Tuesday, September 08, 2020

the bright uncounted Pow'rs





I've become rather obsessed recently with the poetry of William Collins (1721 - 1759). It began with seeing this epigraph to Chapter III of Scott's Anne of Geierstein (1829):


Cursed be the gold and silver, which persuade
Weak man to follow far fatiguing trade.
The lily, peace, outshines the silver store,
And life is dearer than the golden ore.
Yet money tempts us o'er the desert brown,
To every distant mart and wealthy town.
                                                  Hassan, or the Camel-driver.


This comes from the second of Collins' early Persian Eclogues. The poem starts out like this:


SCENE, the Desart. TIME, MID-DAY.

In silent Horror o'er the Desart-Waste
The Driver Hassan with his Camels past.
One Cruise of Water on his Back he bore,
And his light Scrip contain'd a scanty Store:
A Fan of painted Feathers in his Hand,
To guard his shaded Face from scorching Sand.
The sultry Sun had gain'd the middle Sky,
And not a Tree, and not an Herb was nigh.
The Beasts, with Pain, their dusty Way pursue,
Shrill roar'd the Winds, and dreary was the View!
With desp'rate Sorrow wild th' affrighted Man
Thrice sigh'd, thrice strook his Breast, and thus began:
Sad was the Hour, and luckless was the Day,
When first from Schiraz' Walls I bent my Way.


William Collins was born in Chichester, the son of a hatter. He is said to have written the four Persian Eclogues while still at Winchester College, but they were not published until 1742 when he was at Oxford. The idea of transplanting the classical eclogue into exotic settings was a novel one, and these simple attractive poems would become popular (mainly after his death, e.g. with Langhorne's 1765 edition).

What followed, in Collins' brief active career as a poet, made significantly more radical demands on the reader. 


II
The Band, as Fairy Legends say,
Was wove on that creating Day,
When He, who call'd with Thought to Birth
Yon tented Sky, this laughing Earth,
And drest with Springs and Forests tall,
And pour'd the Main engirting all,
Long by the lov'd Enthusiast woo'd,
Himself in some Diviner Mood,
Retiring, sate with her alone,
And plac'd her on his Saphire Throne,
The whiles, the vaulted Shrine around,
Seraphic Wires were heard to sound,
Now sublimest Triumph swelling,
Now on Love and Mercy dwelling;
And she, from out the veiling Cloud,
Breath'd her magic Notes aloud:
And Thou, Thou rich-hair'd Youth of Morn,
And all thy subject Life was born!
The dang'rous Passions kept aloof,
Far from the sainted growing Woof:
But near it sat Ecstatic Wonder,
List'ning the deep applauding Thunder:
And Truth, in sunny Vest array'd,
By whose the Tarsel's Eyes were made;
All the shad'wy Tribes of Mind
In braided Dance their Murmurs join'd,
And all the bright uncounted Pow'rs,
Who feed on Heav'n's ambrosial Flow'rs.
Where is the Bard, whose Soul can now
Its high presuming Hopes avow?
Where He who thinks, with Rapture blind,
This hallow'd Work for Him design'd?


(the Epode, or strictly Mesode, the second of the three sections making up Collins' Ode on the Poetical Character)

Collins' poetic world is an extreme one. His idea of the poet is not so much a maker or an artist with a social dimension, as a rare visionary concerned with heaven. Milton is his model. 

But the manner of the poetry is Collins' own: the incessant imagery and allegory, the allusions, inversions and condensations that often leave us wondering who and where and what we're talking about, but euphoric with the elevation and feeling like a new door of perception has been opened, even unhinged. (This is where the obsessional bit comes in.) 

Band, Woof: Compared to Florimel's girdle of chastity (Faerie Queene IV.5), this is Fancy's "Cest", bestowed by her on the true poet. This section describes its creation. 
He: God.
The lov'd Enthusiast, her, she: Fancy, the image-making power.
Saphire Throne: Compare Milton's At a Solemn Music: where the sisters Voice and Verse present "That undisturbèd Song of pure content, / Ay sung before the saphire-colour'd throne / To Him that sits theron" (I can't avoid hearing the strains of Parry's 1887 choral version). Milton's poem is a principal foundation for Collins' poem, but Milton might have been horrified by Collins' assertion that God places Fancy herself on the sapphire throne. (The ultimate source of the image is Ezekiel 1:26, and cf. Exodus 24:10. Is it too obvious to add that we're talking about the blue sky?) 
Thou rich-hair'd Youth of Morn: the sun, hence Apollo, hence the divinely inspired Poet.
Tarsel: Strictly any male falcon, but perhaps meaning an eagle (traditionally supposed to be able to gaze directly at the sun). 


[I was helped by these essays:

Patricia Meyer Spacks, "Collins' Imagery" (Studies in Philology, 1965)


Gerald A. Kirk, "Collins' Love Poem: 'Ode on the Poetical Character'" (South Central Review, 1984)


Casey Finch, "Immediacy in the Odes of William Collins" (Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1987)



Highly recommended!

Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence (2019), Ch 5, "The Sublime as Romance: Two Texts from Collins":


 (The texts in question are the "Ode to Fear" and the "Ode on the Poetical Character"). 

 ]

William Collins' Poetical Works (1865) on Project Gutenberg:


(It includes the splendid appreciation by Sir Egerton Brydges, and John Langhorne's influential Observations on the Eclogues and Odes.)


An 1815 edition of William Collins' Poetical Works:


It also includes Samuel Johnson's brief and moving "Life of Collins":

. . . . His poems are the productions of a mind not deficient in fire, nor unfurnished with knowledge either of books or life, but somewhat obstructed in its progress by deviation in quest of mistaken beauties. 
     His morals were pure, and his opinions pious; in a long continuance of poverty, and long habits of dissipation, it cannot be expected that any character should be exactly uniform.  There is a degree of want by which the freedom of agency is almost destroyed; and long association with fortuitous companions will at last relax the strictness of truth, and abate the fervour of sincerity.  That this man, wise and virtuous as he was, passed always unentangled through the snares of life, it would be prejudice and temerity to affirm; but it may be said that at least he preserved the source of action unpolluted, that his principles were never shaken, that his distinctions of right and wrong were never confounded, and that his faults had nothing of malignity or design, but proceeded from some unexpected pressure, or casual temptation.
    The latter part of his life cannot be remembered but with pity and sadness.  He languished some years under that depression of mind which enchains the faculties without destroying them, and leaves reason the knowledge of right without the power of pursuing it.  These clouds which he perceived gathering on his intellect he endeavoured to disperse by travel, and passed into France; but found himself constrained to yield to his malady, and returned.  He was for some time confined in a house of lunatics, and afterwards retired to the care of his sister in Chichester, where death, in 1756, came to his relief.
    After his return from France, the writer of this character paid him a visit at Islington, where he was waiting for his sister, whom he had directed to meet him.  There was then nothing of disorder discernible in his mind by any but himself; but he had withdrawn from study, and travelled with no other book than an English Testament, such as children carry to the school.  When his friend took it into his hand, out of curiosity to see what companion a man of letters had chosen, ‘I have but one book,’ said Collins, ‘but that is the best.’”


Collins' last major poem was An Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland, Considered as the Subject of Poetry. 

Here he argues for the intrinsic worth of traditional legends and superstitions as material for the poet; though they aren't true in the narrow sense, yet rehearsing them releases images that invoke a deeper truth. This is a more concrete and moderate elaboration of the high-pitched ideas about Fancy in the Ode on the Poetical Character (and see also the Ode to Fear). Here's the second stanza:


There must thou wake perforce thy Doric quill,
'Tis Fancy's land to which thou sett'st thy feet;
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,
While airy minstrels warble jocund notes.
There every herd, by sad experience, knows
How, wing'd with fate, their elf-shot arrows fly;
When the sick ewe her summer food foregoes,
Or, stretch'd on earth, the heart-smit heifers lie.
Such airy beings awe th' untutor'd swain:
Nor thou, though learn'd, his homelier thoughts neglect;
Let thy sweet muse the rural faith sustain:
These are the themes of simple, sure effect,
That add new conquests to her boundless reign,
And fill, with double force, her heart-commanding strain.

swart tribes: brownies. Traditionally each house or farm had only a single brownie. Compare the lines in Milton's L'Allegro about the "drudging goblin". Collins seems to reduce the household spirits in size and to enjoy the picture of them sipping communally from a single dish. 


And here's the twelfth stanza:


In scenes like these, which, daring to depart
From sober truth, are still to nature true,
And call forth fresh delight to Fancy's view,
Th' heroic muse employ'd her TASSO'S art!
How have I trembled, when at TANCRED'S stroke,
In gushing blood the gaping cypress pour'd;
When each live plant with mortal accents spoke,
And the wild blast upheav'd the vanish'd sword!
How have I sat, when pip'd the pensive wind,
To hear his harp by British FAIRFAX strung.
Prevailing poet, whose undoubting mind
Believ'd the magic wonders which he sung!
Hence at each sound imagination glows;
Hence his warm lay with softest sweetness flows;
Melting it flows, pure, numerous, strong and clear,
And fills th' impassion'd heart, and wins th' harmonious ear.

Fairfax: Edward Fairfax, translator of Tasso. 


Johnson mentioned the poem as lost, but this jogged the memory of Alexander Carlyle, who rediscovered the manuscript among the papers of a friend of John Home (the poem's dedicatee). The poem was read at the Literary Club of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1784. The manuscript contains several lacunae.

Text, preserving the lacunae: 

An anonymous pamphlet of 1788 claimed to contain Collins' complete and final revision of the poem. This is the text that appeared in most nineteenth-century editions, including the 1815 and 1865 editions linked above. Happy nineteenth-century readers, able to enjoy what they supposed was the authentic and complete text of one of Collins' best poems! 

Walter C. Bronson's 1898 edition, laying out the detailed arguments for regarding the Anonymous Edition as fraudulent (see p. 121 - 132):




The Anonymous Edition is most interesting for its interpolated Stanza Five:

To monarchs dear, some hundred miles astray,
Oft have they seen Fate give the fatal blow!
The Seer, in Sky, shriek'd as the blood did flow,
When headless Charles warm on the scaffold lay!
As Boreas threw his young Aurora forth,
In the first year of the first George's reign,
And battles rag'd in welkin of the North,
They mourn'd in air, fell Rebellion, slain!
And as, of late, they joy'd in Preston's fight,
Saw at sad Falkirk, all their hopes near crown'd!
They rav'd! divining, thro' their Second Sight,
Pale, red Culloden, where these hopes were drown'd!
Illustrious William! Britain's guardian name!
One William sav'd us from a tyrant's stroke;
He, for a sceptre, gain'd heroic fame,
But thou, more glorious, Slavery's chain hast broke,
To reign a private man, and bow to Freedom's yoke!


Aurora: On 6 March 1716 there was a spectacular display of the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) in southern England. This is an unusual sight so far south. Observers described the display as armies fighting in the sky. It occurred at a time when political tensions were high. Many were horrified by the public execution of Lords Derwentwater and Kenmure, two leaders of the 1715 Jacobite rebellion, at Tower Hill on 24 February 1716.  Whig authors like Defoe and Addison claimed (perhaps falsely) that Tory Jacobite sympathizers were indulging in "Highland" babble about the aurora and its dire prognostications; they, on the other hand, insisted that celestial phenomena had natural causes. (E.g. the predictable recurrence of Halley's comet. Sir Edmund Halley took great interest in the 1716 aurora, and was dismissive of "battles in the air".) 

Some earlier editions of Collins' poems absurdly state that the aurora borealis (northern lights) were never mentioned prior to 1716, so cannot have existed. But between 1621 (Galileo) and 1716 (Halley) there do indeed seem to be remarkably few reports of auroral sightings, compared with the centuries before and after. Doubtless there was still some high-latitude auroral activity. But lower-latitude aurorae usually occur after geomagnetic storms, which in turn are caused by sunspots, so the Maunder Minimum (a period of very low sunspot activity in 1645-1715) could reasonably account for the lack of reports. This was also the period of the "Little Ice Age" (1650 onwards), but that may be unconnected. (The currently predominant hypothesis is that the Little Ice Age was caused by volcanic activity.) 

This is a complicated subject. I found these articles useful:

Lord Derwentwater's Lights: Prediction and the Aurora Polaris (Patricia Fara, 1996)
Maunder Minimum (Wikipedia)
Auroral Observations in Finland-Visual Sightings during the 18th and 19th Centuries
(Heikki Nevanlinna, 1995)


Illustrious William: William, Duke of Cumberland (1721 - 1765), youngest son of George II. The victor of Culloden, also known as "Butcher Cumberland" for the harshness of his reprisals. The victory was widely celebrated in England. Compared in subsequent lines to William III (1650 - 1702).

This may all be the fraudulent 1788 version, but it reminds us that when Collins wrote his Highlands Ode in 1749, it would have had a political dimension. It was only four years since the 1745 rebellion. And the topic of highland superstition would recall the auroral controversies that followed the 1715 rebellion.

Though this stanza is spurious, Collins had himself written in praise of the Duke of Cumberland, in Ode, to a Lady on the Death of Colonel Ross in the Action of Fontenoy. When he published his Odes (Dec 1746) he added stanzas 7-8, not in the original publication (June 1746), envisioning William's return to the scene of his defeat with "sated sword"; perhaps that referred to his triumph at Culloden (April 1746) or to his mooted return to the Schelde. As it turned out William did return, and was defeated again at Laffaelt (1747); and perhaps it was Collins who withdrew the two new stanzas from the ode's subsequent appearance in Dodsley's Collection (1748).

*

Another post on William Collins:




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