thy native skies : 5

When War, by vultures drawn from far,

[]

To Britain bent his iron car,

[]

And bad his storms arise!

37

2. Tired of his rude tyrannic sway,

[]

Our youth shall fix some festive day, His sullen shrines to burn : 10

[]

But thou who hear’st the turning spheres, What sounds may charm thy partial ears,

[]

And gain thy blest return! 3. O Peace, thy injured robes up-bind, O rise, and leave not one behind 15

Of all thy beamy train :

[]

The British lion, goddess sweet, Lies stretched on earth to kiss thy feet, And own thy holier reign. 4. Let others court thy transient smile, 20

But come to grace thy western isle, By warlike Honour led! And, while around her ports rejoice, While all her sons adore thy choice, With him for ever wed!

The Manners.

An Ode

Farewell, for clearer ken designed,

[]

[]

The dim-discovered tracts of mind : Truths which, from action’s paths retired, My silent search in vain required! 5

[]

No more my sail that deep explores, No more I search those magic shores, What regions part the world of soul,

[]

Or whence thy streams, Opinion, roll : 10

If e’er I round such fairy field,

[]

Some power impart the spear and shield,

[]

At which the wizard Passions fly, By which the giant Follies die!

38

15

Farewell the porch, whose roof is seen,

[]

Arched with the enlivening olive’s green :

[]

Where Science, pranked in tissued vest,

[]

By Reason, Pride, and Fancy dressed, Comes like a bride so trim arrayed, To wed with Doubt in Plato’s shade!

[]

Youth of the quick uncheated sight, 20

Thy walks, Observance, more invite!

[]

O thou, who lov’st that ampler range, Where life’s wide prospects round thee change, And with her mingling sons allied,

[]

Throw’st the prattling page aside : 25

To me in converse sweet impart,

[]

To read in man the native heart, To learn, where science sure is found,

[]

From Nature as she lives around : And gazing oft her mirror true, 30

[]

By turns each shifting image view! Till meddling Art’s officious lore, Reverse the lessons taught before, Alluring from a safer rule,

[]

To dream in her enchanted school; 35

Thou Heaven, whate’er of great we boast, Hast blest this social science most.

[]

Retiring hence to thoughtful cell,

40

As Fancy breathes her potent spell,

[]

Not vain she finds the charmful task,

[]

In pageant quaint, in motley mask, Behold before her musing eyes, The countless Manners round her rise; While ever varying as they pass,

45

To some Contempt applies her glass :

[]

With these the white-robed Maids combine,

[]

And those the laughing Satyrs join!

[]

But who is he whom now she views, In robe of wild contending hues?

[]

Thou by the Passions nursed, I greet 50

The comic sock that binds thy feet!

[]

O Humour, thou whose name is known,

[]

39

To Britain’s favoured isle alone : Me too amidst thy band admit, There where the young-eyed healthful Wit, 55

(Whose jewels in his crisped hair

[]

Are placed each other’s beams to share,

[]

Whom no delights from thee divide) In laughter loosed attends thy side! By old Miletus who so long 60

[]

Has ceased his love-inwoven song : By all you taught the Tuscan maids,

[]

In changed Italia’s modern shades : By him, whose Knight’s distinguished name

[]

Refined a nation’s lust of fame; 65

Whose tales even now, with echoes sweet, Castilia’s Moorish hills repeat : Or him, whom Seine’s blue nymphs deplore,

[]

In watchet weeds on Gallia’s shore,

[]

Who drew the sad Sicilian maid, 70

By virtues in her sire betrayed : O Nature boon, from whom proceed

[]

Each forceful thought, each prompted deed; If but from thee I hope to feel, 75

On all my heart imprint thy seal!

[]

Let some retreating Cynic find,

[]

Those oft-turned scrolls I leave behind, The Sports and I this hour agree,

[]

To rove thy scene-full world with thee!

The Passions.

An Ode for Music

[]

When Music, heavenly maid, was young, While yet in early Greece she sung,

5

The Passions oft to hear her shell,

[]

Thronged around her magic cell,

[]

Exulting, trembling, raging, fainting, Possessed beyond the muse’s painting; By turns they felt the glowing mind, Disturbed, delighted, raised, refined.

40

Till once, ’tis said, when all were fired, 10

Filled with fury, rapt, inspired,

[]

From the supporting myrtles round, They snatched her instruments of sound, And as they oft had heard apart Sweet lessons of her forceful art, 15

Each, for madness ruled the hour, Would prove his own expressive power. First Fear his hand, its skill to try, Amid the chords bewildered laid, And back recoiled he knew not why,

20

Even at the sound himself had made. Next Anger rushed, his eyes on fire, In lightnings owned his secret stings, In one rude clash he struck the lyre, And swept with hurried hand the strings.

25

With woeful measures wan Despair Low sullen sounds his grief beguiled,

[]

A solemn, strange, and mingled air, ’Twas sad by fits, by starts ’twas wild. But thou, O Hope, with eyes so fair, 30

What was thy delightful measure? Still it whispered promised pleasure, And bad the lovely scenes at distance hail! Still would her touch the strain prolong, And from the rocks, the woods, the vale,

35

She called on Echo still through all the song; And where her sweetest theme she chose, A soft responsive voice was heard at every close, And Hope enchanted smiled, and waved her golden hair.

[]

And longer had she sung,—but with a frown, 40

Revenge impatient rose, He threw his blood-stained sword in thunder down,

41

And with a withering look, The war-denouncing trumpet took,

[]

And blew a blast so loud and dread, 45

Were ne’er prophetic sounds so full of woe. And ever and anon he beat The doubling drum with furious heat;

[]

And though sometimes each dreary pause between, Dejected Pity at his side, 50

Her soul-subduing voice applied, Yet still he kept his wild unaltered mien, While each strained ball of sight seemed bursting from his head. Thy numbers, Jealousy, to nought were fixed, Sad proof of thy distressful state,

55

Of differing themes the veering song was mixed, And now it courted Love, now raving called on Hate. With eyes up-raised, as one inspired, Pale Melancholy sat retired, And from her wild sequestered seat,

60

In notes by distance made more sweet, Poured through the mellow horn her pensive soul : And dashing soft from rocks around, Bubbling runnels joined the sound; Through glades and glooms the mingled measure stole,

65

Or o’er some haunted stream with fond delay, Round an holy calm diffusing, Love of peace, and lonely musing, In hollow murmurs died away. But O how altered was its sprightlier tone!

70

When Cheerfulness, a nymph of healthiest hue,

[]

Her bow across her shoulder flung, Her buskins gemmed with morning dew, Blew an inspiring air, that dale and thicket rung, The hunter’s call to faun and dryad known! 75

[]

The oak-crowned sisters, and their chaste-eyed queen, Satyrs and sylvan boys were seen,

[]

Peeping from forth their alleys green;

42

Brown Exercise rejoiced to hear, And Sport leapt up, and seized his beechen spear. 80

Last came Joy’s ecstatic trial,

[]

He with viny crown advancing, First to the lively pipe his hand addressed, But soon he saw the brisk awakening viol,

[]

Whose sweet entrancing voice he loved the best. 85

They would have thought who heard the strain, They saw in Tempe’s vale her native maids,

[]

Amidst the festal sounding shades, To some unwearied minstrel dancing, While as his flying fingers kissed the strings, 90

Love framed with Mirth, a gay fantastic round,

[]

Loose were her tresses seen, her zone unbound,

[]

And he amidst his frolic play,

[]

As if he would the charming air repay, Shook thousand odours from his dewy wings. 95

O Music, sphere-descended maid,

[]

Friend of pleasure, Wisdom’s aid, Why, goddess, why to us denied? Lay’st thou thy ancient lyre aside? As in that loved Athenian bower, 100

You learned an all-commanding power, Thy mimic soul, O nymph endeared,

[]

Can well recall what then it heard. Where is thy native simple heart, Devote to virtue, fancy, art? 105

[]

Arise as in that elder time, Warm, energic, chaste, sublime!

[]

Thy wonders in that god-like age, Fill thy recording Sister’s page—

[]

’Tis said, and I believe the tale, 110

Thy humblest reed could more prevail, Had more of strength, diviner rage,

[]

Than all which charms this laggard age,

[]

Even all at once together found, Cecilia’s mingled world of sound—

[]

43

115

O bid our vain endeavours cease, Revive the just designs of Greece, Return in all thy simple state! Confirm the tales her sons relate!

Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Thomson

[]

1. In yonder grave a Druid lies

[]

Where slowly winds the stealing wave! The year’s best sweets shall duteous rise To deck its poet’s sylvan grave! 2. 5

In yon deep bed of whispering reeds His airy harp shall now be laid,

[]

That he, whose heart in sorrow bleeds May love through life the soothing shade. 3. Then maids and youths shall linger here, 10

And while its sounds at distance swell, Shall sadly seem in Pity’s ear To hear the woodland pilgrim’s knell. 4. Remembrance oft shall haunt the shore When Thames in summer wreaths is dressed,

15

And oft suspend the dashing oar To bid his gentle spirit rest! 5. And oft as Ease and Health retire To breezy lawn, or forest deep, The friend shall view yon whitening spire,

20

[] []

And mid the varied landscape weep.

44

6. But thou, who own’st that earthy bed, Ah! what will every dirge avail? Or tears, which Love and Pity shed That mourn beneath the gliding sail! 7. 25

Yet lives there one, whose heedless eye Shall scorn thy pale shrine glimmering near? With him, sweet bard, may Fancy die, And Joy desert the blooming year. 8. But thou, lorn stream, whose sullen tide

30

No sedge-crowned Sisters now attend,

[] []

Now waft me from the green hill’s side Whose cold turf hides the buried friend! 9. And see, the fairy valleys fade,

[]

Dun Night has veiled the solemn view! 35

—Yet once again, dear parted shade

[]

Meek Nature’s child again adieu! 10. The genial meads assigned to bless

[]

Thy life, shall mourn thy early doom, Their hinds, and shepherd-girls shall dress 40

[]

With simple hands thy rural tomb. 11. Long, long, thy stone and pointed clay

[]

Shall melt the musing Briton’s eyes, O! vales, and wild woods, shall he say In yonder grave your Druid lies!

45

Ode to a Friend on his Return etc.

[]

( An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, Considered as the Subject of Poetry )

1. H—— thou return’st from Thames, whose Naiads long

[]

Have seen thee lingering with a fond delay Mid those soft friends, whose hearts some future day 5

[]

Shall melt perhaps to hear thy tragic song

[]

Go not unmindful of that cordial youth

[] []

Whose Together let us wish him lasting truth And joy untainted with his destined bride

[]

Go! nor regardless, while these numbers boast 10

My short-lived bliss, forget my social name But think far off how on the southern coast I met thy friendship with an equal flame! Fresh to that soil thou turn’st, whose every vale Shall prompt the poet, and his song demand;

15

To thee thy copious subjects ne’er shall fail Thou need’st but take the pencil to thy hand And paint what all believe who own thy genial land.

[] []

2. There must thou wake perforce thy Doric quill ’Tis Fancy’s land to which thou set’st thy feet 20

[] []

Where still, ’tis said, the fairy people meet Beneath each birken shade, on mead or hill

[]

There each trim lass that skims the milky store To the swart tribes their creamy bowl allots,

[]

By night they sip it round the cottage door 25

While airy minstrels warble jocund notes There every herd by sad experience knows How winged with fate their elf-shot arrows fly

[] [] []

When the sick ewe her summer food foregoes Or stretched on earth the heart-smit heifers lie! 30

Such airy beings awe the untutored swain;

[]

Nor thou, though learned, his homelier thoughts neglect

[]

46

Let thy sweet muse the rural faith sustain; These are the themes of simple sure effect That add new conquests to her boundless reign 35

And fill with double force her heart commanding strain. 3. Even yet preserved how often may’st thou hear Where to the pole the Boreal mountains run

[]

Taught by the father to his listening son 40

Strange lays whose power had charmed a Spenser’s ear

[]

At every pause, before thy mind possessed,

[]

Old Runic bards shall seem to rise around With uncouth lyres, in many-coloured vest, Their matted hair with boughs fantastic crowned Whether thou bidd’st the well-taught hind repeat 45

[] [] [] []

The choral dirge that mourns some chieftain brave When every shrieking maid her bosom beat And strewed with choicest herbs his scented grave Or whether sitting in the shepherd’s shiel

[]

Thou hear’st some sounding tale of war’s alarms 50

When at the bugle’s call with fire and steel The sturdy clans poured forth their bonny swarms And hostile brothers met to prove each other’s arms.

[]

4. ’Tis thine to sing how framing hideous spells In Skye’s lone isle the gifted wizard seer 55

Lodged in the wintry cave with Or in the depth of Uist’s dark forests dwells

[]

How they whose sight such dreary dreams engross

[]

With their own visions oft astonished droop When o’er the watery strath or quaggy moss 60

[]

[] []

They see the gliding ghosts unbodied troop Or if in sports or on the festive green Their

glance some fated youth descry

Who now perhaps in lusty vigour seen And rosy health shall soon lamented die 65

For them the viewless forms of air obey

[]

Their bidding heed, and at their beck repair

47

They know what spirit brews the storm full day And heartless oft like moody madness stare

[]

To see the phantom train their secret work prepare! 5. [ Stanza missing, ll.70–86 ] 6. [ Lines 87– 94 missing ] 95

What though far off from some dark dell espied His glimmering mazes cheer the excursive sight

[]

Yet turn ye wanderers turn your steps aside Nor choose the guidance of that faithless light! For watchful lurking mid the unrustling reed 100

At those sad hours the wily monster lies

[]

And listens oft to hear the passing steed And frequent round him rolls his sullen eyes

[]

If chance his savage wrath may some weak wretch []

surprise. 7. Ah luckless swain, o’er all unblest indeed! 105

Whom late bewildered in the dank dark fen Far from his flocks and smoking hamlet then! To that sad spot his On him enraged the fiend in angry mood Shall never look with pity’s kind concern

110

But instant furious rouse the whelming flood O’er its drowned banks forbidding all return

[] []

Or if he meditate his wished escape To some dim hill that seems uprising near To his faint eye the grim and grisly shape 115

In all its terrors clad shall wild appear. Meantime the watery surge shall round him rise Poured sudden forth from every swelling source What now remains but tears and hopeless sighs? His fear-shook limbs have lost their youthly force

120

[]

And down the waves he floats a pale and breathless corse.

[]

48

8. For him in vain his anxious wife shall wait Or wander forth to meet him on his way For him in vain at to-fall of the day

[]

His bairns shall linger at the unclosing gate 125

Ah ne’er shall he return—Alone if night Her travelled limbs in broken slumbers steep With dropping willows dressed his mournful sprite

[] []

Shall visit sad perhaps her silent sleep Then he perhaps with moist and watery hand 130

Shall fondly seem to press her shuddering cheek And with his blue swoln face before her stand And shivering cold these piteous accents speak ‘Pursue dear wife thy daily toils pursue ‘At dawn, or dusk industrious as before

135

‘Nor e’er of me one hapless thought renew ‘While I lie weltering on the osiered shore

[] []

‘Drowned by the Kaelpie’s wrath nor e’er shall aid []

thee more 9. Unbounded is thy range, with varied style Thy Muse may like those feathery tribes which spring 140

From their rude rocks extend her skirting wing

[] []

Round the moist marge of each cold Hebrid isle

[]

To that hoar pile which still its ruin shows

[]

In whose small vaults a pigmy-folk is found Whose bones the delver with his spade up-throws 145

And culls them wondering from the hallowed ground![] Or thither, where beneath the showery west

[]

The mighty kings of three fair realms are laid Once foes perhaps together now they rest No slaves revere them, and no wars invade : 150

Yet frequent now at midnight’s solemn hour

[]

The rifted mounds their yawning cells unfold And forth the monarchs stalk with sovereign power In pageant robes, and wreathed with sheeny gold And on their twilight tombs aerial council hold.

49

10. 155

But O o’er all forget not Kilda’s race On whose bleak rocks which brave the wasting tides

[] []

Fair Nature’s daughter Virtue yet abides! Go just, as they, their blameless manners trace! Then to my ear transmit some gentle song 160

Of those whose lives are yet sincere and plain Their bounded walks the ragged cliffs along And all their prospect but the wintry main.

[]

With sparing temperance at the needful time They drain the sainted spring, or hunger-pressed 165

Along the Atlantic rock undreading climb And of its eggs despoil the solan’s nest

[]

Thus blest in primal innocence they live Sufficed and happy with that frugal fare Which tasteful toil and hourly danger give 170

Hard is their shallow soil,

[]

and bare

Nor ever vernal bee was heard to murmur there! 11. Nor need’st thou blush that such false themes engage Thy gentle mind of fairer stores possessed

[] []

For not alone they touch the village breast, 175

But filled in elder time the historic page There Shakespeare’s self with every garland crowned In musing hour his Wayward Sisters found

[]

And with their terrors dressed the magic scene! From them he sung, when mid his bold design 180

Before the Scot afflicted and aghast

[]

The shadowy kings of Banquo’s fated line Through the dark cave in gleamy pageant passed

[]

Proceed nor quit the tales which simply told Could once so well my answering bosom pierce 185

Proceed, in forceful sounds and colours bold The native legends of thy land rehearse To such adapt thy lyre, and suit thy powerful verse

50

12. In scenes like these which daring to depart From sober Truth, are still to Nature true 190

And call forth fresh delights to Fancy’s view []

The heroic Muse employed her Tasso’s art! How have I trembled when at Tancred’s stroke Its gushing blood, the gaping cypress poured When each live plant with mortal accents spoke 195

And the wild blast up-heaved the vanished sword. How have I sat where piped the pensive wind []

To hear his harp by British Fairfax strung

[]

Prevailing poet, whose undoubting mind Believed the magic wonders which he sung! 200

Hence at each sound imagination glows Hence his warm lay with softest sweetness flows Melting it flows, pure numerous strong and clear

[] []

And fills the impassioned heart, and lulls the harmonious ear 13. All hail ye scenes that o’er my soul prevail 205

Ye

firths and lakes which far away

Are by smooth Annan filled, or pastoral Tay

[]

Or Don’s romantic springs, at distance hail! The time shall come, when I perhaps may tread Your lowly glens o’erhung with spreading broom 210

Or o’er your stretching heaths by Fancy led Then will I dress once more the faded bower Where Jonson sat in Drummond’s

215

shade

[]

Or crop from Tiviot’s dale each

[]

And mourn on Yarrow banks

[]

Meantime ye powers, that on the plains which bore The cordial youth, on Lothian’s plains attend Where’er he dwell, on hill or lowly muir

[] []

To him I lose, your kind protection lend And touched with love, like mine, preserve my absent friend.

51

Fragments

[]

Fragment on Restoration Drama Yet this wild pomp so much in vain pursued, The courtly Davenant on our Thames renewed.

[]

For who can trace through time’s o’er-clouded maze The dawning stage of old Eliza’s days? 5

What critic search its rise, or changes know, With all the force of Holinshed or Stow?

[]

Yet all may gain, from many a worthless page, Some lights of Charles and his luxurious age.

[]

Then, thanks to those! who sent him forth to roam 10

Or equal weakness! brought the monarch home! The taste of France, her manners and her style (The fool’s gay models) deluged all our isle : Those courtly wits which spoke the nation’s voice In Paris learned their judgment and their choice

15

Vain were the thoughts, which nature’s passions speak, Thy woes Monimia impotent and weak!

[]

Vain all the truth of just dramatic tales! Naught pleased Augustus, but what pleased Versailles!

[]

His hand of power outstretched with princely care 20

From his low state upraised the instructive player And even in palaces, for never age Was graced like Richelieu’s, placed his regal stage

[]

To those proud halls where Burgundy had vied

[]

With all his Gallic peers in princely pride 25

The Muse succeeded like some splendid heir And placed her chiefs and favoured heroes there! And could that theatre, believe you, trust To those weak guides—the decent and the just? Ah no! could aught delight that modish pit?

30

’Twas but the froth, and foppery of wit. True nature ceased; and in her place, were seen That pride of pantomime, the rich machine—

[]

There, when some god, or spirit poised in air, Surprised the scented beau, or masking fair 35

Think! with what thunder, in so just a cause,

52

The mob of coxcombs swelled their loud applause! These witlings heeded nature, less than they

[]

That rule thy taste, the critics of today : Yet all could talk how Betterton was dressed 40

[]

And gave that queen their praise, who curtsied best. Thus Folly lasted long at Truth’s expense Spite of just nature, or reluctant sense— Ask you what broke at last her idle reign? Wit’s easy villain could not laugh in vain.

Fragment by Two Authors ‘But why you’ll say to me this

song

‘Can these proud aims to private life belong ‘Fair instances your verse unbidden brings ‘The ambitious names of ministers and kings. 5

‘Am I that statesman whom a realm obeys ‘What ready tributes will my mandate raise ‘Or like the pontiff can my word command ‘Exacted sums from every pliant land ‘That all of which the men of leisure read

10

‘This taste and splendour must from me proceed ‘Tell me if wits reprove or fortune frown ‘Where is my hope but in the uncertain town ‘Yet ere you urge weigh well the mighty task ‘Behold what sums one poet’s dramas ask

15

‘When Shakespeare shifts the place so oft to view ‘Must each gay scene be beautiful and new ‘Come you who trade in ornament appear ‘Come join your aids through all the busy year ‘Plan build and paint through each laborious day

20

‘And let us once produce this finished play Yes the proud cost allows some short suspense I grant the terrors of that word expense Did taste at once for full perfection call That sole objection might determine all

25

But such just elegance not gained at ease Scarce wished and seen, may come by slow degrees

53

Today

may one fair grace restore

And some kind season add one beauty more And with these aims of elegant desire 30

The critic’s unities, ’tis sure, conspire And though no scenes suffice to deck the wild round their works on whom the Muse has smiled Some scenes may still the fair design admit Chaste scenes which Addison or Philips writ.

35

[]

Is but our just delight in one increased ’Tis something gained to decency at least : And what thy judgement first by nature planned May find completion from some future hand. &c. The pomp

Fragment Addressed to James Harris These would I sing—O art for ever dear Whose charms so oft have caught my raptured ear O teach me thou, if my unpolished lays Are all too rude to speak thy gentle praise 5

O teach me softer sounds of sweeter kind []

Then let the Muse and Picture each contend

[]

This plan her tale, and that her colours blend With me though both their kindred charms combine 10

No power shall emulate or equal thine! And thou the gentlest patron born to grace

15

And add new brightness even to Ashley’s race

[]

Intent like him in Plato’s polished style

[]

To fix fair Science in our careless isle

[]

Whether through Wilton’s pictured halls you stray

[]

Or o’er some speaking marble waste the day Or weigh each sound its various power to learn Come son of Harmony O hither turn! Led by thy hand Philosophy will deign 20

To own me meanest of her votive train

54

O I will listen, when her lips impart Why all my soul obeys her powerful art Why at her bidding or by strange surprise Or waked by fond degrees my passions rise 25

How well-formed reeds my sure attention gain And what the lyre’s well-measured strings contain The mighty masters too unpraised so long Shall not be lost, if thou assist my song They who with Pindar’s in one age bestowed

30

[]

Clothed the sweet words which in their numbers flowed And Rome’s and Adria’s sons—if thou but strive

[]

To guard their names, shall in my verse survive

Fragment Addressed to Jacob Tonson While you perhaps exclude the wintry gloom In jovial Jacob’s academic room

[]

There pleased by turns in breathing paint to trace The wit’s gay air or poet’s genial face 5

Say happy Tonson, say, what great design (For warmest gratitude must sure be thine) What due return employs thy musing heart For all the happiness their works impart What taste directed monument which they

10

Might own with smiles, and thou with honour pay? Even from the days when courtly Waller sung

[]

And tuned with polished sounds our barbarous tongue Ere yet the verse to full perfection brought With nicer music clothed the poet’s thought 15

[]

The muse whose song bespoke securest fame Made fair alliance with thy favoured name Dealt from thy press the maid of elder days Lisped the soft lines to Sacharissa’s praise Or the gay youth for livelier spirits known

20

By Cowley’s pointed thought improved his own

[]

Even all the easy sons of song who gained A poet’s name when Charles and pleasure reigned

[]

All from thy race a lasting praise derived

55

Not by their toil the careless bards survived 25

You wisely saved the race who

gay

But sought to wear the myrtles of a day At soft Barn Elms (let every critic join) You more than all enjoy each flowing line Yours is the price whate’er their merits claim 30

[]

Heir of their verse and guardian of their fame! move luxury and love!

Fragment Addressed to a Critic []

Yes, ’tis but Angelo’s or Shakespeare’s name The striking beauties are in each the same. The s

[]

5

Were Horace dumb, who knows even Fresnoy’s art Might guide the muse in some

[]

part

Or searchful Vinci, who his precepts drew

[]

For Tuscan pencils, form the poet too!

[]

From these fair arts, 10

Obtain some fair ef Nor fear to talk of numbers or of oil Though not quite formed like Addison or Boyle

[]

Defect in each abound and more, you say Than sage de Piles instructs us how to weigh 15

[]

Defects which glanced on those who finely feel All Thornhill’s colours would in vain conceal

[]

Or all the golden lines howe’er they flow Through each soft drama of unfruitful Rowe

[]

These too you sometimes praise to censure loth 20

But fix the name of mannerist on both

[]

And should my friend, who knew not Anna’s age

[]

So nicely judge the canvas or the page? Still should his thought on some old model placed Reject the Briton with so nice a taste? 25

From each some forceful character demand

56

but peculiar to his happy hand? Some sovereign mark of genius all his own Ah where on Thames shall gentle Dodsley find 30

[]

The verse contrived for so correct a mind? Or how shall Hayman trembling as you gaze

[]

Obtain one breath of such unwilling praise? Go then in all unsatisfied complain Of Time’s mistake in Waller’s desperate strain 35

[]

For ah untimely cam’st thou forth indeed With whom originals alone succeed! Go as thou wilt, require the bliss denied []

To call back art and live ere Carlo died But O in song the public voice obey 40

There let each author

his

day []

Abroad be candid, reason as you will And live at home a chaste Athenian still! For each correct design the critic kind Look back through age to Homer’s godlike mind 45

But Blackhall’s self might doubt if all of art

[]

Were self produced in one exhaustless heart

Fragment Addressed to a Friend about to Visit Italy On each new scene the sons of Shall give fresh objects to thy

vertu view

Bring the graved gem or offer as you pass

[]

The imperial medal, and historic brass 5

Then o’er its narrow surface may’st thou trace The genuine spirit of some hero’s face Or see minutely touched the powerful charms Of some proud fair that set whole realms in arms The patriot’s story with his look compare

10

And know the poet by his genial air

57

Nor, for they boast no pure Augustan vein Reject her poets with a cold disdain Oh think in what sweet lays how sweetly strong Our Fairfax warbles Tasso’s forceful song 15

[]

How Spenser too, whose lays you oft resume Wove their gay

in his fantastic loom

That Cinthio prompted oft even Shakespeare’s flame

[]

And Milton valued even Marino’s name!

[]

Fragment on a Female Painter The moon with dewy lustre bright Her mild ethereal radiance gave On paly cloisters gleamed her light Or trembled o’er the unresting wave 5

’Twas midnight’s hour—

Long o’er the spires and glimmering towers 10

The whispering flood, and silvery sky As one whom musing grief devours She glanced by turns her silent eye! Like hers, the fair Lavinia’s hand

[]

Once mixed the pallet’s varied store 15

Blest maid whom once Italia’s land In years of better glory bore!

[]

Like her, O death, O ruthless power O grief of heart remembered well In lovely youth’s untimely hour 20

Like her soft Tintoretta fell

[]

Even she, whose science Philip sought To share his throne an envied bride

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Like thee deplored, ah fatal thought By every art lamented died 25

Thy draft where Love his hand employed Shall only please a shortlived day And timeless like thyself destroyed

[]

In each revolving year decay. Yet soft and melting flowed thy line 30

As every Grace had lent her aid Bid each mild light unglaring shine And soft imbrowned each melting shade And when thy tints, ah fruitless care With softest skill compounded lay

35

The flaunting bowers where spring repairs Were not more bloomy sweet than they! The child of them who now adore Thy tender tints and godlike flame Pass some few years on Adria’s shore

40

[]

Shall only know thy gentle name Or when his eyes shall strive in vain Thy fairy pencil’s stroke to trace

[]

The faded draft shall scarce retain Some lifeless line or mangled grace

Fragment :

‘Ye genii who in secret state’

Ye genii who in secret state Far from the wheaten field

[] []

At some thronged city’s antique gate Your unseen sceptres wield 5

Ye powers that such high office share O’er all the restless earth

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Who see each day descend with care Or lost in senseless mirth Take them who know not how to prize 10

The walks to wisdom dear The gradual fruits and varying skies

[]

That paint the gradual year Take all that to the silent sod Prefer the sounding street 15

And let your echoing squares be trod By their unresting feet But me, by

springlets laid

That through the woodland chide Let elms and oaks that lent their shade 20

To hoary druids hide Let me where’er wild nature leads My sight enamoured look And choose my hymning pipe from reeds That roughen o’er the brook

25

[]

Sometimes when morning o’er plain Her radiant mantle throws I’ll mark the clouds where sweet Lorrain His orient colours chose

[] []

Or when the sun to noontide climbs 30

I’ll hide me from his view By such green plats and cheerful limes As

Rysdael drew

[] []

Then on some heath all wild and bare With more delight I’ll stand 35

Than he who sees with wondering air The works of Rosa’s hand

[]

60

There where some rock’s deep cavern gapes Or in some tawny dell I’ll seem to see the wizard shapes 40

That from his pencil fell

[] []

But when soft evening o’er the plain Her gleamy mantle throws I’ll mark the clouds whence sweet Lorrain His 45

colours chose

Or from the vale I’ll lift my sight To some Where’er the sun withdraws his light The dying lustre falls Such

50

will I keep

Till The modest moon again shall peep Above some eastern hill All tints that ever picture used Are lifeless dull and mean

55

To paint her dewy light diffused []

What art can paint the modest ray So sober chaste and cool As round yon cliffs it seems to play 60

Or skirts yon glimmering pool? The tender gleam her orb affords No poet can declare Although he choose the softest words That e’er were sighed in air.

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Fragment :

To Simplicity 1. []

O Fancy, altered maid Who now too long betrayed To toys and pageant wed’st thy cheated heart Yet once with chastest thought 5

Far nobler triumphs sought Thrice gentle guide of each exalted art! 2. Too No more, sweet maid, the enfeebling dreams prolong

10

Return sweet maid at length In all thy ancient strength And bid our Britain hear thy Grecian song 3. For thee of loveliest name That land shall ever claim

15

And laid an infant on her favoured shore []

Soft bees of Hybla’s vale To age attests the tale To feed thy youth

their s

store.

4. From that 20

hour

Thou knew’st the gentle power To charm her matrons chaste, and virtuous youth For Wisdom learned to please By thy persuasive ease And simplest sweetness more ennobled Truth. 5.

25

Nor modest Picture less Declined the wild excess Which frequent now distracts her wild design The modest Graces laid

[]

62

Each soft unboastful shade 30

While feeling Nature drew the impassioned line! 6. O chaste unboastful guide O’er all my heart preside And midst my cave in breathing marble wrought In sober musing near

35

With Attic robe appear

[]

And charm my sight and prompt my temperate thought 7. And when soft maids and swains Reward my native strains With flowers that chastest bloom and sweetest breathe 40

I loveliest nymph divine Will own the merits thine And round thy temples bind the modest wreath

Fragment :

‘No longer ask me gentle friends’ 1.

No longer ask me gentle friends Why heaves my constant sigh? Or why my eye for ever bends To yon fair eastern sky 5

Why view the clouds that onward roll? Ah who can fate command While here I sit my wandering soul Is in a distant land. 2. Did ye not hear of Delia’s name?

10

When on a fatal day O’er yonder northern hills she came And brought an earlier May. Or if the month her bloomy store By gentle custom brought

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15

She ne’er was half so sweet before To my delighted thought 3. She found me in my southern vale All in her converse blest My

20

heart began to fail

Within my youngling breast

[]

I thought when as her To me of lowly birth There lived not aught so good and kind On all the smiling earth 4. 25

To Resnel’s banks, again to greet

[]

Her gentle eyes I strayed Where once a bard with infant feet Among the willows played His tender thoughts subdue the fair 30

And melt the soft and young But mine I know were softer there Than ever poet sung. 5. I showed her there the songs of one

[]

Who done to death by pride 35

Though Virtue’s friend, and Fancy’s son In love unpitied died I hoped when to that shepherd’s truth Her pity should attend She would not leave another youth

40

To meet his luckless end. 6. Now tell me you who hear me sing And prompt the tender theme How far is Lavant’s little spring From Medway’s mightier stream!

45

[] []

Confined within my native dells

64

The world I little know But in some tufted mead she dwells Where’er those waters flow. 7. There too resorts a maid renowned 50

For framing ditties sweet I heard her lips Her gentle lays repeat They told how sweetly in her bower A greenwood nymph complained

55

Of Melancholy’s gloomy power And joys from Wisdom gained 8. Sweet sung that Muse, and fair befall Her life whose happy art What other bards might envy all

60

Can touch my Laura’s heart Sweet Oaten reeds for her I’ll make And chaplets for her hair If she for friendly pity’s sake Will whisper Damon there. 9.

65

Her strain shall dim if aught succeeds From my applauding tongue Whate’er within her native meads The tuneful Thyrsis sung Less to my love shall he be dear

70

Although he earliest paid Full many a soft and tender tear To luckless Collins’s shade!

65

Fragment on Greek Music Recitative Accompanied When glorious Ptolemy by merit raised

[]

Successive sat on Egypt’s radiant throne Bright Ptolemy, on whom, while Athens gazed She almost wished the monarch once her own 5

[]

Then virtue owned one royal heart; For loathing war, humanely wise For all the sacred sons of art He bad the dome of science rise.

[]

The Muses knew the festal day 10

And called by power obsequant came

[]

With all their lyres and chaplets gay They gave the fabric its immortal name

[]

High o’er the rest in golden pride The monarch sat, and at his side 15

His favourite bards—his Grecian choir Who while the roofs responsive rung To many a fife and many a tinkling lyre Amid the shouting tribes in sweet succession sung.

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Life and Works of William Collins

T

HE life of William Collins was sadly affected, and prematurely ended, by illness. As a result, his poetic

oeuvre remains small, the product wholly of his early twenties. However, his reputation and his later significance are much greater than such a brief career would suggest. This pattern makes Collins one of the early examples of that Romantic stereotype of the youthful genius cut down before his prime. Thomas Chatterton, the ‘Marvellous Boy’, is the eighteenth century’s most famous contribution to this myth of the true poet, writing the ‘Rowley poems’ before committing suicide in poverty at the age of seventeen. Henry Wallis’s 1856 painting of Chatterton on his death-bed is the icon of a nineteenth-century idea of neglected genius. Keats, attacked by critics and dying of consumption in Rome the year after the publication of the volume of poetry which would win him lasting fame, is the full Romantic flowering of the ideal. Because he wrote lyric poetry, chose the ode as his preferred form and used imagery and personification as his primary vehicles of expression, Collins has often been seen as a precursor of the Romantic period. Indeed, his influence on Keats is clear in such details as the imagined temple to pity in the first poem of his volume of odes. But it is dangerous to trust in myths, and it is misleading to rely on stock notions of literary periods. As is noted in the introduction to Collins’s odes below, the common idea that eighteenth-century poetry consisted entirely of moral and satiric poems in rhyming couplets until brave pioneers such as Collins came along falsifies the real course of literary history. To see Collins and his like as preparing the way for the great exponents of true lyric poetry is to impose a retrospective and over-neat pattern on reality. Most importantly for present purposes, these falsifications can distract us from considering and appreciating the work of Collins in its own right. For the poems that he wrote constitute a striking and powerful contribution to eighteenth-century literature.

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William Collins was born in Chichester, Sussex, in 1721, the son of a hatter who was twice mayor of the town. Details of his early life are obscure, but it is generally assumed that his schooling took place in Chichester, until he was admitted to Winchester College as a Scholar. At Winchester he was a contemporary of Joseph Warton, who remained a friend throughout Collins’s life and whose role in the poetry of the mid-century is discussed in the introduction to Collins’s odes. It was at Winchester that Collins began to write poetry, and his ‘Sonnet’, the earliest poem that can confidently be attributed to him, was printed in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1739. Also dating from this period are the Persian Eclogues (later re-titled the Oriental Eclogues). They were published in 1742, and remained the best known of his works during his lifetime, even though Collins himself came to disparage them as youthful productions. Collins had by then gone up to Queen’s College, Oxford, where he spent a year before being elected a Demy (that is, a scholar) of Magdalen College in July 1741. He graduated B.A. in November 1743, shortly before the publication of his Verses Humbly Addressed to Sir Thomas Hanmer. On His Edition of Shakespeare’s Works (entitled An Epistle : Addressed to Sir Thomas Hanmer when published in a revised version in 1744). If this poem was intended to help Collins to a Fellowship, it failed, and he went to London as, in the words of Samuel Johnson in his Life of Collins, ‘a literary adventurer, with many projects in his head, and very little money in his pocket’. The first of these projects seems to have been for an essay on the history of the revival of learning : a notice of such a volume appeared in A Literary Journal in December 1744, although no other trace of the book has been found. Other projects dating from this period were for contributing articles to the Biographia Britannica and for a translation of Aristotle’s Poetics with a commentary. Again, no outcome from these is known of, but Collins’s interest in Aristotle’s Poetics may well have stimulated his ‘Ode to Pity’ and ‘Ode to Fear’ and the dramatic content of ‘The Passions’.

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The death of his mother (his father had died when Collins was at school) in July 1744 appears to have spurred Collins to seek an appointment. A curacy was offered to him, but Collins was persuaded to turn it down by a tobacconist called John Hardham. Hardham, like Collins from Chichester, was involved in the world of London theatre, and it has been suggested that he encouraged Collins to turn his writing in that direction. Johnson records that Collins planned several tragedies, but none materialised. For whatever reasons (and Collins also inherited some property in Chichester from an uncle at about this time), Collins seems now to have committed himself to a life of writing. At this time, British forces were engaged in the continental War of Austrian Succession, and on May 11, 1745 were defeated by the French at the Battle of Fontenoy. Collins addressed an ode ‘To a Lady on the Death of Colonel Ross’, which was printed in The Museum in June 1746. This response to a public event establishes another of the important elements of the volume of odes of 1746/7, in which a revised version of ‘To a Lady’ was included. The Jacobite Rebellion began in July 1745 with the landing in Scotland of the Young Pretender, and the resulting military conflict inspired Collins’s ‘Ode, Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746’; while its aftermath in the form of the trial for treason of three rebel lords informed the ‘Ode to Mercy’. The volume was as much a reaction to events of national importance as it was an attempt to trace the well-springs of poetic invention as a private act. In terms of his poetic career, the most important event took place in May 1746 when Collins and Joseph Warton decided to undertake a joint volume of odes. In the event, Warton’s volume was separately published by Dodsley, shortly before Andrew Millar published Collins’s on December 20, 1746 (with 1747 on the title page). But the prospect of joint action may well have stimulated Collins to further writing and to gather a number of poems together in a coherent form. Of the volumes of odes published around this time, that by Collins, though little noted in its time,

69

has best stood the test of time. It has received the adulation of subsequent generations of poets, such as Swinburne in the nineteenth century and Edmund Blunden in the twentieth. Along with the lyric poems of Thomas Gray, those by Collins have also received most critical attention from students of eighteenth-century poetry. They represent an ambitious and remarkable attempt to exploit the expressive capacity of language of dramatic power and visual intensity. The entire volume also explores a wide range of stanzaforms and subjects the Pindaric mode to a series of variations. There is throughout the volume a strong impression of a poet experimenting with his medium, straining its syntactic and linguistic resources in order to discover its full powers. It may not be the most assured collection in English poetry, but it is among the most exciting. By 1747, Collins was living at Richmond in Surrey, and knew John Ragsdale whose recollections form an important source of our knowledge of him. He also knew the poet James Thomson, author of The Seasons. It was the sudden death of Thomson in August 1748 that produced the last of the poems of Collins published in his life-time, his ‘Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr Thomson’, which appeared in June 1749. This poem has struck some readers as cold and insufficiently emotive. However, its delicate decorum in setting the elegy within a scene of darkening, departing nature is both highly expressive and fitting for the author of the greatest nature poem of the century. Other publications about this time indicate that Collins was now building up a reputation. Three poems from the 1746/7 volume (‘Ode, Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746’, ‘Ode. To a Lady’ and ‘Ode to Evening’) appeared in the second edition of Robert Dodsley’s Collection of Poems by Several Hands in 1748. His early ‘Song from Cymbeline’ was reprinted in the Gentleman’s Magazine under the title ‘Elegiac Song’ in October 1749. Then in July 1750 ‘The Passions’ was performed in Oxford with a musical setting by William Hayes, the Professor of Music at the University, and was printed in pamphlet form. In addition, he was still experimenting with new forms of poetry, as is shown by

70

the fragmentary ‘Ode to a Friend on his Return’ which he wrote in the winter of 1749–50. However, illness now put an end to Collins’s career. He was seen in London by Thomas Warton in 1750, but was living in Chichester again by November 8, 1750, when he sent a letter to William Hayes discussing a new composition. By Easter 1751 he was, according to Thomas Warton, gravely ill. Details are sparse and depend on the reports of others, but it would seem that, seeking to regain his health, Collins travelled in France and went to Bath during the period 1751–4. Samuel Johnson says that he met Collins in London after his return from France. His physical weakness now developed into mental illness. He spent a period in a lunatic asylum, probably in 1754, and was looked after by his sister Anne in Chichester during his final years. He died at Chichester on June 12, 1759, and was buried in St Andrew’s Church.

Note on the Text It is seldom possible to establish a single authentic text for Collins. His work appeared in different publications, magazines and collections, so that variants cannot often be confidently identified as the decision of the writer rather than of the editor or publisher. Some poems (the ‘Ode to a Friend on his Return etc’, the fragments) were not published in the author’s lifetime, and Collins might have made amendments had he proceeded to publication. In addition, publishing conventions varied. For example, the habit of capitalising the first letter of nouns lapsed around the middle of the eighteenth century, so that poems by the same author are differently presented before and after the change of practice. The present edition aims at a regularised text based on the following principles : the copy text is the last published in Collins’s lifetime, unless that text is clearly poor or misleading; spelling is modernised; contractions are modernised unless to do so would affect the metre; initial capital letters of nouns (not at the beginning of a line or sentence)

71

are modernised to lower case unless they are significant (e.g. to mark a personification); punctuation follows that of the original unless unclear. The editorial introduction to each poem includes a note on the text.

Select Bibliography Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1747; published December 1746) A Collection of Poems by Several Hands, ed. Robert Dodsley. 6 vols (1748–58) The Poetical Works of Mr. William Collins, ed. John Langhorne (1765) The Poetical Works of Gray and Collins, ed. Christopher Stone and A. L. Poole (London : 1917). Reissued 1977, ed. Roger Lonsdale William Collins : Drafts and Fragments of Verse, ed. J. S. Cunningham (Oxford : 1956) Arthur Johnston, Selected Poems of Thomas Gray and William Collins (London : 1967) The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale (London : 1969) The Works of William Collins, ed. Richard Wendorf and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford : 1979) General critical or biographical works : Edward G. Ainsworth, Poor Collins : His Life, His Art, and His Influence (Ithaca : 1937) P. L. Carver, William Collins : The Life of a Poet : A Biographical Sketch of William Collins (London : 1967) Chester Chapin, Personification in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (New York : 1955) Paul H. Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven : 1980) H. W. Garrod, Collins (Oxford : 1928) Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts : The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago : 1958)

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Norman Maclean, ‘From Action to Image : Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century’, in Critics and Criticism : Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago : 1952) Paul S. Sherwin, Precious Bane : Collins and the Miltonic Legacy (Austin, Texas : 1977) Oliver F. Sigworth, William Collins (New York : 1965) Patricia M. Spacks, The Poetry of Vision : Five EighteenthCentury Poets (Cambridge, Mass. : 1967) Richard Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Minneapolis : 1981) A. S. P. Woodhouse, ‘Collins and the Creative Imagination : A Study in the Critical Background of his Odes (1746)’, in Studies in English by Members of University College, Toronto, ed. M. W. Wallace (Toronto : 1931), pp.59–130 A. S. P. Woodhouse, ‘The Poetry of Collins Reconsidered’, in From Sensibility to Romanticism : Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York : 1965), pp.93–137 Specific critical works will be found in introductions to individual poems, where appropriate.

Commentary and Notes Sonnet First printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine, October 1739, the version followed here. Written when Collins was a schoolboy at Winchester, the poem is modelled on Alexander Pope’s early lyric poem, ‘Weeping’, itself based on a poem of the same title by the seventeenth-century poet, Abraham Cowley. A sonnet in the sense of being a small song (from the Italian ‘sonetto’), the poem compares the awakening of the poet’s love at the moment of the beloved’s weeping to the birth of the goddess of love, Venus, from the waves. This conceit links a

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moment of personal experience to the universal world of mythology. Bibliography Richard Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Minneapolis : 1981) Line 1. wanton.

Sportive, rather than lascivious.

Line 7. teeming.

Full, but also with the sense of pregnant.

Oriental Eclogues First published under the title Persian Eclogues in 1742. Reprinted, with substantial changes, in 1757 under the title Oriental Eclogues. Because of the mental illness from which Collins suffered after 1751, editors have questioned whether he could have been responsible for all the changes made in the 1757 version. Collins gave a copy of the 1742 edition to his former school-companion at Winchester, Joseph Warton, when he and his brother Thomas visited Collins for the last time, in September 1754. This copy, now in the Dyce Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, contains many of the 1757 revisions, made in Collins’s own hand. However, other changes are found only in the 1757 edition, and these have been attributed by some modern editors to Joseph Warton, rather than to Collins himself. In the absence of proof one way or the other, the present version follows the revised 1757 edition. The Eclogues achieved a greater contemporary success than did the Odes on which Collins’s lasting reputation has depended. From a Greek word meaning ‘selection’, the term eclogue originally meant any short poem. But the term became specifically associated with pastoral poems on the model of Virgil’s Eclogues, themselves imitations of the pastoral poems of Theocritus. Following the classical

74

model of Virgil, whose Eclogues and Georgics (a poem about agricultural activities) preceded his great national epic, The Aeneid, many subsequent writers saw pastoral poems as the way to begin a literary career. For example, Edmund Spenser’s Shepheards Calender, a series of twelve eclogues, was published in 1579, the year he began work on his epic poem, The Faerie Queene. In the eighteenth century, Pope published his four pastorals (which he claimed were written when he was sixteen) in 1709 as a prelude to his mature work. Collins clearly follows Pope’s model in locating his four poems at, successively, morning, noon, evening and night. As Samuel Johnson, always sceptical of the value of idealised depictions of country life, notes in his ‘Life of Pope’, such poems provide an appropriate trainingground for the youthful poet because they do not depend upon that experience of life which only adulthood can bring. Their usefulness is thus restricted to their status as attractive exercises, rather than meaningful contributions to knowledge. However, poets have attempted to combine the apparent escapism of the pastoral with moral or political subjects, either through the allegorical method used by Spenser or by the more explicit statements of moral intention of the kind delivered by Selim in the first of Collins’s Eclogues. Collins’s choice of a series of eastern landscapes (however vaguely located) is the poems’ distinctive contribution to the genre. The exotic associations of the orient had long attracted writers. In 1674, the critic Thomas Rymer had described Arabian poetry as being characterised by a wild and unbridled imaginative power (Preface to Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poetry). Pope told Joseph Spence that he had considered writing a Persian fable ‘in which I should have given a full loose to description and imagination’ (Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes and Characters of Books and Men). In his preface to the Oriental Eclogues, Collins uses the pretence that his poems are translations from Persian originals to contrast the styles of English and Arabian poetry : ‘the style of my countrymen is as naturally strong and nervous [i.e. sinewy, muscular],

75

as that of an Arabian or Persian is rich and figurative’. Our climate, he says, is too cold for the ‘elegancy and wildness of thought’ he attributes to eastern poetry. Such a view of Arabic poetry would have been confirmed by descriptions in the book which was Collins’s main source, Thomas Salmon’s Modern History, published in thirty-one volumes between 1725 and 1738, and in a three-volume collected edition in 1739. ‘Their invention’, says Salmon of the Persian poets, ‘is fruitful and lively, their manner sweet, their temper amorous, and their language has a softness proper for verse’. In the first and third eclogues the freshness of morning and an evening-song of virtuous love provide richness of description, while in the second and fourth a parched desert landscape and the terrors of a mountain scene at midnight provide contrasting wildness. The figurative style is present throughout, in the lush nature of Collins’s descriptive language and in the consistent use of personification, a device which will become his trade-mark. The 1757 edition is prefaced by a quotation from Virgil’s Georgics, I, 250 : ‘ubi primus equis Oriens adflavit anhelis’ (‘when the rising sun first breathed with panting horses’). This replaces the 1742 motto from Cicero, Pro Archia Poeta, vii, 16 : ‘Quod si non hic tantas fructus ostenderetur, et si ex his studiis delectatis sola peteretur; tamen, ut opinor, hanc animi remissionem humanissimam ac liberalissimam judicaretis’ (‘But let us for the moment waive these solid advantages; let us assume that entertainment is the only end of reading; even so, I think you would hold that no mental relaxation is so broadening to the sympathies or so enlightening to the understanding’). Whoever was responsible for the alteration from a prose to a poetic epigram, the metaphoric language of Virgil’s line provides an appropriate reflection of Collins’s poetic aspirations. Bibliography Marion K. Bragg, The Formal Eclogue in EighteenthCentury England (Orono, Maine : 1926) R. F. Jones, ‘Eclogue Types in English Poetry of the

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Eighteenth Century’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 24 (1925), pp.51–7 Richard Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Minneapolis, 1981) SCENE. Bagdat.

Baghdad, in modern Iraq.

Line I. 9. meaning.

Meaningful, expressive.

Line I. 15. wanton gales.

Playful breezes (not strong winds). Both

words are conventional poetic language in these senses. Line I. 17. Tigris.

River of Mesopotamia.

Line I. 28. the fair.

‘The fair sex’; that is, women in general.

Line I. 30. Balsora.

‘The gulf of that name, famous for the pearl-

fishery’ (Collins’s note, 1742). Line I. 38. spots on ermine.

Dark spots put on the fur of the ermine

to set off its whiteness : thus, some faults which enhance virtues by contrast. Line I. 49. balmy.

Fragrant.

Line I. 50. Ind … Araby.

India, Arabia. The line varies normal

word order : our plants shall no more be excelled by those of India or Arabia.

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Line II. 3. cruse.

Earthenware pot.

Line II. 4. scrip.

Satchel, small bag.

Line II. 14. Schiraz.

Shiraz, town in modern Iran.

Line II. 37. tempt.

Venture on, attempt.

Line II. 40. fond.

Foolish (not loving).

Line II. 73. owned.

Acknowledged.

Line II. 85. He said.

Thus he spoke.

Line III. 1. Tefflis.

Described in Salmon’s Modern History as the

capital of Eastern Georgia, with fourteen Christian churches, a cathedral and a castle. Georgia lies to the east of the Black Sea and the north of Turkey. Line III. 5. fields of rice.

Collins is evidently not aware that rice

grows in water, not really suitable for straying over. Line III. 12. mead.

Meadow (poetic language).

Line III. 57. swain.

Countryman.

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Line III. 68. myrtle.

The myrtle shrub was associated in classical

mythology with Venus, goddess of love. Line IV. 1. Circassia.

Mountainous area of Caucasia.

Line IV. 3. awful.

Inspiring awe, solemnly impressive.

Line IV. 8. wildering.

To cause to lose one’s way.

Line IV. 19. ragged.

With a rough, jagged surface.

Line IV. 23. Tartar.

Name given to the people of central Asia, east of

the Caspian Sea; generally signifies a savage person. Line IV. 29. swains.

Countrymen.

Line IV. 30. fleecy care.

Sheep in their care (a common periphrasis,

or roundabout phrase). Line IV. 45. gale.

Breeze, not strong wind.

Line IV. 71. He said.

Thus he spoke.

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An Epistle : Addressed to Sir Thomas Hanmer, on his Edition of Shakespeare’s Works First published December 1743. Revised edition published 1744, together with the ‘Song from Cymbeline’. The revised version, the first publication to have Collins’s name on the title-page, is followed here. Sir Thomas Hanmer (1677–1746), former Speaker of the House of Commons, spent his retirement from 1727 working on an edition of Shakespeare. Published at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, the title-pages of each volume are dated 1744. Thus it seems probable that Collins’s poem was published before the edition came out. Collins graduated B.A. at Oxford on November 18, 1743, and, as Lonsdale suggests (ed., p.387), he may have been hoping that associating himself with this prestigious Oxford event would help to gain Hanmer’s patronage or to establish his claims to a Fellowship. The revised version reduces the poem’s length from 160 to 148 lines, largely by omitting a description of the river Isis. By so cutting the specific reference to Oxford, Collins frees the poem from its topical significance and allows its broader pattern to emerge more clearly. Collins builds up to his celebration of Shakespeare by means of a progress motif. The progress poem was a highly popular genre in the eighteenth century, examples being James Thomson’s large-scale Liberty of 1735, Thomas Gray’s ‘The Progress of Poesy’ (1757) and Collins’s own ‘Ode to Liberty’. The principle behind the progress poem was that the culture, the arts or the politics of the present age are in a line of succession from the great achievements of classical and Renaissance civilisations. Collins varies the normal pattern of the progress poem here. Drama is viewed as having its noblest expression in its Greek origins (ll.19–26), while its Roman successors are successful in comedy, but not in tragedy (ll.27–34). The Italian Renaissance fosters lyric poetry (ll.37–44), but only in Shakespeare are the lyric and dramatic strains brought together (ll.45–50). Collins then reviews the achievements

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and limitations of later Elizabethan dramatists, Jonson and Fletcher (ll.51–66), and of neo-classical French drama (ll.67–74). Thus the line of succession is seen as achieving its culmination in Shakespeare, rather than continuing to the present age. The Shakespearean moment is the ‘perfect boast of time’, but also its ‘last’ : we are reminded that the word ‘perfect’ etymologically means completed, finished (Latin ‘per’ + ‘facere’, to carry through). Such a point of view accords with the veneration of Shakespeare which grew in the eighteenth century, fuelled by those editions of his work to which Hanmer is making a contribution and by productions of his plays, in which David Garrick was to take a leading part. The implication of subsequent decline is not developed by Collins, as he reserves the second half of the poem for a celebration of Shakespeare’s varied vision. The praise of Shakespeare contains two main elements. Collins attests to Shakespeare’s ability to create convincing and living imitations of human nature at all levels of society, from monarchs to humble rustics : ‘Yet he alone to every scene could give, | The historian’s truth, and bid the manners live’ (ll.77–8). Further, he emphasises the pictorial quality of Shakespeare’s dramatic tableaus, providing his own descriptions of the scenes of Mark Antony with the body of Julius Caesar (ll. 115–20), and Volumnia pleading with her son Coriolanus not to attack Rome (ll.121–32). As Lonsdale has pointed out (ed., p.389), these scenes and the battle of Agincourt in Henry V and Richard III’s dream on the eve of Bosworth Field (ll.81–92), are represented in engravings in Nicholas Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare (1709; reprinted 1714 with some new engravings by Du Guernier). Drawing on existing pictorial representations and also recommending the power of Shakespearean scenes to future artists, Collins asserts the intimate relationship between the ‘sister arts’ of poetry and painting. Allusions can be found in Collins’s lines to earlier poems addressed to painters, Dryden’s ‘To Sir Godfrey Kneller’ and Pope’s ‘Epistle to Jervas’. Collins’s own poetry, particularly the odes of 1746, will come more and more to render poetry as opening the imagination to visual forces.

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Bibliography John R. Crider, ‘Structure and Effect in Collins’ Progress Poems’, Studies in Philology, 60 (1963), pp.57–72 Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts (Chicago : 1958) Paul S. Sherwin, Precious Bane (Austin, Texas : 1977) Richard Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Minneapolis : 1981) Line 3. myrtles.

In classical mythology, the myrtle plant

was sacred to Venus. Here it is used as a sign of the flourishing Muse (under Hanmer’s care). Line 6. transports.

Raptures.

Line 7. conscious.

Aware. The Muse is aware of the reverence

she feels towards Hanmer (‘the critic’), and also of her feeling of inadequacy when compared with Shakespeare (l.8). Line 9–12. Describe Shakespeare’s works as having been neglected over a period of years. Line 10. Science.

Knowledge (from Latin ‘scire’, to know).

Line 11. Fancy.

Imagination.

Line 19. rage.

Poetic ardour.

Line 22. Phaedra.

The wife of Theseus, whose tortured love

for her stepson is the subject of Euripides’ Hippolytus. Racine’s Phèdre (1671) takes the same subject.

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Line 23. Oedipus, whose discovery that he has killed

Theban.

his father and married his mother is the subject of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. Line 28. comic Sisters.

The comic Muses.

Line 30. Menander.

The most distinguished of the writers of

Athenian New Comedy, with a focus on contemporary life. Plautus and Terence were Roman followers of Menander. Collins argues that, while Greek comedy was matched in Rome, no Latin tragedian rivalled Greek tragedy. Line 33. Ilissus.

River near Athens, and so implying Greek

tragedy. Line 37. Julius.

Julius II, Pope from 1503 to 1513. Friend of

Raphael and Michelangelo. Thus his fostering of the arts is seen as recalling the exiled Muses. Line 38. Cosmo.

Cosimo de Medici (1389–1464), Florentine

patron of the arts. Florence, on the banks of the Arno (l.40), is in ancient Etruria. Line 40. Provençal.

The language of the southern part of France,

renowned in the medieval period for lyric poetry composed by troubadours. Troubadours also flourished in the courts of Spain and Italy. Line 43. gay description.

‘Gai saber’ (‘the gay science’) is the

Provençal name for the art of poetry.

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Line 48. Tuscan.

Florence is in modern Tuscany. Shakespeare is

seen as combining the imagination of Italian poets with the power of Greek writing. Line 52. equal day.

That is, a day of power equal to its dawn in

Shakespeare. Line 55. Too nicely. Jonson.

With too much fastidiousness.

The contrast between Ben Jonson’s ‘art’ and

Shakespeare’s ‘nature’ had become a commonplace. Line 57. Fletcher.

John Fletcher (1579–1625), best known for his

collaborations with Francis Beaumont. Line 65. ruder passions.

More violent emotions.

Line 67. A note in the 1744 edition refers to the playwright Alexandre Hardy (c.1569–1630) as an important figure in the development of French neo-classical drama, which is ‘exacter’ than Elizabethan drama because of its closer observance of the unities of time, place and action. Line 71. Corneille.

Pierre Corneille (1600–1684) based his La

Mort de Pompée on the Pharsalia of Lucan (AD 39–65), an epic poem about the civil war between Caesar and Pompey.

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Line 73. Racine.

Jean Racine (1639–1699), French neo-classical

dramatist whose ‘judgment’ is seen as having been founded on classical models, such as the pure (‘chaster’) versification of Virgil, whose cognomen was Maro (l.74). Line 76. less artful.

Referring to Shakespeare’s truth to nature

rather than to artistic rules. Line 78. Passions, habits. See ‘The Manners’.[]

manners. Line 81–2. Henry.

The victory of Henry V at Agincourt, depicted

in the frontispiece to Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Line 83. Edward.

The child Edward V is murdered in the Tower

in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Line 84. Scarce born to honours.

That is, the ‘honours’ of

kingship were his at so young an age and for so short a time. Line 87. Gloucester.

Richard III was formerly Duke of

Gloucester. The scene in which Richard dreams that the ghosts of those he has murdered appear to him and prophesy his defeat at the battle of Bosworth Field is depicted in the frontispiece to Rowe’s edition of Richard III. Line 89. dreary.

Gory, bloody. This meaning, used by Spenser,

was obsolete in the eighteenth century.

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Lines 93–4. The mind is ‘cheated’ because imagination (‘Fancy’) charms it into believing in an illusion. Line 97. swains.

Countrymen.

Line 98. fairies.

Depicted in the frontispiece to Rowe’s edition of

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Line 100. enchanted isle.

The Enchanted Island is the sub-title of

the adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest by Dryden and Davenant. Line 105. warmth.

Ardour.

Line 106. lays.

Songs, so poetry.

Line 108. Picture.

Painting (Latin ‘pictura’).

Line 110. Raphaels.

Raphael, Italian Renaissance painter (1483–

1520). Line 115. Antony.

Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III.ii, with Mark

Antony speaking over the body of Caesar, is depicted in the frontispiece to Rowe’s edition. Line 121. he.

Coriolanus. In Rowe’s 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s

play, Coriolanus is depicted with his sword in his hand as Volumnia pleads with him.

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Line 134. sister arts.

Poetry and painting.

Line 137. Sibyl-leaves.

Virgil’s Sibyl wrote her prophecies on

leaves, which were blown about by the wind (Aeneid, iii, 445–51). Line 140. just to nature. own.

Restored to their natural state.

Acknowledge.

Line 143. Ulysses.

Hero of Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey. He is

a wanderer because the poem charts his lengthy voyage home after the battle of Troy. Line 145. former Hanmer.

The Athenian tyrant Pisistratus (6th

century BC) was traditionally given the credit for collecting and ordering the scattered works of Homer.

A Song from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline First published with the second edition of An Epistle : Addressed to Sir Thomas Hanmer (1744), the version followed here. In Act IV, scene ii of Cymbeline, the shepherds Arviragus and Guiderus lament the apparent death of ‘Fidele’, the disguised Imogen. The well-known dirge ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’ is sung over Fidele’s body. Collins’s imitation derives from Shakespeare’s original, and is one of the earliest examples of eighteenth-century versions of Shakespearean lyrics. Bibliography Earl R. Wasserman, Elizabethan Poetry in the Eighteenth Century (Urbana : 1947)

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Line 18. cell.

Used by Milton to mean a small place of residence.

Line 23. That is, loved until life could no longer exercise its spell.

Song. The Sentiments Borrowed from Shakespeare First printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1788. It has been claimed that the verses are actually by Henry Headley, who sent them to the Gentleman’s Magazine, stating that they were by Collins. But most editors accept their authenticity. Collins’s probable source was Ophelia’s madscene in Act IV of Hamlet.

Written on a Paper, which Contained a Piece of Bride Cake given to the Author by a Lady First printed in the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1765. The poem refers to the custom of placing a piece of wedding cake under one’s pillow in order to induce a dream of one’s lover. Line 9. Cyprian queen.

Venus, the goddess of love. See note to

l.14, below. Hymen.

God of marriage.

Line 14. Paphian.

In one version of the myth, Venus emerged

from the sea onto the shore at Paphos in Cyprus. Another version has her landing at the island of Cythera.

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ODES ON SEVERAL DESCRIPTIVE AND ALLEGORIC SUBJECTS Collins’s most important volume is his Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects. This was published in December 1746, although 1747 appears on the title-page. The volume contains, in order : ‘Ode to Pity’, ‘Ode to Fear’, ‘Ode to Simplicity’, ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’, ‘Ode, Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746’, ‘Ode to Mercy’, ‘Ode to Liberty’, Ode, to a Lady on the Death of Colonel Ross in the Action of Fontenoy’, ‘Ode to Evening’, ‘Ode to Peace’, ‘The Manners. An Ode’, ‘The Passions. An Ode for Music’. Collins originally intended to publish his odes together with those of Joseph Warton, his former fellow-student at Winchester and Oxford. A letter from Warton to his brother Thomas tells of how the two men met at Guildford races (which took place each Whitsun), where they showed each other examples of their work and agreed to join forces for publication. In fact, the publisher Robert Dodsley, to whom they sent their poems, accepted Warton’s but not Collins’s. Dodsley published Warton’s Odes on Various Subjects on December 4, 1746. Collins’s volume was published on December 20 by Andrew Millar. Unless otherwise stated in the introduction to individual poems, the text followed here is that of the 1746/7 volume. Collins’s odes stand at an important moment in the history of English poetry. Joseph Warton prefaced his volume with the following Advertisement, which provides the best introduction to both poets’ work : The public has been so much accustomed of late to didactic poetry alone, and essays on moral subjects, that any work where the imagination is much indulged, will perhaps not be relished or regarded. The author therefore of these pieces is in some pain lest certain austere critics should think them too fanciful and descriptive. But as he is convinced that the fashion of moralizing in verse has been carried too far, and as he

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looks upon invention and imagination to be the chief faculties of a poet, so he will be happy if the following odes may be looked upon as an attempt to bring back poetry into its right channel. The main target of Warton’s attack is Alexander Pope, the outstanding poet of the first half of the eighteenth century. Among his works are the Essay on Criticism (1711) and Essay on Man (1733–4), and many of his works could be broadly described as ‘essays on moral subjects’. Warton’s belief that such poetry, for all its merits, did not constitute the highest form of the art was confirmed in his Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope. His dedication to the first volume (1756) states that ‘a clear head and acute understanding are not sufficient, alone, to make a poet; that the most solid observations on human life, expressed with the utmost elegance and brevity, are morality, and not poetry’. Warton asserts that only ‘a creative and glowing imagination’ can stamp a writer with the name of poet, an ‘exalted and very uncommon character, which so few possess’. In his conclusion to the second volume of the Essay (1782), Warton sums up Pope’s works as consisting mainly of didactic, moral and satiric verse, which are not the ‘most poetic species of poetry’. Pope’s qualities were ‘good sense and judgment’, rather than ‘fancy and invention’, and he has written ‘nothing in a strain so truly sublime as The Bard of Gray’. Like Wordsworth in his 1800 preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Warton the critic defined the qualities of the poetry he wished to write in contrast to those of the preceding age. The attitudes Warton expressed remained influential on poets of later generations, for example Wordsworth and Coleridge for whom imagination is a watchword, and, still later, Matthew Arnold who describes Dryden and Pope as respectively the founder and high priest of an ‘age of prose and reason’ (The Study of Poetry). That Collins shared these views is clear from the ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’, where Spenser and Milton are invoked in the context of defining the poetic gift as ‘god-

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like’ and rare. Shakespeare, celebrated in Collins’s Epistle to Hanmer and imitated in his ‘Song from Cymbeline’, is the third member of the trinity of great English poets rated by Warton as in a separate and superior category of poetry. The influential essays by A. S. P. Woodhouse focus on this conception of the poetic imagination, seeing Collins’s poems as important examples of a growing belief in poetry as a divinely creative act, which culminates in Wordsworth and Coleridge. This emphasis upon Collins’s ‘Romanticism’ has more recently produced an image of Collins as, like many poets of the Romantic generation, burdened by the desire to be original while being dominated by the major achievements of the past (notably the Greek poets and Warton’s English trinity). The ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’, with its concluding image of the inability of the poet to follow in the footsteps of Milton, is the central poem for such views, articulated in Harold Bloom’s influential The Anxiety of Influence and followed in Paul S. Sherwin’s Precious Bane : Collins and the Miltonic Legacy. However, we should guard against believing the neat historical divisions of literary history beloved of tendentious critics and committed writers. Pope, the author of An Essay on Man, also wrote the lyric ‘Ode for Music on St. Cecilia’s Day’, and explored human passions in Eloisa to Abelard and ‘Verses to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’. As early as 1728, before Pope’s Essay on Man, Edward Young, who would later achieve fame as the author of Night Thoughts, a large-scale example of the vogue for graveyard poetry from which Gray’s Elegy emerged, wrote Ocean : an Ode. In his preface, Young described the ode as the oldest form of poetry, demanding from its adherents a spirit of rapture appropriate to the sublimity of its subject-matter. Joseph Warton’s Dedication of the Essay on Pope is addressed to Edward Young. Lyric poetry, then, did not disappear in the early decades of the eighteenth century, and there is no necessary reason to describe the lyric impulse as specifically ‘Romantic’ or ‘proto-Romantic’. It is nevertheless significant that a number of poets concentrated on odes during the 1740s. In 1745, Mark

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Akenside, the author of The Pleasures of Imagination (1744), produced a volume of odes. The volumes of Warton and Collins thus followed quickly, and immediately came to the notice of Thomas Gray. In a letter to his friend Thomas Wharton (not to be confused with the Wartons) on December 27, 1746, Gray praised Warton’s ‘very poetical choice of expression’ and Collins’s ‘fine fancy’, but saw each as lacking the qualities of the other. Collins’s limitations for Gray were a lack of rhythmic control and a superfluity of language, ‘images with no choice at all’. Gray’s view that Collins combines imaginative power with confusion of expression constitutes an acute summary of one line of critical thinking, countered by the Victorian poet Swinburne whose essay on Collins praised his lyric impulse and clarity of style. It may well be, however, that the relative obscurity of some of Collins’s writing was responsible for Dodsley’s rejection of his work in favour of the clearer if less dynamic writing in Warton’s odes. Swinburne described Collins as a ‘perfect painter of still life or starlit vision’ and praised his ‘incomparable and infallible eye for landscape’, and Collins’s imagery, disorganised or not, is at the core of his style. This was noted by one of the earliest enthusiasts for Collins’s work, the poet John Langhorne in his 1765 edition. Langhorne praised Collins for his luxuriant imagination and felicity of expression, and located the roots of description and allegory in poetry’s association with its sister art of painting. In modern criticism, the pictorial qualities of his personifications have been defined by Jean H. Hagstrum, while Norman Maclean’s extensive essay on lyric poetry in the eighteenth century locates the visualised personification as a major device in the allegorical ode. A further question addressed in modern criticism is that of whether the order of the odes in the 1746 volume follows any particular plan. An essay by S. Musgrove argues that the book is about the nature of the true poet, each ode describing one of the attributes necessary for the attainment of the true stature of the poet. Ricardo Quintana developed this approach by seeing the volume as more concerned

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with kinds of poetry and their different images and effects. Quintana detects two main groups, those poems which explore the resources of poetry and its creative possibilities, and the patriotic odes which define the aspirations of a civilised community. The first four and last two odes are about the nature of poetry, while political and public themes are concentrated in the middle group, with the exception of the ‘Ode to Evening’. We should beware, however, of too strenuous an attempt to impose unity of structure on a volume entitled Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects. ‘Several’ (from the Latin ‘separ’) means separate, distinctive. Thus the title emphasises diversity rather than unity. In his edition, Lonsdale notes that Collins so arranges the volume that no two poems with the same metrical form are juxtaposed. The Odes are expressions of the various possibilities of lyric forms. The volume has on its title-page a motto from the Greek poet Pindar’s ninth Olympian ode, ll.80–83. A translation would run : ‘Would I could find words, as I move onward bearing good gifts in the Muses’s chariot; would that I might be attended by Daring and by all-embracing Power’. The epigraph, as well as drawing attention to the Pindaric influence on individual poems, finely balances ambition and uncertainty, the aspiration to imaginative expression and the fear of proving wanting. Bibliography Items referring to individual odes will be found with the relevant poem. The following are of general relevance to the volume : Paul Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven : 1980) Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts (Chicago : 1958) Deborah Haller, ‘Seeing but Not Believing : The Problem of Vision in Collins’ Odes’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 35 (1993), pp.103–23 Norman Maclean, ‘From Action to Image : Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century’, in Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago : 1952), pp.408–60

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S. Musgrove, ‘The Theme of Collins’s Odes’, Notes and Queries, 185 (1943), pp.214–17 and 253–5 Ricardo Quintana, ‘The Scheme of Collins’s Odes on Several … Subjects’, in Restoration and EighteenthCentury Literature, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago : 1963), pp.371–80 Paul S. Sherwin, Precious Bane : Collins and the Miltonic Legacy (Austin, Texas : 1977) Richard Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Minneapolis : 1981) A. S. P. Woodhouse, ‘The Poetry of Collins Reconsidered’, in From Sensibility to Romanticism, ed. F. W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York : 1965), pp.93–137

Ode to Pity The first two odes in the 1746/7 volume are addressed to pity and fear. According to Aristotle’s Poetics, these are the two emotions aroused and purged by the audience’s experience of tragedy. This process of catharsis (the Greek word for purging or cleansing) has become important in theories of tragedy. Collins at one point considered translating the Poetics. Collins associates pity with the plays of Euripides and the English dramatist Thomas Otway (1652–85). Collins’s own note to l.7 cites Aristotle as calling Euripides ‘the greatest master of the tender passions’. Otway, like Collins educated at Winchester and Oxford, was more celebrated in the eighteenth century than now. His tragedies The Orphan (1680) and Venice Preserved (1682) were praised for their treatment of sentiment and love. In the final three stanzas, Collins imagines the creation of a temple to pity. This motif was earlier employed by Pope in his ‘Temple of Fame’, and influenced the Keats of ‘Ode to Psyche’. Towards the end of his poem, Collins implicitly evokes Milton through a series of allusions to his poem Il Penseroso, which depicts the pleasures which appeal to the pensive or thoughtful. Collins particularly alludes to

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the poem’s last lines : ‘These pleasures Melancholy give, | And I with thee will choose to live.’ Milton’s companion poem, L’Allegro, depicting livelier pleasures, concludes with a similar formula. Bibliography John R. Crider, ‘Structure and Effect in Collins’ Progress Poems’, Studies in Philology, 60 (1963), pp.57–72 Line 2. balmy.

Balm is an ointment used for soothing wounds.

Thus Pity is seen as a healing agent. Line 3. charm.

Soothe by the magical powers of Pity.

frantic.

Making man wild with grief.

Line 5. destined scene.

Paradise, ruined by man’s first distress,

that is his original sin. Line 7. Pella’s bard.

Euripides died at Pella, the ancient capital

of Macedonia. Line 12. dewy.

Moist with tears.

Line 14. Ilissus.

A river flowing near Athens, where the plays of

Euripides were performed. Line 16. Arun.

‘The river Arun runs by the village in Sussex,

where Otway had his birth.’ [Collins] Line 17. native.

Collins was born in Chichester, not far from the

river Arun.

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Line 19. wren.

Sometimes associated in poetry with Pity, as in

Shakespeare, Cymbeline, IV. ii : ‘as small a drop of pity | As a wren’s eye’. myrtles.

Traditionally sacred to the goddess of love.

Line 21. cell.

Small dwelling of a hermit.

Line 23. youth.

Otway’s first play was produced in 1675, when he

was 23. Line 24. turtles.

Turtle-doves, associated with Venus in classical

mythology, and linked with Pity on account of their gentleness. Line 26. relenting.

Making softer, more gentle.

Line 27. pride.

Magnificence.

Line 31–3. Paintings (the labours or toils of a painter : ‘Picture’ means ‘painting’, from Latin ‘pictura’) on the walls of the temple will represent how fortune or destiny overcome human happiness. Line 34. buskined Muse.

Tragedy. Buskins were high shoes worn

by tragic actors. Cf. Milton’s Il Penseroso, l.102. Line 38. dreams of passion.

Dreams of powerful emotion.

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Line 42. shell. The lyre was supposed to have been made with the shell of a tortoise. Cf. ‘The Passions’, l.3.[]

Ode to Fear Collins associates the second of Aristotle’s tragic emotions with Aeschylus and Sophocles. In particular, he cites Sophocles’ Electra in the strophe, and refers in the epode to Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Oedipus Tyrannus. The concluding lines of the poem cite Shakespeare as the English dramatist associated with tragic fear, describing him in religious terms as a prophet. As in ‘Ode to Pity’, Collins imitates the last lines of Milton’s Il Penseroso. ‘Ode to Fear’ is structured in three sections which correspond to those of the Pindaric Ode. Pindar (c.522–442 BC) wrote many kinds of lyric poems, the only complete extant set being the ‘Epinica’, four groups of odes written to celebrate victories at public games. Following the publication of Abraham Cowley’s Pindarique Odes in 1656, Pindar became known as a poet of enthusiasm, passion and lyric power, the prime example of the genius unconstrained by the rules of more decorative poetry as typified by the Latin lyricist Horace. The Pindaric Ode is therefore formally appropriate for a poem celebrating the furious passions of fear. William Congreve, in the preface to his Pindarique Ode to the Queen (1706), first demonstrated that Pindar had written according to clear and coherent principles. The usual form of a Pindaric Ode consisted of a strophe, antistrophe and epode. The metrical form of the strophe (which could vary from poem to poem) was repeated exactly in the antistrophe. When Greek choral odes were sung, the chorus moved in one direction during the strophe (meaning ‘turn’), turning and proceeding in the opposite direction for the antistrophe. The concluding epode was in a different metre. Collins, Gilbert West in his translation of Pindar (1749) and Thomas Gray in his ‘The Progress of Poesy’

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and ‘The Bard’ (1757) are the major eighteenth-century examples of the form. Collins, however, varies the strict pattern of the Pindaric Ode by moving the epode to a central position, between the strophe and antistrophe. The central epode (which should, strictly speaking, be called a ‘mesode’) thereby creates, with its restrained, stanzaic form, a moment of relative calm between the more dramatic strophe and antistrophe. Whereas the Greek form moves to a final resolution, Collins allows only a temporary relief from the strong passions of his opening and closing movements. A further peculiarity of the form of the ‘Ode to Fear’ is that the antistrophe does not precisely repeat the pattern of the strophe. In the strophe line 9 is a single, unrhymed line, while the antistrophe has a regular couplet at this point. Thus the antistrophe has 26 lines to the strophe’s 25. It has been suggested that a line was omitted from the strophe, but there is no evidence to support this conjecture. Bibliography John R. Crider, ‘Structure and Effect in Collins’ Progress Poems’, Studies in Philology, 60 (1963), pp.57–72 Lines 1–4. Fear is the personification of the emotion of being afraid. She is depicted here as having seen what to human beings is the shadowy world of the unknown. The power of imagination (‘Fancy’) has revealed to her the full horror of a scene which to us is but dimly revealed. Line 5. frantic.

Driven wild by frenzy.

Line 7. haggard.

Wild, untamed, from the name given to a hawk

which has been captured after having assumed adult plumage. Gray uses the word in ‘The Bard’, l.18.

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Line 9. monsters.

Fear is accompanied by agents which cause

fear. Line 22. Collins notes that he is citing the chorus in Sophocles’ Electra, ll.1385–8 : ‘Breathing out blood and vengeance, lo! Stalks Ares, sure though slow. Even now the hounds are on the trail; within, the sinners at their coming quail.’ Line 26. partial.

Showing favouritism : the earliest Muse favoured

tragedy (in Greek drama). Line 28. awful.

Awe-inspiring, solemnly impressive.

Line 30. the bard.

Aeschylus (c.525–456 BC), considered to be the

initiator of Greek tragedy. Line 31. Marathon.

Aeschylus fought at the Battle of Marathon

(490 BC). The battle was between the Persians and the Athenians. Line 35. Hybla.

City in Sicily, famous for its honey. Sophocles

(496–406 BC) was called the ‘Attic bee’ on account of the sweetness of his verse. Only seven tragedies by Sophocles are extant, but up to 126 have been attributed to him. As a follower of Aeschylus, he is ‘later’ (l.34). Line 36. dreary.

Sad, doleful.

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Line 37. baleful grove.

Grove dedicated to the Furies or

Eumenides, at the entrance to which Sophocles’ Oedipus Colonus is set. The Furies in classical mythology were avenging spirits. Line 38. incestuous queen.

Jocasta, the mother of Oedipus, whose

marriage to her son (‘her son and husband’, l.39) is tragically revealed in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus. Line 39. Collins notes lines from Oedipus at Colonus (ll.1622–5) : ‘Their mourning had an end, and the sound was heard no more, there was a silence; suddenly the voice cried aloud to him, so that the hair of all stood up on their heads with fear.’ The voice is actually that of a god, rather than of Jocasta. Line 41. Thebes.

Oedipus was king of Thebes.

Line 48. shroud.

Take shelter, hide.

Line 55. awakening.

Awakening a response in their listeners.

Line 56. my blasted view.

My eyes struck dim with horror.

Line 59. thrice-hallowed eve.

The reference is not clear, but is

usually assumed to be to Hallowe’en, October 31, the night when ghosts and witches were traditionally active. Line 63. flood.

River.

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Line 70. cypress.

Tree of dark foliage traditionally regarded as

symbolic of mourning : hence an appropriate reward (‘meed’) for the tragic poet.

Ode to Simplicity The ‘Ode to Simplicity’ is linked to the preceding poems by its concern with the idea as a literary quality, and by its reference to Sophocles’ Electra (l.18). The ‘Fragment : To Simplicity’, which is included in a group of unfinished poems in this edition, is presumably an earlier draft of this poem. Simplicity means plainness, naturalness, freedom from artifice. In literary contexts, the quality is associated with clarity, elegance and unity. Collins depicts Simplicity as the pupil of Nature in his first stanza, and as the sister of Truth in his fifth stanza. Bibliography John R. Crider, ‘Structure and Effect in Collins’ Progress Poems’, Studies in Philology, 60 (1963), pp.57–72 Raymond D. Havens, ‘Simplicity, A Changing Concept’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 14 (1953), pp.3–32 Line 3. numbers.

Verses.

Line 5. Fancy.

Imagination seen as the child of Simplicity or

Pleasure. Line 9. gauds.

Ornaments.

pageant weeds.

Garments fit for show.

Line 10. decent.

Modest, delicate, seemly.

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Line 11. Attic.

Greek, thus classical and pure.

Line 14. Hybla.

City in Sicily, famous for its honey. See note [] to

‘Ode to Fear’, l.35. Line 16. her.

Collins’s note specifies her as the nightingale, ‘for

which Sophocles seems to have entertained a peculiar fondness’. Lines 668–93 of Oedipus at Colonus describe the haunt of the nightingale. Line 18. Electra’s poet.

Sophocles, author of Electra.

Line 19. Cephisus.

The name of two rivers in Greece. One runs

near Athens, and is mentioned in Sophocles’ lines on the nightingale (see note to l.16). The other was the site of the battle of Chaeonea (338 BC), where Philip of Macedon ended the independence of Athens. Line 22. enamelled.

With varied colours.

Line 26. To.

Into.

Line 27. native.

Natural.

Line 32. Virtue.

Courage, valour becoming a man (from Latin

‘vir’, meaning ‘man’). Line 34. stayed.

Ceased.

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Line 35. one distinguished throne.

That of the emperor

Augustus, patron of Horace and Virgil. With Augustus, the Roman republic gave way to the rule of emperors, and is thus seen as relinquishing its purity. Line 38. passions.

Emotions. In the later, post-classical world,

poetry is seen as obsessed with but one emotion, that of love. Line 39. her.

Rome, now referring to Italian medieval and

modern poetry. Line 43. genius.

Natural ability. The connotation of exceptional

and powerful ability developed in the mid-eighteenth century : OED cites 1749 as the first instance. Collins may here imply an element of this meaning : cf. ‘some divine excess’ (l.44). Line 48. meeting soul.

That is, the soul that can match simplicity.

Line 52. reed.

That is, a reed made into a musical pipe. Thus,

pastoral poetry.

Ode on the Poetical Character Although the sections are not named, the poem follows the pattern of ‘Ode to Fear’, with the form of the first section repeated in the third, and a middle section in contrasting form. ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ is commonly regarded as the central poem of the volume because of its direct concern with the divine origin of poetry itself and its pessimistic conclusion about the ability of the present age

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to aspire to the commanding heights of poetic inspiration and achievement. It is also his most difficult poem, while being often seen as his most powerful. The first section describes an event in the fourth book of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, a competition at a solemn feast and tournament for the magic girdle or cestus of Venus. ‘That girdle gave the virtue of chaste love, | And wifehood true, to all that did it bear; | But whosoever contrary doth prove, | Might not the same about her middle wear, | But it would loose, or else asunder tear’ (IV. v. 3, 1–5). The false Florimel wins the competition, but is unable to fasten the girdle. It is eventually restored to its rightful owner, the true Florimel, who is the type of female virtue and chastity. To this emblem of rare purity Collins compares the gift of poetic imagination, a godlike gift given to few. In the second section Collins elaborates a myth of the poetic act of imaginative creation as analogous to God’s creation of the world. God is the supreme poet; poetry is supremely godlike. Imagination (the ‘Fancy’ of l.17 and the ‘Enthusiast’ of l.29) is placed by God on his sapphire throne, and she creates the sun and the earth (ll.39–40). The divine connection between imagination and creation is sustained by the etymological meaning of ‘enthusiasm’, being possessed by a god (Greek en + theos); and by Collins’s allusion to Ezekiel I, 26 (‘And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone’). The second section ends by asking whether a poet can now be found who can aspire to the exalted nature of poetic creation. The third section presents a negative answer. Collins begins by describing a Garden of Eden like that in Milton’s Paradise Lost. He specifically describes it in terms reminiscent of Milton’s account of Satan’s approach to Eden in book four, thereby implying that his own approach to Eden is that of a fallen human being attempting to regain a lost innocence. Thus his steps fail him, and the bowers of Eden are closed from the view of mortals. The poem is ultimately about failure, the impossibility of

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achieving the divine expression of the purest poetry. The very difficulty of Collins’s writing may thus be suggestive. The poem creates not only the excitement of the imaginative act, but also the struggle involved in any attempt of mere mortals to fashion a creation of such high value. Bibliography Earl R. Wasserman, ‘Collins’ ‘Ode on the Poetical Character’ ’, English Literary History, 34 (1967), pp.92–115 Line 1. regard.

Attention.

Line 3. school.

Spenser’s followers, such as Giles and Phineas

Fletcher and Michael Drayton. Line 4. Elfin Queen.

The phrase is Spenser’s : Faerie Queene, II.

I. 1, 6. Line 5. fair.

Florimel, in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. See

headnote.[] Line 9. applied.

Brought into contact.

Line 12. band.

The girdle.

Line 16. zone.

The girdle. See headnote.[]

Line 17. Fancy.

Imagination, to whom Collins attributes the

highest creative power. The imagination creates artistic worlds as God created the world itself.

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Line 19. cest.

Girdle. See headnote.[]

Line 22. gaze.

Gaze on.

Line 24. creating day.

In the creation myth narrated in Genesis,

God creates the sky on the second day, the earth on the third, and the sun and moon on the fourth (Genesis I, 6–19). Line 26. tented.

Shaped like a tent. OED gives this as the first

citation of the word in this sense. laughing.

Appearing pleasant.

Line 27. dressed.

Adorned.

Line 29. Enthusiast.

The word derives from the Greek, meaning

‘possessed by a god’. Line 34. wires.

Metallic strings of a musical instrument. Music,

representing harmony, marks the final day of creation in Milton’s account in Paradise Lost, book 7, l.597. Line 39. youth of morn.

Identified by some critics as the poet-

figure, the offspring of the union of God and Fancy. But more likely to signify the sun, as identified by Collins’s first commentator, Langhorne, and recently by Lonsdale and by Wendorf and Ryskamp. Collins is describing God’s creation of the universe, whose centre is the sun.

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Line 40. subject life.

In the biblical account of creation, animal

and human life is created on the fifth and sixth days (Genesis I, 20–31). Line 41. Passions.

Emotions : in this moment of divine creation,

the destructive emotions are kept away. Line 43. Wonder.

Admiration, awe.

Line 45. vest.

Vestment, garment : truth is clothed in light.

Line 46. tarsel.

Tercel, the male falcon. Like Truth, the falcon’s

eyes are far-seeing. Line 47. shadowy tribes.

That is, the creations of the poetic

mind. Line 48. braided.

Intertwining.

Line 53. with rapture blind.

That is, blinded by poetic rapture.

Line 56. rude.

Wild, rugged.

Line 57. jealous steep.

The sides of the cliff are carefully guarded

to keep out trespassers. Line 60. embrown.

Make brown, darken.

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Line 61. ambitious.

High, towering.

Line 62. his. That is, Milton’s. See headnote.[] Line 63. oak.

In Milton’s Il Penseroso, l.60, the evening scene

contains ‘the accustomed oak’. Line 67. trump.

Trumpet.

Line 69. Waller.

Edmund Waller (1606–87), author of love poems

to Sacharissa. The myrtle was sacred to Venus, goddess of love.

Ode, Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746 The first of the odes on national subjects, its title indicates that it is a response to the Battle of Falkirk (January 17, 1746), at which the English army was defeated by the forces of the Young Pretender. The rebels’ success did not last long, ending at the Battle of Culloden on April 16, 1746. When the poem was reprinted in the second edition of Dodsley’s Collection (1748), it was described as having been written in the same year as ‘Ode, to a Lady’ (1745). If this were taken as the authentic date, it would locate the poem’s reference as to defeat by the French rather than by the Young Pretender, but the revised title in 1748 is as likely to have been Dodsley’s as Collins’s. Although Patricia M. Spacks has argued that the poem’s depiction of the value of human sacrifice is ironic, most critics have seen the lines as expressing a mood of delicate lament. The poem was certainly taken in its time as a direct expression of national sentiment. For example, the last four lines were set to music in the revised version (1753) of

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Thomas Arne’s opera Alfred, which celebrates a hero from Britain’s Saxon past for contemporary patriotic purposes. The opera culminates in the famous ode, ‘Rule, Britannia’. Howard D. Weinbrot sets the poem in the context of Collins’s advocacy of peace and mercy after the events of 1745, the Jacobite Rebellion and the defeat at Fontenoy. Bibliography Patricia M. Spacks, ‘Eighteenth-Century Poetry : The Teacher’s Dilemma’, College English, 23 (1962), pp.642–5 Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘William Collins and the MidCentury Ode : Poetry, Patriotism, and the Influence of Context’, in Context, Influence, and Mid-EighteenthCentury Poetry (Los Angeles : 1990), pp.3–39 Line 4. deck.

Adorn.

Ode to Mercy John Langhorne suggested that the ‘Ode to Mercy’ was written, like the previous ode, on the occasion of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745–6. Where ‘How sleep the brave’ recognises ‘those heroes who fell in the defence of their country’, the present poem is designed ‘to excite sentiments of compassion in favour of those unhappy and deluded wretches who became a sacrifice to public justice’. After the Battle of Culloden, the Earl of Kilmarnock, the Earl of Cromartie and Lord Balmerino, who had taken part in the rebellion, were tried for high treason and sentenced to death on August 1, 1746. All three, who had pleaded guilty, sought the king’s mercy. There was great public interest in the trial, and debate about whether the noblemen should be pardoned. In the event, George II pardoned Cromartie, but Kilmarnock and Balmerino were executed on August 18. Lines 14–22 of the poem are usually taken as referring specifically to the invasion of England by the

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Young Pretender, although the ‘Fiend of Nature’ may be war in general. As Lonsdale notes, there are various classical accounts of Venus disarming cruelty, and Collins may be drawing on these. Howard D. Weinbrot sets the poem in the context of Collins’s advocacy of peace and mercy after the events of 1745. The form of the poem is an extreme variation on the Pindaric structure, with the epode omitted. The result is two equivalent stanzas, suggestive of balance. Bibliography Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘William Collins and the MidCentury Ode : Poetry, Patriotism, and the Influence of Context’, in Context, Influence, and Mid-EighteenthCentury Poetry (Los Angeles : 1990), pp.3–39 Line 2. awful.

Awesome, inspiring reverence.

Line 5. fatal.

Deadly.

Line 7. deathful.

Full of dead bodies.

Line 10. for him.

That is, for the youth who sinks to the ground.

Line 11. loaded.

That is, full of offerings to Mercy.

Line 12. Genius.

Guardian spirit.

Line 14. provoke.

Incite, enrage.

Line 15. joined his yoke.

Yoked his horses.

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Line 18. blasted.

Wasted, ravaged.

Line 21. salvage.

A consciously archaic form of ‘savage’.

Line 22. own.

Acknowledge : the horses acknowledge the tender

eyes of Mercy. Line 24. bars her iron tower.

That is, justice excludes her harsh

aspect, acknowledging Mercy. Line 26. rule our Queen.

Rule as our Queen.

Ode to Liberty The ‘Ode to Liberty’ follows the form of a progress poem (see the Epistle to Hanmer []). The path of Liberty is traced from ancient Greece through Renaissance Italy to Britain. James Thomson had published his five-book Liberty in 1735, and a similar trajectory is described there. See the essay by William Levine for the implications of the progress pattern in terms of contemporary political thought. In a further variation on the Pindaric structure, Collins adds a ‘second epode’, which explores the legendary basis of British Liberty in the Druids. Bibliography John R. Crider, ‘Structure and Effect in Collins’ Progress Poems’, Studies in Philology, 60 (1963), pp.57–72 William Levine, ‘Collins, Thomson, and the Whig Progress of Liberty’, Studies in English Literature 1500– 1900, 34 (1994), pp.553–77

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Line 1. Spartan fife.

Ancient Sparta, the chief town of the

Peloponnesus in southern Greece, is invoked as representing a spirit of liberty and independence defended by military courage. The fife is a small flute used with drums in military music. Line 3. locks.

The Greek historian Herodotus (VII, 208–9)

describes the Spartan ritual of combing their hair before the battle of Thermopylae. Line 4. hyacinths.

Hair is commonly described in poetry as

‘hyacinthine’, from the dark colour of the hyacinth flower. The usage derives from Homer’s Odyssey, book 6, l.231. Line 5. shedding.

Giving out (an air of fear and virtue).

Lines 7–8. Alcaeus.

Collins in a note cites a fragment of a drinking-

song, though not thought today to be by Alcaeus. Alcaeus was a lyric poet of the seventh century BC. The lines may be translated : ‘In a myrtle branch I will carry my sword, as did Harmodius and Aristogiton. Dearest Harmodius, you are not dead, I think, but they say that you are in the Islands of the Blest. In a myrtle branch I will carry my sword, as did Harmodius and Aristogiton, when at the feast of Athena they killed the tyrant Hipparchus. Your fame, dearest Harmodius and Aristogiton, will live for ever on earth.’ Harmodius and Aristogiton assassinated Hipparchus, brother of Hippias, the tyrannical ruler of Athens, in 514 BC. Harmodius was killed at once, Aristogiton was tortured to death. After the later expulsion from Athens of Hippias, Harmodius and Aristogiton were honoured as patriots and champions of freedom.

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Line 12. prompted.

That is, prompted by Liberty (‘her’).

Line 13. feeling hour.

That is, the time when most affected by

emotion. Line 15. shell.

Lyre. See ‘Ode to Pity’, l.42.[]

Lines 18–25. These lines refer to the sack of Rome by Alaric, king of the Visigoths in AD 410, and by Genseric, king of the Vandals, in AD 455. The fall of Rome, and so of Liberty, is imaged in the toppling of a statue. Line 26. least.

That is, of the fragments of Liberty (l.25).

Line 36. they.

Collins notes that he is referring to the family of

the Medici. Florence, having become a democratic republic in the mid-fourteenth century, came under the dominance of the Medicis from 1434. The Medici family was celebrated for its patronage of arts and learning. Science.

Knowledge (from Latin ‘scire’, to know).

Line 39. Pisa.

Annexed by Florence in 1406, Pisa regained its

independence briefly in 1494. Line 40. Marino.

The tiny republic of San Marino in north Italy,

which fought to preserve its independence from the Malatesta and Borgia families during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. Its independence was threatened in 1739, but restored in 1740.

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Line 43. those.

Venetians, whose power was founded on trade.

The next lines refer to the annual ceremony in which the Doge of Venice threw a gold ring into the Adriatic Sea in a ceremony of symbolic wedding. Line 47. Lydian.

A plaintive mode of Greek music.

Line 49. Liguria.

Genoa, captured by the Austrians in 1746.

Line 51. Helvetia.

Switzerland. Collins refers to the story of

William Tell (the archer of l.53) and the insurrection against the Austrians, whose emblem was an eagle (l.55). Line 56. willowed.

That is, meadows with willows growing in

them. Line 57. those.

The Dutch. Collins supplies a note explaining

a superstition among the people of Holland, that they would lose their liberty if storks became extinct in the country. Line 58. Alva.

The Duke of Alva, Spanish governor of the

Netherlands from 1567 to 1573. He was appointed by Philip II to put down the Dutch revolt initiated by the presentation of a petition in 1566, demanding respect for liberty. Line 59. British queen.

Elizabeth, who refused to accept the

crown of the Dutch provinces in 1575.

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Line 66. Gaul.

France. Collins supplies a note about the legend

that Britain and France were once joined. Line 67–9. Collins refers to the tradition that Britain was once geographically linked to mainland Europe. Line 68. hoary.

White.

Line 72. Orcas.

The Orkney Islands.

wolfish.

Full of wolves.

Line 73. banded West.

The united West, that is the British Isles

at the west of Europe. Line 75. giant sons.

Traditionally the first inhabitants of Britain,

described by early chroniclers such as Geoffrey of Monmouth (c.1100–55). uncouth.

Uncommon, marvellous.

Line 82. Mona.

Usually identified as Anglesey, but a note by

Collins shows that he is taking it to refer to the Isle of Man. Collins’s note reads : ‘There is a tradition in the Isle of Man, that a mermaid becoming enamoured of a young man of extraordinary beauty, took an opportunity of meeting him one day as he walked on the shore, and opened her passion to him, but was received with a coldness, occasioned by his horror and surprise at her appearance. This however was so misconstrued by the sea-lady, that in revenge for his treatment of her, she punished the whole island, by covering it with a mist, so that all who attempted to carry on any commerce with it, either never arrived

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at it, but wandered up and down the sea, or were on a sudden wrecked upon its cliffs.’ Line 85. thee.

That is, Liberty.

Line 89. hoary pile.

Old building.

Line 90. navel.

The centre. Greek ‘omphalos’ and Latin

‘umbilicus’ were both also used to designate the centre in a figurative rather than the literal sense. The former, for example, was applied to the shrine at Delphi as the symbolic centre of Greece. Line 93. painted native.

Referring to ancient Britons painting

themselves with woad. Line 96. rolls.

Scrolls, rolled-up parchment.

Line 97. fiery-tressed.

Red-haired. Collins refers to the Danish

invasions of Britain during the ninth to eleventh centuries. Line 98. Roman.

The invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar took

place in 55–54 BC. Britain was subsequently colonised under the emperor Claudius from AD 43. Line 99. heaven-left age.

An age when heaven had abandoned

Britain.

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Line 103–4. Intertwined (‘braided’) clouds break up the light of the sky, so producing a visual effect of embroidery, of light and cloud interwoven. Line 105. pavilioned.

Tented.

Line 107. islands blest.

In classical mythology, the Islands of the

Blest were the dwelling places of dead heroes. See note to ll.7–8.[] Line 108. Hebe.

Goddess of youth.

Line 111. Druids.

The Druids were traditionally regarded as

sacred bards of the Britons before the Roman conquest. Collins’s lines exemplify a growing eighteenth-century belief in the historical Druids as ‘an idealized and romanticized conception of the priests of the ancient Britons’ (Stuart Piggott, Ancient Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination [London : 1989], p.139). See also Piggott’s The Druids (London : 1975) and A. L. Owen, The Famous Druids (Oxford : 1962). Line 114. numbers.

Metrical feet, verses.

Line 118. Gothic.

Although the word was often used to to mean

barbarous in a derogatory sense, in a political context ‘gothic’ had been associated by Whig writers with democratic forms of government. See Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England (Cambridge, Mass. : 1952). A taste for Gothic architecture was growing in the 1740s, influenced by Batty Langley’s Ancient Architecture Restored (1742) and Gothick Architecture Improved (1747).

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Line 119. Græcia’s graceful orders.

The architectural system

defining the style and decoration of Greek columns, etc. Lines 123–4. The gems found in heavenly soil (‘mould’) would be purer than those found on earth, because the sun (whose power, it was thought, made precious stones) is nearer to heaven than it is to the earth. Line 127. graved with some prophetic rage.

Engraved (on the walls

of the shrine) by natives filled with the ardour (‘rage’) of prophecy. Line 128. Albion.

Greek and Roman name for Britain.

Line 129. forms divine.

The Druids as priest-figures.

Line 130. her.

That is, Liberty’s.

Line 139. the fair.

Liberty.

Line 140. tangles of her hair.

Echoes Milton’s Lycidas, ll.68–9 : ‘To

sport with Amaryllis in the shade, | Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair’.

Ode, to a Lady on the Death of Colonel Ross in the Action of Fontenoy First printed anonymously in The Museum, a periodical published by Robert Dodsley and edited by Mark Akenside, June 7, 1746. The poem is there dated May 1745.

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When included in the 1746/7 volume, two stanzas (seven and eight) were added and stanza four was revised. When published in the second edition of Dodsley’s Collection (1748), these stanzas were removed and stanza four was again changed. At the Battle of Fontenoy (May 11, 1745) during the War of Austrian Succession, the British and Dutch forces under William, Duke of Cumberland, were defeated by the French. Among the British casualties was Charles Ross, a captain (not, as Collins’s title has him, a colonel) in the Scots Guards. The stanzas added in 1746 are a compliment to the Duke of Cumberland, who, having defeated the Jacobite rebels at Culloden, was expected to return to Flanders to avenge the defeat at Fontenoy. Lonsdale (ed., p.455) convincingly proposes that the removal of the new stanzas in 1748 reflects the failure of this mission, Cumberland having been again defeated by the French at Laeffelt in July 1747. The present edition follows the 1746/7 version, with the earlier and later versions of stanza four included in the notes. The lady to whom the poem is addressed was identified by Thomas Warton as Elizabeth Goddard, living at or near the village of Harting, in Sussex (mentioned in the final stanza of the poem). However, nothing definite is known about her. Presumably one of the earliest of Collins’s odes to be written, the poem gives an insight into the development of his approach to lyric poetry. Initially an occasional poem, its ‘fusion of elegiac and epistolary elements’ creates the characteristic form of a Collins ode (Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry, p.90). The two added stanzas provide additional and elaborate allegorical figures, the device which so frequently gives Collins’s odes their visual and dramatic force. Bibliography Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘William Collins and the MidCentury Ode : Poetry, Patriotism, and the Influence

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of Context’, in Context, Influence, and Mid-EighteenthCentury Poetry (Los Angeles : 1990), pp.3–39 Line 1. lost to.

Deprived of.

Line 13. Scheldt.

River near Fontenoy. The land is actually flat

and the Scheldt accordingly not ‘rapid’. Line 19. In The Museum, stanza four reads : Even now, regardful of his doom, Applauding Honour haunts his tomb, With shadowy trophies crowned : Whilst Freedom’s form beside her roves Majestic through the twilight groves, And calls her heroes round. In Dodsley’s Collection, it reads : O’er him, whose doom thy virtues grieve, Aerial forms shall sit at eve And bend the pensive head! And, fallen to save his injured land, Imperial Honour’s awful hand Shall point his lonely bed! Lines 31–2. Only the Black Prince, eldest son of Edward III, actually fought at the battle of Crécy (1346). Line 39. Impatient.

In the sense defined in Samuel Johnson’s

Dictionary as ‘Vehemently agitated by some painful passion’.

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Line 46. William.

The Duke of Cumberland.

Line 54. insulting.

In scornful triumph.

Line 58. Harting.

Village near Midhurst, Sussex.

Ode to Evening After appearing in the 1746/7 volume, a revised version of the ‘Ode to Evening’ was published in the second edition of Dodsley’s Collection (1748). Dodsley was not averse to making editorial changes himself, but there is no evidence to indicate that these were not made by Collins. The present text is that of 1748, with substantial differences in 1746/7 recorded in the notes. Collins’s best-known poem, the ‘Ode to Evening’ brings together seamlessly the major qualities of his pensive, meditative poetry. Evening’s gentle and sacred power leads the poet through an atmospheric landscape to a fixed point from which he can view the close of day and the round of the seasons. Nature is both a process, a force which is animate and moves through time, and a still object of the poet’s detached but sympathetic contemplation. In the suspended motion of evening’s twilight, we see that moment of visual stillness which so clearly influences the Keats of poems such as ‘To Autumn’. Also influential on Keats is the pictorial quality of so many of Collins’s descriptions and personifications. Here, for example, the ‘shadowy car’ (l.28) is seen by Hagstrum as an evening equivalent of Guido Reni’s fresco of Aurora in the Pallavicini Palace in Rome (The Sister Arts, p.278). The verse-form is that of Milton’s unrhymed translation of Horace’s ‘Pyrrha’ ode (book I, 5).

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Bibliography John Barrell, ‘The Public Figure and the Private Eye : William Collins’s “Ode to Evening” ’, in Teaching the Text, ed. Susanne Kappeler and Norman Bryson (London : 1983) John Bishop, ‘The Genial William Collins’, English Language Notes, 31 (1994), pp.33–40 Merle E. Browne, ‘On William Collins’ “Ode to Evening” ’, Essays in Criticism, 11 (1961), pp.136–53 A. D. McKillop, ‘Collins’s “Ode to Evening” – Background and Structure’, Tennessee Studies in Literature, 5 (1960), pp.73–83 Henry Pettit, ‘Collins’ “Ode to Evening” and the Critics’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 4 (1964), pp.361–9 Line 1. oaten stop.

The hole on a shepherd’s pipe made of an

oat-stem, and so pastoral music. Stop signifies the closing of a hole on a wind instrument to change the pitch. Line 2. In 1746/7, the line read : ‘May hope, O pensive Eve, to soothe thine ear’. Line 3. solemn.

Awe-inspiring. In 1746/7, the adjective was

‘brawling’, meaning the sound of water running over pebbles. Line 4. gales.

Gentle breezes, not strong winds.

Line 6. skirts.

A common poeticism for the edge of a cloud.

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Line 7. brede.

Braid. Commonly used by poets to refer to

interwoven colours. Here, the colouring of the clouds over the sea into which the sun sinks (‘his wavy bed’, l.8). Lines 9–12. The shrill sound of the bat and the humming of the beetle are sounds commonly used in poetry to invoke an atmosphere of evening. Line 11. winds.

Blows.

Line 12. sullen.

Dull in tone.

Line 17. numbers.

Poetic sounds.

Line 20. genial.

Usually taken to mean cheering. But see essay by

John Bishop for the possibility that Collins is deriving an adjective from ‘genius’ in the sense of tutelary spirit residing in the landscape. Line 21. folding star.

The evening star, whose arrival tells the

shepherd that it is time to return his sheep to their fold. Line 23. Hours.

In classical mythology, the Horae, attendants of

Venus. Line 24. flowers.

In 1746/7, the noun was ‘buds’.

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Line 28. car.

Chariot. Evening’s chariot is prepared by the Hours,

elves, nymphs and Pensive Pleasures. Collins bases the idea on the chariot which, in classical mythology, brings Aurora, the dawn. Line 29. vot’ress. sheety.

One devoted to the service of a deity. Water spreading like a sheet.

In 1746/7, the stanza ran : Then let me rove some wild and heathy scene, Or find some ruin midst its dreary dells, Whose walls more awful nod By thy religious gleams. Line 30. pile.

Building.

Line 33. But when.

In 1746/7, the words were ‘Or if’.

Line 34. Forbid.

In 1746/7, the verb was ‘Prevent’.

Line 37. brown.

In poetic usage, ‘brown’ signifies ‘dark’.

Line 41. as oft he wont.

As he is often wont to do.

Line 42. breathing.

Fragrant, breathing out fragrance.

Line 47. shrinking train.

Attendants who shrink in fear.

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Line 49. In 1746/7, the line ran : ‘So long regardful of thy quiet Rule’. Line 50. Fancy.

Imagination.

Science.

Knowledge (from Latin ‘scire’, to know).

rose-lipped Health.

In 1746/7, the phrase was ‘smiling

Peace’. Line 52. hymn.

In 1746/7, the verb was ‘love’.

thy favourite name.

That is, thy (evening’s) name will

be their (Fancy, Friendship, Science and Health’s) favourite.

Ode to Peace The poem expresses a desire for peace with honour, and presumably, as Lonsdale argues (ed., p.467), reflects a mood of expectation in response to peace talks held in the summer and autumn of 1746 between the countries engaged in the War of Austrian Succession. The negotiations were abandoned in late autumn. The poem’s opening stanza may be indebted to the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Astraea, the goddess of justice, left earth to take refuge in heaven when the Golden Age gave way to a time of wickedness. War made its appearance during the Iron Age. Line 1. turtles.

Turtle-doves, emblems of peace.

Line 4. vultures.

In Roman sacrifices, vultures were offered to

Mars, god of war.

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Line 5. car.

Chariot.

Line 7. rude.

Rough, violent.

Line 9. sullen.

Sombre, dismal. The youth of Britain will burn

the shrines dedicated to war (as Roman soldiers burnt the arms gathered on a battlefield in sacrifice to Mars). Line 11. partial.

Favourably inclined.

Line 15. beamy. train.

Radiant. Attendants.

The Manners.

An Ode

Traditionally seen as the earliest of Collins’s odes on the grounds that it is his farewell to academic study. Collins left Oxford in 1744. However, as Lonsdale has argued, there is no reason to take the poem so literally or to link it specifically with an event in Collins’s life. Collins is forsaking philosophical study for the world of empirical reality. ‘Manners’ generally meant one’s habits, way of life, in a wider sense than the modern. But Collins is using the term in a still more specific literary sense, the varied temperaments of figures in epic poetry or drama. John Dryden, in his essay ‘The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy’ (1679) wrote : The manners in a poem are understood to be those inclinations, whether natural or acquired, which move and carry us to actions, good, bad, or indifferent, in a play; or which incline the persons to such or such actions.

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Thus the poem announces a decision to learn about human nature by abandoning abstract philosophy in favour of the world of social converse, to ‘read in man the native heart’ (l.26). The Art to which the poet will subsequently be drawn back will be one which reflects the lessons of his observation of humanity. The dramatic world he will inhabit will be one marked by accurate representations of character. So Art, the enchanted world which will allure the poet (ll.33–4), for all its retreat from the world, is not escapism into falsehood : on the contrary, its fictions depict the essential nature of human temperaments. Line 1. ken.

Range of sight : Collins is bidding farewell to those

obscure areas of thought which require sharper eyes than his to perceive. Line 4. required.

Sought for.

Line 7. part.

Possibly meaning ‘to separate’, but more likely ‘to

apportion, to divide up’: that is, ‘no more will I search those regions which divide up the world of soul.’ Line 9. round.

Travel round.

Line 10. impart.

Bestow. That is, ‘if I ever reach these magical

regions of the mind, may some power bestow on me the spear and shield which scare off the bewitching emotions (“wizard Passions”) and destroy folly.’ Line 13. porch.

The portico in Athens where the Greek stoic

philosopher Zeno (c.335–264 BC) taught.

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Line 14. olive.

The olive was sacred to Athena, the patron

goddess of Athens and goddess of wisdom. Line 15. Science.

Knowledge (from Latin ‘scire’, to know).

tissued.

Interwoven with gold or silver. Thus, ‘knowledge

dressed up in showy clothes’. Line 18. Plato.

Greek philosopher (428–348 BC). Thus

ostentatious knowledge joins with doubt in the shadow of the earlier great philosopher, Plato. Line 20. Observance.

Observation, which will not cheat or

deceive (as abstract philosophy does). Line 23. mingling sons.

That is, the diverse human characters

who mingle in the world. Line 25. converse.

Talk, discussion.

Line 27. science sure.

Certain knowledge, as opposed to

speculative knowledge. Line 29. gazing.

Looking into (nature’s truthful mirror).

Lines 33–4. That is, art (the magical school of our imagination) attracts us back from the world, but on the basis of a sounder knowledge (because founded on our observation).

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Line 36. social science.

Knowledge gained by mixing with society.

Line 38. Fancy.

Imagination.

Line 39. she.

That is, Art.

Line 44. Contempt.

Comedy which depicts figures of ridicule.

Line 45. white-robed Maids.

Critics have variously suggested

that these are the virtues, the spiritual characteristics of people, or the Graces (the classical personifications of grace and beauty). Line 46. Satyrs.

In classical mythology, woodland gods, part

human, part animal, the companions of Bacchus, god of wine. Thus they represent revelry. ‘Satyr’ was sometimes confused with ‘satire’ by English writers (although the words are etymologically distinct), so it may be that Collins means satirical comedy. Line 48. wild contending hues.

The parti-coloured clothing of

Harlequin, originally a character in Italian comedy, then in English pantomime. Line 50. sock.

Shoe worn by Greek and Roman comic actors.

Line 51. Humour.

Quality of writing that creates amusement.

Often distinguished from wit (l.54), which is a more intellectual, sharper and less sympathetic form of comedy.

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Line 55. crisped.

Curled.

Line 56. each other’s beams to share.

The repartee of wit, one

sparkling remark provoking an equivalently brilliant reply. Line 59. Miletus.

City in which Aristides, a writer of the second

century BC, is supposed to have written tales of love. Collins takes the city for the writer. Line 61. you.

Presumed to refer to Giovanni Boccacio (1313–75),

author of the stories in the Decameron. He lived in Florence, in Tuscany. Line 63. him.

Collins’s note identifies the reference as Miguel de

Cervantes (1547–1616), the author of Don Quixote. He wrote the first part at Valladolid, in Castile (‘Castilia’, l.66). Spain was conquered by the Moors in the Middle Ages. Line 67. him.

Collins’s note identifies the reference as Alain

René Le Sage (1667–1747), author of Gil Blas. An interpolated story in Gil Blas tells of Blanche, the ‘sad Sicilian maid’ (l.69), who is compelled by her father to marry another man, although she is in love with the King of Sicily. Her husband, mortally wounded by the king, stabs her as she holds him in her arms. Line 68. watchet.

Light blue.

Line 71. boon.

Bounteous.

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Line 74. imprint thy seal.

That is, make your impression, as of a

seal on wax. Line 75. Cynic.

The Greek Cynic school of philosophers despised

wealth and pleasure, advocating retirement from the world. Line 77. Sports.

Diversions, amusements.

The Passions.

An Ode for Music

The juxtaposition of the last two poems of the 1746/7 volume reflects John Dryden’s observation in ‘The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy’ (1679 : see ‘The Manners’ and headnote, above []) : Under this general head of manners, the passions are naturally included as belonging to the characters. I speak not of pity and terror, which are to be moved in the audience by the plot; but of anger, hatred, love, ambition, jealousy, revenge, etc., as they are shown in this or that person of the play. To describe these naturally, and to move them artfully, is one of the greatest commendations which can be given to a poet. Pity and terror are the emotions aroused in the audience of a tragedy, with which Collins began his volume. Now, in his concluding poem, he depicts in highly dramatic, visual forms the passions which move human beings : Fear, Anger, Despair, Hope, Revenge, Pity, Jealousy, Love, Hate, Melancholy, Cheerfulness, Joy. By addressing music as a power capable of stimulating the passions in the context of a poem which uses strongly visual effects, Collins extends the common sister arts of poetry and painting to a trio of mutually reflective and creative expressions of human emotion. Earlier musical

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odes for the festival of St. Cecilia provide a background for Collins’s ode, in particular Dryden’s ‘Alexander’s Feast’ and ‘Song for St. Cecilia’s Day’ and Pope’s ‘Ode for Music on St. Cecilia’s Day’. An altered version of the poem was performed with a musical setting by William Hayes (1705–77), Professor of Music in the University, at Oxford on July 2, 1750. Bibliography Robert M. Myers, ‘Neo-Classical Criticism of the Ode for Music’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 62 (1947), pp.399–421 Brewster Rogerson, ‘The Art of Painting the Passions’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 14 (1953), pp.68–94 Line 3. See headnote.[]

Passions. shell.

The lyre was supposed to have been originally

made with the shell of a tortoise. See ‘Ode to Pity’, l.42.[] Line 4. cell.

Dwelling.

Line 10. fury.

Inspired, possessed rage.

Line 26. sullen.

Dismal, melancholy.

Line 38. waved.

That is, hung down in waves.

Line 43. denouncing.

Announcing.

Line 47. doubling.

Resounding.

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Line 70. Cheerfulness.

The description is based on Diana, the

goddess of chastity (l.75) and hunting, usually depicted with her bow (l.71) and wearing buskins (l.72), that is coverings for the foot and leg reaching up to the calf. Line 74. faun.

In classical mythology, a rural deity, human in

form, but with the horns and tail of a goat. dryad.

In classical mythology, dryads were tree-nymphs

(hence ‘oak-crowned sisters’, l.75). Line 76. Satyrs.

In classical mythology, woodland gods, part

human, part animal, the companions of Bacchus, god of wine. Line 80. ecstatic trial.

Endeavour to express strong emotions.

Line 83. viol.

Medieval stringed instrument, predecessor of the

violin. Line 86. Tempe.

Beautiful valley in Thessaly, between Mount

Olympus and Mount Ossa, celebrated by Greek and Latin poets. Line 90. framed. round.

Formed. A circular dance.

Line 91. zone.

Belt.

Line 92. he.

That is, Love.

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Line 95. sphere-descended.

Alluding to the idea that the harmony

of the universe is the music created by the spheres. Line 101. mimic.

With the power of imitating.

Line 104. Devote.

Devoted.

Line 106. Warm.

Ardent.

energic.

Full of vigour.

sublime.

Noble and awe-inspiring.

Line 108. recording Sister.

Clio, the Muse of History.

Line 111. rage.

Inspired frenzy.

Line 112. laggard.

Slow-moving, lagging behind.

Line 114. Cecilia.

St. Cecilia, patron saint of music.

Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr. Thomson Published in June 1749. James Thomson (1700–48) was the author of The Seasons (1730–46), one of the most popular and influential poems of the eighteenth century, and Liberty (1735). The Seasons is a large-scale descriptive and reflective poem, at the centre of which lies the relationship between nature, humanity and the creator. Collins acknowledges Thomson’s achievement by calling him the year’s poet in the first stanza. The reference to the Aeolian harp (see notes below) associates

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Thomson with natural harmony. As J. M. S. Tompkins’s essay argues, the idea of Thomson as a poet-priest of nature, as a celebrator of a benevolent creator and as a devotee of the cause of liberty explains Collins’s use of the word ‘druid’. Antiquarians had depicted druids as idealised early Britons, and Collins himself associated the term with such ideals in his ‘Ode to Liberty’ (ll.89–112). Thomson, a Scot by birth, lived at Richmond, Surrey. Collins had settled there by 1747, and became one of Thomson’s circle. The Advertisement to the elegy locates the scene of the poem as the Thames near Richmond, and the ‘spire’ of l.19 is specified by Collins’s note as being that of Richmond church. Thomson died on August 27, 1748, and was buried in the parish church. E. M. W. Tillyard’s essay notes a double progression in the course of the poem, that of nightfall and that of a boat on the Thames. The boat approaches ‘yonder grave’ (l.1) from a distance, and moves away again in stanza eight as night falls in stanza nine. At the mid-point of the poem, stanza six, Collins directly addresses Thomson’s grave. In addition, as Wendorf points out, there is a circular form, most obvious in the last line’s echo of the first line. The second half of the poem fades away from its central address to Thomson into a distance matching that from which the poet came, but which is now shrouded in darkness. ‘Collins’s journey down the Thames literally carries him past Thomson, and past the natural scene that has become so closely identified with Thomson’s poetic achievement.’ (Wendorf, p.173). With the death of Thomson, the nymphs (the divinities of nature) have departed (l.30), the landscape emptied of its magic and mythology. The poem is addressed to George Lyttelton, later Baron Lyttelton (1709–73), a friend and patron of Thomson, and one of his executors. It is prefaced by two epigraphs from Virgil’s Eclogues, V, 74–5 and 52 : Haec tibi semper erunt, et cum solennia vota Reddemus Nymphis, et cum lustrabimus agros. (These rites shall be thine for ever, both when we pay

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our yearly vows to the Nymphs, and when we purify our fields.) amavit nos quoque Daphnis. (me, too, Daphnis loved.) Bibliography John Bishop, ‘The Genial William Collins’, English Language Notes, 31 (1994), pp.33–40 E. M. W. Tillyard, ‘William Collins’s “Ode on the Death of Thomson” ’, A Review of English Literature (ARIEL), 1 (1960), pp.30–38 J. M. S. Tompkins, ‘In Yonder Grave a Druid Lies’, Review of English Studies, 22 (1946), pp.1–16 Richard Wendorf, William Collins and Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (Minneapolis : 1981) Line 1. See headnote.[]

Druid. Line 6. harp.

The Aeolian harp, a stringed instrument which

produces musical sounds when the wind blows through it. So called from Aeolus, the god of the winds. Thomson refers to it in his poem The Castle of Indolence (1748), I, xl–xli, and wrote an ‘Ode on Aeolus’s Harp’ which was printed in Dodsley’s Collection (1748). Line 18. lawn.

Grass-covered land (not a cultivated lawn in the

modern sense). Line 19. whitening spire.

Collins imagines a spire on the church

glimmering in the light. Line 29. lorn. sullen.

Forlorn. Moving sluggishly, melancholy.

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Line 30. sedge-crowned Sisters.

Naiads, nymphs of the river.

Line 33. fairy.

Magical, enchanted.

Line 35. parted.

Departed.

Line 37. genial.

See essay by John Bishop for the possibility that

Collins is deriving an adjective from ‘genius’ in the sense of tutelary spirit residing in the landscape. Line 39. hinds.

Farm-workers.

Line 41. pointed.

Variously interpreted as meaning ‘pointed

out’; as referring to the pointing of the brickwork of the tomb; as describing the shape of the grave or the monument.

Ode to a Friend on his Return etc. ( An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, Considered as the Subject of Poetry ) This fragmentary but extraordinary ode is presumed to have been written in late 1749 and early 1750. It is addressed to John Home (1722–1808), a Scottish clergyman who later became a successful playwright. While in London, Home was introduced to Collins through Thomas Barrow, who had been a medical student in Edinburgh and fought with Home in the Edinburgh volunteers against the Jacobite rebels in 1746. Collins presented Home with the poem on the latter’s departure for Scotland. However, the poem disappeared until in 1781 Samuel Johnson, in his

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biography of Collins in Lives of the Poets, mentioned that an ode on the superstitions of the Highlands had been seen by Joseph and Thomas Warton when they had visited Collins in Chichester in 1754. Reading Johnson’s account reminded Dr Alexander Carlyle (1722–1805), a Scottish Presbyterian minister and friend of Home, that he had in his possession a manuscript of the ode. He read a draft of the poem at the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1784. The ode was published in the first volume of the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1788. Publication of the draft was widely reported, and it was reprinted in various periodicals. However, a letter, signed ‘Verax’ (Latin for ‘truthful’) appeared in the St. James’s Chronicle (April 12–15, 1788), claiming that the Edinburgh text was a mutilated version and that Collins had produced a final draft of the poem. A further version was then published by J. Bell in London in May 1788, claiming to be based on the final copy seen in 1754 by the Wartons and attributing the discovery to a ‘gentleman who, for the present, chooses not to publish his name’. This text became accepted as the standard text, despite the misgivings of reviewers and the continued anonymity of the gentleman. However, this version is now accepted as being a forgery, and in effect consists of the Edinburgh text with the gaps filled in. In the meantime, the Edinburgh manuscript once again vanished. For a full account of the events surrounding the Edinburgh and Bell versions, see Lonsdale’s edition, pp.492–9. The story comes up to date with the rediscovery of the manuscript by Claire Lamont in 1967, among papers which had descended to Col. A. E. Cameron of Aldourie Castle. Lamont’s article in Review of English Studies provides a full account and a transcript. The MS title is ‘Ode to a Friend on his Return etc.’ The alternative title, ‘Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, Considered as the Subject of Poetry’ was given to it in 1788. The present text is a modernised version of the Aldourie MS. Gaps indicate missing sections. The original punctuation, or lack of it, is retained

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with the aim of maintaining the fragmentary appearance of the text. The poem is a fascinating contribution to the growing interest in the mid-eighteenth century in the language and customs of Scotland. Collins was largely indebted for his information to Martin Martin’s Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1703; second edition 1716). This is the book which stimulated Samuel Johnson’s youthful interest in the remote regions of Scotland. He took a copy of it with him when he finally visited the Highlands and Islands with James Boswell in 1773. Collins gleaned much of the Scottish diction used in the poem from the popular collections and compositions of Allan Ramsay (1686–1758), whose work contributed to the revival of vernacular Scottish poetry. An interest in primitive societies was part of the movement towards the concept of the ‘noble savage’, an idealised vision of a life uncontaminated by the sophistications of advanced civilisation (see stanza ten []). Bibliography John Bishop, ‘The Genial William Collins’, English Language Notes, 31 (1994), pp.33–40 Claire Lamont, ‘William Collins’s ‘Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland’ : a Newly Recovered Manuscript’, Review of English Studies, 19 (1968), pp.137–47 Patricia M. Spacks, The Insistence of Horror : Aspects of the Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Poetry (Cambridge, Mass. : 1962) Line 1. H——.

John Home. See headnote.[]

Naiads.

In classical mythology, water-nymphs.

Line 3. soft.

Kind, tender-hearted.

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Line 4. tragic song.

Home had come to London to try to

persuade David Garrick to stage his tragedy Agis, based on Plutarch’s life of Agis, king of Sparta. Line 5. Thomas Barrow. See headnote.[]

youth. Line 6.

The unfinished line replaces ‘Whom long endeared thou leav’st by Lavant’s side’, which is crossed out in the MS. The Lavant is a river running through Chichester. Line 8. bride.

Mary Downer, whom Barrow married in 1753.

Line 16. pencil.

Paintbrush (from Latin ‘penicillum’).

Line 17. own.

Acknowledge (for its value, its beauty).

genial.

See essay by John Bishop for the possibility that

Collins is deriving an adjective from ‘genius’ in the sense of a tutelary spirit in the landscape. Line 18. Doric quill.

Rustic pipe : as with the ‘Oaten stop’ of the

‘Ode to Evening’ (l.1), the phrase stands for ‘pastoral music’. Line 19. Fancy.

Imagination.

Line 21. birken.

Northern form of ‘birchen’, made of birch.

Line 23. swart.

Swarthy, dark-coloured.

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Line 25. jocund.

Merry, cheerful.

Line 26. herd.

Herdsman, shepherd.

Line 27. elf-shot arrows.

Referring to a Scottish legend that elves

shoot arrows to kill livestock. Line 30. swain.

Countryman.

Line 31. homelier.

Simpler, less sophisticated.

Line 37. Boreal.

Northern.

Line 39. had.

Would have.

Line 40. possessed.

That is, by the stories.

Line 41. Runic.

Meaning old Scottish poetry, rather than old

Scandinavian poetry which it usually signifies. This is the first such usage recorded in OED. Line 42. uncouth. vest.

Strange, unfamiliar.

Vestment, clothing.

Line 43. fantastic.

Strange or grotesque in shape.

Line 44. hind.

Farm-worker.

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Line 48. shiel.

A note in the MS explains : ‘a kind of hut built

every summer for the convenience of milking the cattle’. Line 52. prove.

Test.

Line 54. Skye.

Caves on the island of Skye are described in

Martin Martin’s Description of the Western Islands of Scotland. Line 56. Uist.

Martin Martin refers to the natives’ belief that a

valley on South Uist (in the Outer Hebrides) is haunted by spirits. Line 57. sight.

The phenomenon of ‘second-sight’ is discussed

in Martin Martin who defines it as ‘a singular faculty of seeing an otherwise invisible object’. The topic fascinated Johnson and Boswell on their tour of the Western Islands. Line 58. droop.

Become dispirited.

Line 59. strath.

Scottish word for a mountain valley.

quaggy moss.

Bog or swamp.

Line 65. viewless.

Invisible.

Line 68. heartless.

Dismayed.

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Line 96. excursive.

Wandering (Latin ‘ex’ + ‘currere’, to run

outside). Line 100. sad.

The word ‘mirk’ (meaning dark) is written above

‘sad’ in the MS. monster.

The ‘kaelpie’ of l.137. In fable, a spirit that

haunts lakes and rivers and causes travellers to drown. Line 102. sullen.

Gloomy, dismal.

Line 103. chance.

By chance.

Line 110. whelming.

Overwhelming.

Line 111. drowned.

Flooded.

Line 119. youthly.

Youthful.

Line 120. corse.

Corpse.

Line 123. to-fall.

Close (Scottish word).

Line 126. travelled.

Travailed, wearied.

Line 127. dropping.

Dripping.

Line 135. hapless.

Unfortunate, luckless.

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Line 136. weltering.

Tossed about in water.

Line 137. See l.100 [] and note.[]

Kaelpie. Line 139.

feathery tribes.

A periphrasis (roundabout phrase) for

birds. Line 140. rude.

Rugged, rough.

Line 141. marge.

Margin, so the coast of the island.

Hebrid.

Hebridean.

Line 142. hoar pile.

Ancient building. The discovery of small

bones in a vault at Bael-nin-Killach on Benbecula is described in Martin Martin’s Description of the Western Islands of Scotland. Line 145. culls.

Picks up.

Line 146. thither.

St Ouran’s Church on the island of Iona,

described in Martin Martin as the burial place of kings of Scotland, Ireland and Norway. Line 150. frequent.

Frequently, often.

Line 155. Kilda.

St Kilda, described in Martin Martin’s Description

of the Western Islands of Scotland, and in his earlier A Voyage to St Kilda, the remotest of all the Hebrides (1698) as a place of primitive virtue.

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Line 156. wasting.

Laying waste, destroying.

Line 162. main.

Main sea, open ocean (poetic language).

Line 164. sainted spring.

Holy well.

Line 166. solan.

Solan geese or gannets.

Line 169. tasteful.

Lonsdale proposes that the word combines the

senses of ‘agreeable’ and ‘conducive to appetite’. Line 172. false themes.

The phrase seems more appropriate to

the superstitions described in earlier stanzas than to the preceding stanza’s account of the pure life of the islanders. Line 173. gentle.

Well-born.

Line 177. Wayward Sisters.

The witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

‘Wayward’, a form of ‘weird’, means possessed of supernatural power or connected with fate (from Old English ‘wyrd’, meaning destiny). Lines 180–81. Referring to Macbeth, IV. I, where the witches show Macbeth (‘the Scot’) a vision of the descendants of Banquo, whom he has murdered. Line 182. gleamy pageant.

Procession lit by gleams of light.

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Line 191. Tasso.

Torquato Tasso (1544–95), author of the epic

poem Gerusalemme Liberata (‘Jerusalem Delivered’). Collins refers to Tancred’s adventures in a magic wood, where the trees are inhabited by evil spirits (XIII, 39–49). Line 197. Fairfax.

Edward Fairfax published his translation of

Gerusalemme Liberata in 1600. A new edition was published in October, 1749. Line 198. Prevailing.

Capable of persuading.

Line 201. warm.

Ardent.

Line 202. numerous.

Harmonious.

Lines 206–7. Annan … Tay … Don.

Rivers in Scotland.

Line 212. Jonson.

Ben Jonson visited William Drummond

(1585–1649) of Hawthorden, near Edinburgh, in 1618. Drummond kept records of their conversations, though these were not published in full until the nineteenth century. Line 213. Tiviot.

Teviot : river in Roxburghshire.

Line 214. Yarrow.

River in Selkirkshire. Collins refers to a ballad

by William Hamilton of Bangour (1704–54), ‘The Braes of Yarrow’. A young bride laments her husband, killed by her family on her wedding day.

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Line 216. cordial youth.

The phrase used to refer to Thomas

Barrow in l.5; but apparently signifying Home here. Lothian.

Edinburgh is in Lothian.

Line 217. muir.

Moor.

FRAGMENTS Eleven unfinished drafts of poems were discovered among the Warton papers in Trinity College, Oxford, and firstpublished as Drafts and Fragments of Verse, ed. J. S. Cunningham (Oxford : 1956). Ten are wholly in Collins’s hand; the other partly in his hand. Lonsdale argues (ed. p.523) that they date from 1744 to 1746, that is from the period between Collins’s arrival in London from Oxford and the publication of his Odes. The present edition modernises spelling, but retains the original punctuation (or lack of it), gaps and errors, in order to convey a sense of their fragmentary nature. Titles are added to indicate the subjectmatter. The first six fragments are verse epistles in couplets, similar to Collins’s Epistle to Hanmer. The first is, like the poem to Hanmer, about the history of English drama, taking as its theme the supposed corruption of Restoration drama through the influence of the French theatre. In the second, ll.1–24 are in an unidentified hand and ll.25–40 are by Collins. The subject is the expense of theatrical production and scenery and therefore (as Lonsdale argues, ed. p.527) probably dates from Collins’s early days in London when he had ambitions to write for the stage, rather than from his school-days, as Cunningham proposed. The third is addressed to James Harris (1709–80), and is clearly a response to his Three Treatises. The First Concerning Art. The Second Concerning Music, Painting, and Poetry. The Third Concerning Happiness, which were published in May 1744. The lines celebrate the sister arts. The fourth

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is addressed to one of the Tonson family, probably Jacob (d.1767), great-nephew of Jacob Tonson (c.1656–1736) who set up a publishing firm which produced the works of many major writers, such as Dryden, Addison and Pope. The poem praises the publishers for their preservation of poets’ work, and may have been intended as a bid for patronage. The fifth refers again to the parallel between painting and poetry, and appears to be written to a critic with a taste for correct models of established writing. The sixth is addressed to a friend who is about to leave for a tour of Italy. Fragment seven is written in quatrains of octosyllabic lines. It is an elegy on a female painter, whether real or fictitious. The poem again reflects Collins’s interest in painting. Its final two stanzas resemble Pope’s ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’ (ll.55–61, 82), but the elegaic mood and verse-form perhaps link the poem to Collins’s ‘Song from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline’, which was published with the second edition of the Hanmer epistle in 1744. The next three fragments are connected with the Odes of 1746. The eighth (‘Ye genii who in secret state’) seems to be, in its later stanzas, an early version of the ‘Ode to Evening’. The relationship between the two is discussed by A. D. McKillop, ‘Collins’s Ode to Evening – Background and Structure’, Tennessee Studies in Literature, 5 (1960), pp.73–83. The preceding stanzas of the fragment are on the topic of retreat into the country, associating times of the day with specific painters. The ninth fragment is entitled ‘To Simplicity’ in the MS, and is clearly an early version of the ode of that title in the 1746/7 volume. The tenth (‘No longer ask me, gentle friends’) is in the mode of a pastoral love elegy (popularised by the publication of James Hammond’s Love Elegies in December 1742), about the poet’s love for a ‘Delia’ who is separated from him socially and geographically, and concluding with praise of a female poet. Links with the ‘Ode, to a Lady’ have been proposed because of the mention in both poems of Sussex placenames. This has led to speculation that Delia is Elizabeth

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Goddard. Lonsdale (ed., p.552) has suggested that the female poet may be Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806), who was gaining a literary reputation in the 1740s. The last fragment is the opening of an ode for music on the subject of Greek music. It has been linked with Collins’s letter of November 8, 1750 to William Hayes, Professor of Music at Oxford who wrote the music for the performance of ‘The Passions’ at Oxford in June 1750. In the letter, Collins mentions an ode on the subject of ‘the music of the Grecian theatre’, although Collins there talks about it as if it were complete.

Fragment on Restoration Drama Line 2. Davenant.

Sir William Davenant (1606–68), along with

Thomas Killigrew, obtained patents from Charles II in 1660 for the establishment of play companies after the closure of the theatres during the Commonwealth. Line 6. Holinshed or Stow.

Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles

(1577) and John Stow’s Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles (1565) and Chronicles of England (1580; later called Annales of England) were important Elizabethan historical works. Line 8. lights.

Knowledge.

Charles.

Charles II.

Line 16. Monimia.

Heroine of Thomas Otway’s The Orphan (see

‘Ode to Pity’, l.20 [] and headnote []). Line 18. Augustus.

Standing for Charles II, to set against the

Versailles of Louis XIV (the ‘his’ of l.19).

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Line 22. Richelieu.

Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) was a patron

of drama, under whose direction such playwrights as Corneille and Molière wrote. His own play Mirame was performed in a hall of the Palais-Royal. Line 23. Burgundy.

The Hôtel de Bourgogne, former residence of

the Dukes of Burgundy in Paris, was used as a theatre from 1548 to the end of the eighteenth century. Line 32. pantomime.

Referring to the use of spectacular

stage effects in Restoration opera, which Davenant introduced. Line 37. witlings.

Those who fancy themselves to be wits, but

succeed only in feeble witticisms. Line 39. Betterton.

Thomas Betterton (1635–1710), the most

famous of Restoration actors.

Fragment by Two Authors Line 34. Addison or Philips.

Joseph Addison (1672–1719), poet,

essayist and author of Cato (1713), the most successful of eighteenth-century neo-classical tragedies. Ambrose Philips (c.1675–1749), author of The Distressed Mother (1712), an adaptation of Racine’s tragedy Andromaque.

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Fragment Addressed to James Harris Line 6. This line is blank in the MS. Line 7. Muse.

The second of James Harris’s Three Treatises (see

introduction []) compares the powers of poetry, music and painting (‘Picture’), defining the particular qualities of each. Poetry is seen as the supreme art, but the combination of poetry and music has the greatest effect. Line 12. Ashley.

Harris was the nephew of Anthony Ashley

Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713). Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) was a highly influential series of philosophical and aesthetic treatises. Line 13. Plato. Both Harris and Shaftesbury used the form of the Platonic dialogue. Line 14. Science.

Knowledge (from Latin ‘scire’, to know).

careless.

Uncaring.

Line 15. Wilton.

The dialogue in Harris’s first treatise is initiated

by a visit to Wilton House, seat of the Earl of Pembroke, near Salisbury in Wiltshire. pictured.

With walls hung with paintings.

Line 29. Pindar.

Greek lyric poet (c.522–442 BC).

Line 31. Adria.

The Adriatic Sea, and so probably signifying

Venice.

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Fragment Addressed to Jacob Tonson Line 2. Jacob.

Jacob Tonson the Elder, founder of the publishing

firm (see introduction []). Pope calls him ‘genial Jacob’ in The Dunciad, I, 57. The academic room is the room in Tonson’s house at Barn Elms in Surrey (cf. l.27) where the Kit-Cat Club met from 1703 to 1717. Tonson was secretary of the club, a group of Whig politicians and writers, who originally met at a London tavern run by Christopher Cat (hence the name). Portraits of club members by Sir Godfrey Kneller hung in the room. Line 11. Waller.

Edmund Waller (1606–87), a poet commonly

credited in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the refining of English poetry. Some of his poems are addressed to ‘Sacharissa’ (l.18), Lady Dorothea Sidney. Line 14. nicer. More refined. Line 20. Cowley.

Abraham Cowley (1618–67), poet and essayist.

Both he and Waller were published by Tonson. Line 22. Charles.

Charles II.

Line 29. price. Reward.

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Fragment Addressed to a Critic Line 1. Angelo.

Michelangelo (1475–1564).

Line 4. This line is blank in the MS. Line 5. Horace’s Ars Poetica is the source of the tag ‘ut

Horace.

pictura poesis’ (‘as with a picture, so with poetry’), frequently cited out of context to justify the concept of the sister arts, the interrelationship between poetry and painting (e.g. in the first line of du Fresnoy’s treatise). Fresnoy.

Charles Alphonse du Fresnoy (1611–65),

French painter and critic, author of the Latin De Arte Graphica (1668). Dryden translated the poem as The Art of Painting (1695), and prefaced it with an essay on the parallel between painting and poetry. Line 7. Vinci.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) wrote Trattato

della Pittura, first published in Paris in 1651 and translated into English as A Treatise on Painting in 1721. Line 8. pencils.

Paintbrushes (from Latin ‘penicillum’).

Line 12. Addison or Boyle.

Joseph Addison (see ‘Fragment by

Two Authors’, note to l.34 []) and Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington (1695–1753) were acknowledged judges of artistic taste. Addison wrote a celebrated series of his Spectator papers on the pleasures of imagination. Burlington, to whom Pope addressed an epistle on taste, was highly influential in popularising the Palladian school of architecture.

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Line 14. de Piles.

Roger de Piles (1635–1709), author of a

commentary on Du Fresnoy’s De Arte Graphica (1668) and, among many other works, a Dissertation sur la balance des peintres (1708), translated into English in The Principles of Painting … To which is Added, The Balance of Painters (1743). Cf. Collins’s word ‘weigh’. Line 16. Thornhill.

Sir James Thornhill (1675–1734), painter,

who, among other commissions, worked on the cupola of St Paul’s Cathedral and at Greenwich Hospital. Line 18. Rowe.

Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718), poet laureate and

author of eight plays, presumably ‘unfruitful’ because of his early death. Line 20. mannerist.

The term was first used, according to OED,

in Dryden’s translation of Du Fresnoy to describe painters who ‘repeat five or six times over in the same picture the same hairs of a head’. Line 21. Anna.

Queen Anne, who reigned 1702–14.

Line 29. Dodsley.

Robert Dodsley (1703–64), the publisher.

Line 31. Hayman.

Francis Hayman (1708–76), painter, provided

the illustrations for Hanmer’s edition of Shakespeare.

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Line 34. Waller.

See ‘Fragment Addressed to Jacob Tonson’, note

to l.11.[] Collins quotes from Waller’s ‘To My Young Lady Lucy Sidney’, ll.1–6 : ‘Why came I so untimely forth | Into a world, which wanting thee, | Could entertain us with no worth, | Or shadow of felicity? | That time should me so far remove | From that which I was born to love!’ Line 38. Carlo.

Carlo Maratta or Maratti (1625–1713), Italian

painter. Line 41. candid.

Without malice.

Line 45. Blackhall.

J. S. Cunningham proposed that this was an

error for Thomas Blackwell, author of Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735).

Fragment Addressed to a Friend about to Visit Italy Line 3. graved.

Engraved.

Line 14. Fairfax … Tasso.

See ‘Ode to a Friend on His Return

etc’, notes to ll.191, 197.[] Line 17. Cinthio.

Giraldi Cinthio, whose Hecatommithi (1566)

provided Shakespeare with the plot for Othello. Line 18. Marino.

Giovanni Battista Marino (1569–1625), Italian

poet, referred to in Milton’s Latin poem ‘Mansus’.

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Fragment on a Female Painter Line 13. Lavinia.

Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614), Italian portrait

painter. Line 16. The MS has a space for another stanza after this line. The present line-numbering ignores this. Line 20. Tintoretta.

Marietta, painter and musician, the daughter

of Tintoretto. Line 27. timeless.

Untimely.

Line 39. Adria.

The Adriatic Sea.

Line 42. fairy.

Magical.

pencil.

Paintbrush (from Latin ‘penicillum’).

Fragment :

‘Ye genii who in secret state’

Line 1. genii.

Tutelary spirits. See John Bishop, ‘The Genial

William Collins’, English Language Notes, 31 (1994), pp.33–40. Line 2. wheaten field.

Field of wheat.

Line 11. gradual.

Gradually ripening.

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Line 24. roughen.

Become wild.

Line 27. Lorrain.

Claude Lorrain (1600–82), French landscape

painter celebrated for his handling of light. See Elizabeth W. Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England (New York : 1925). Line 28. orient.

Bright.

Line 31. plats.

Plots, small patches of ground.

Line 32. Rysdael.

Jacob van Ruisdael (c.1629–82), Dutch

landscape painter. Line 36. Rosa.

Salvator Rosa (1615–73), Italian painter, celebrated

for his wild landscapes and frequently contrasted with the gentler Lorrain. See Elizabeth W. Manwaring, as in l.27. Line 39. wizard.

Magic.

Line 40. pencil.

Paintbrush (from Latin ‘penicillum’).

Line 56. This line is blank in the MS.

157

Fragment :

To Simplicity

Line 1. Fancy.

Imagination.

Line 16. Hybla.

City in Sicily, famous for its honey. See ‘Ode to

Fear’, note to l.35.[] Line 28. Graces.

In Greek mythology, personifications of grace

and beauty. Line 35. Attic.

Greek, so classical and pure. (See ‘Ode to

Simplicity’, l.11.[].)

Fragment :

‘No longer ask me gentle friends’

Line 20. youngling.

Youthful.

Line 25. Resnel.

The phrase ‘once a bard’ in l.27 replaces the

deleted ‘Otway first’. Thomas Otway (see ‘Ode to Pity’, headnote []) was born at Trotton in Sussex, but no river called Resnel has been identified. Line 33. one.

Lonsdale suggests that this might be a reference to

James Hammond, the author of Love Elegies, who died in 1742 at the age of thirty-two. It was widely believed that he died from unrequited love for Catherine Dashwood. Line 43. Lavant.

River running through Chichester, Sussex.

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Line 44. Medway.

River which rises in Sussex, but flows mainly

through Kent. The implication is that Delia lives at a distance from the poet.

Fragment on Greek Music Line 1. Ptolemy.

Presumably Ptolemy I (367–283 BC), founder of

the dynasty of kings of Egypt. He was a patron of letters and founded the library and museum in Alexandria. A note in the MS to l.12 identifies the ‘fabric’ as the museum. However, if ‘successive’ (l.2) means ‘in succession’, Collins must be referring to Ptolemy I’s son and heir, Philadelphus (308–246 BC). Collins may have meant ‘successively’ in the sense of ‘successfully’. Line 4. once. Formerly, in the past. Line 8. dome.

Building (from Latin ‘domus’).

science.

Knowledge (from Latin ‘scire’, to know).

Line 10. obsequant.

Form of the obsolete ‘obsequent’, meaning

‘obedient, compliant’. Line 12. immortal name.

That is, Museum, meaning ‘seat of the

Muses’.

159