Today’s Poem: Ode Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746

William Collins: Things fall apart

Józef Czajkowski, Garden in Winter, c. 1906 (Wikimedia Commons)

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Ode Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746

by William Collins

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

By fairy hands their knell is rung,
By forms unseen their dirge is sung;
There Honor comes, a pilgrim grey,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall a-while repair,
To dwell a weeping hermit there!
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William Collins (1721–1759) moved in the glittering London literary circles of the mid-18th century, cultivating friendships with such luminaries as Samuel Johnson and James Thomson. Collins would eulogize Thomson as a “Druid” on the other poet’s death in 1749, ten years before his own.

Collins’s career provides an object lesson in the incontrovertible sad reality that to be a writer with any measure of success whatsoever requires, among other things, a lack of fragility: a certain pigheadedness, maybe, that allows one to persevere in the face of failure. Or perhaps it’s nothing but luck, with a soupçon of sensible financial management, that enables one writer to ride his early promise to a glorious conclusion, while another (e.g., William Collins) collapses into despair, alcoholism, madness, and an early death.

Collins displayed the early promise, certainly. The son of a Chichester hatmaker who had served as the city’s mayor, he received his education first at the ancient Prebendal School at Winchester, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1742, while still an undergraduate, he completed and published his set of Persian Eclogues, purporting to be translations, cast in heroic couplets, of poems acquired from a silk merchant named “Mahamed,” who had composed them “for the entertainment of the ladies of Tauris.”

The pastoral eclogue was having an early-1740s moment of renewal, and Collins’s Persian Eclogues were warmly received. These poems spoke the idiom of their time, channeling the formal neo-classicism of Alexander Pope, but they also presaged the later Romantic taste for the exotic and “oriental,” which would find expression particularly in Byron. The poems were reprinted in England in 1757, and also subsequently translated into German. They continued to sell well long after the poet’s death at 37.

But following this burst of youthful success, things seem to have begun to fall apart. On completing his degree in 1743, Collins failed to secure a university fellowship that would have enabled him to live and write more or less at his ease in Oxford. It is impossible to judge from this distance whether there was any basis in fact to his uncle’s opinion that he was “too indolent” for the army. There was the church, but the Metaphysical poets were a good hundred years in the rearview mirror, and clerical life held no appeal for Collins. He opted instead to accept a modest allowance from a cousin, which enabled him at least to believe that he could conduct a literary career in London.

William Collins, aged about 14 (Wikimedia Commons)

What this allowance enabled him to do, in reality, was live wildly beyond his means. Circulation in the society of Dr. Johnson cost something, which turned out to be rather more than Collins had in his pocket. His 1747 collection, Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects, from which Today’s Poem is taken, sold poorly. Collins, discouraged and already drinking heavily, descended even further into alcoholism, to the extent of being eventually institutionalized in a Chelsea establishment called — with no beating around the bush — MacDonald’s Madhouse. From there he was consigned to the care of a sister married to a clergyman and lived out the rest of his truncated life in the precincts of Chichester Cathedral.

Today’s Poem, from that failed collection of Odes, demonstrates the influence of Edmund Spenser. The iambic regularity of the tetrameter couplets that constitute the poem’s two sestets belongs to the Augustan era, but the vocabulary seems drawn from the imagination of another century. The springtime’s “dewy fingers,” for example, appear straight out of the Elizabethan pastoral mode.

At the same time, the sense of a sentient nature looks forward to Wordsworthian Romanticism. The natural world in this poem is conscious of the nobility of the dead — possibly those slain in battles of the Jacobite uprising, which had gained momentum through a series of conflicts in 1745, but would end in a Scottish defeat at the Battle of Culloden in April of the new year.

It’s a strange and strangely prescient poem, marking the start of a year by envisioning the future as a land of the dead, not the living. Only the eremitic spirits of “Honor” and “Freedom” possess any agency in this envisioned springtime. Although the springtime earth is made “sweeter” by the dead who “sleep” there, no more transcendent hope exists than that they will be remembered. It might have been the poet’s vision for himself. There’s something fitting, therefore, in remembering him today, at the start of our own fresh year, though we hope that ours will be a land of the living.

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