SOURCE: "Collins's Evening Time," in Preromanticism, Stanford University Press, 1991, pp. 49-57.

… As Gray's "Elegy" evokes the form of space, so Collins's "Ode to Evening" evokes that of time. And in the "Ode" as in the "Elegy" the evocation is not given from the start, but rather engendered through the poem's work. The "Elegy" begins with deficient modes of space—particular spaces, statuses, and stations—that that it succeeds in purging. Likewise, the "Ode" begins with deficient modes of time. Impure and unstable movement obscures the purified inner sense that the poem allows us finally to glimpse. No more than in the "Elegy" can the pure form of sensible intuition be attributed to an empirical consciousness, for it is precisely the discovery of what lies beyond empirical consciousness that is at issue. The "Elegy" progresses by means of a diffusion of consciousness, so that the concluding stanzas can speak for space in general in a voice that is beyond localization. That broadening may be inappropriate to the purification of the inner sense; in any case, it is not the method followed by the "Ode." Collins's speaker remains present, and baffled, throughout. The new sensibility emerges not at the end but, more mysteriously, from within the text of the poem. That makes the "Ode" a more difficult poem than the "Elegy" and perhaps explains the latter's markedly greater popularity, in its own day and since. The itinerary of the interpretation, however, will be very similar: an examination of the speaker's troubled temporality, followed eventually by a description of the poem's resolving breakthrough.

In many respects the "Ode to Evening" is opposed to the "Elegy." It is conventional in form and bold in diction. It approaches a natural universality in the middle, but then both of its versions retreat, in one text to a protected social position ("regardful of thy quiet Rule"), in the other to a protected location ("sure-found beneath the Sylvan Shed"). Collins protests too much that his goddess is cloistered, and he draws the veil, ever so gently, over the glimmering intuitions of roughness. Sexuality is denied and therefore neither comprehended nor controlled. In the imaginary progress of the seasons it is hard to say whether Spring courts or tends Eve, whether or not Summer's dalliance ("loves to sport") addresses her, whether "sallow Autumn" woos, protects, or denies her by covering her up with leaves. With Winter the repressed violence breaks out, turning Eve from the ground of being into an object. ("Robes," whose etymological association with robbery and rape is highlighted here, is the only one of Eve's attributes too specific to be associated with a diffused feature of the landscape.) Following these charged scenes the escape in the last stanza seems evasive and poetically awkward. A single bad pun present only in the final version is all that remains to remind us of the pacified sexuality of Gray's Epitaph: "and hymn [him] thy fav'rite Name!" Divinity is even less responsive here than in the Eton College ode and far less responsive than in the "Elegy." The speaker's conjectural refuge under the sylvan shed should not mislead us into believing that his anxieties have been quelled.

The "Elegy" manages to maintain an equilibrium between two orientations of desire: the social or artificial desire for power and the physical or natural desire for love. The natural noises of the swallow are poised against the gentry noises of cock and horn, housewifely labor against filial spontaneity, cultivation (harvest and furrow) against collection, ambition against grandeur, wealth against beauty, gem against flower, and so forth. Finally it reaches the null point where differences are abolished, a point "to Fortune and to Fame unknown," where it is impossible to say whether fortune means money and fame natural recognition, or fortune natural accomplishment and fame social repute. The "Ode to Evening," by contrast, virtually excludes reference to social passions, creating an unbalance in which it rests uneasily. The speaker begins enfolded by evening, and where there is no distance, it is hard to understand what motivates the hesitant intensity of his appeal, or why he should need to discommode himself to follow a goddess who is everywhere. His feet are a little too eager and hint at a restless dissatisfaction that the text does little to explain. Only when the last stanza is so oddly imposed on the poem can we intuit why the transcendental or natural satisfactions of evening—"religious Gleams" or "last cool gleam," in the two versions of line 32—are so avidly sought and yet not enough. "Oaten Stop, or Pastoral Song" faintly evokes a tension in need of reconciliation (as if the reed were nature, the song culture), but tips the scales toward nature, as does the "Sylvan Shed," which confirms the unexpressed deficiency of civilized values. Even by Collins's usual standards the goddess is too powerfully mythic, the speaker too subconscious (he muses, but only his feet will). In this deprived state, what the poem enacts is a frustrated, lost, and inarticulate desire for stabilizing companionship.

It is essential to recognize how greatly the two versions of the final stanza diverge. The first version, "regardful of thy quiet Rule," emphatically moves into the social mode. "Fancy, Friendship, Science, smiling Peace" are an ascending series of qualities rising from the internal through the personal to the public and the communal. The revision, "sure-found beneath the Sylvan Shed," shies back into primitivism. Only one item is changed in the ensuing list, but that changes everything: "Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lip'd Health" now descends from the freedom of imagination and the generosity of friendship to the privacy of knowledge and the merely physical condition of the body. In the first version Fancy is irresponsible, Science productive, and "smiling" the sign of an attitude that encourages participation by all; in the second Fancy is liberating, Science is a private study (the "fair Science" of Gray's Epitaph), and "rose-lip'd" an unshared corporeal attribute, the object of admiration or even envy. The first series is too social for the poem, the second not social enough for the lonesome speaker. Both versions begin, "So long," with an awkward duration entirely disproportionate to the evanescence of evening. The last stanza, then, can be defended, if at all, only as a symptom of still unrequited placation. We need not believe the speaker's hypothetical "sure-found"; he persists in appealing to Evening because he does not possess her.

The speaker petitions Evening with the formula "Maid compos'd." It is difficult to know whether the adjective is descriptive, desiderative, or propitiatory (an antiphrasis like "Eumenides"). Like almost everything else in the poem, composure is an issue rather than a possession. The formula calls the identity of Evening into question. She is a fleeting goddess who cannot be captured without surrendering her identity. In the "Elegy" the speaker's "me. / Now" evaporates into a universal perspective; in the "Ode to Evening" the loss of control functions similarly as an intuition of a reality beyond particularity. In what sense does Evening respond to the speaker's need for an Other? What kind of being is she, and where is she to be found?

Opposing Evening's real or desired composure is the speaker's distraction. His intricate syntax has difficulty keeping to the point. Consciousness for him is expansive and centrifugal: from folding star to circlet to attendants at the lamp to wreaths to the shedding of dew. Or it is diffusive, as in the gradually expanding phrases of lines 34-40, issuing in the all-encompassing veil. "Gradual dusky Veil" is itself a distracted phrase in its wandering from time to space via the double meaning of "dusky." It is curious that so muted a speaker asks to be taught "some softened strain"; evidently, there is a concealed strain on him that surfaces chiefly in his excessive sensitivity to the disturbing noises of the shrill bat and the sullen beetle and in his prickly reaction to the "heedless" hum. "Genial lov'd" suggests a desired if somewhat unequal reciprocity of affection. Beneath the petition to the "Maid compos'd" lies the desire to be made composed.¹⁹

In a poem that begins with song and ends with hymn, it is difficult to keep music out of the picture. As we shall see, this means ultimately that the Other who brings the promise of repose must be found as an inner voicing, not as an external, let alone a social, object of sight. The speaker wants to stay in step with Evening, to march to her tune: "Then lead, calm Vot'ress." In this poem progress has the effect of subordinating visual impression to the rhythms of the day and the year. Even a "cool Gleam" can be too striking for the eye. The sublime epiphany of the first version ("Whose Walls more awful nod / By thy religious Gleams") gives pause for thought ("Or if…"); the natural epiphany of the revision provokes a softened, yet still anxious, temporal musing ("But when chill blustring Winds…"). At the end of the "Ode to Simplicity" Collins rejects the "divine Excess" of a "cold Work" that "may charm our Eye" in favor of "thy temp'rate Vale: / Where oft my Reed might sound … / And all thy Sons, O Nature, learn my Tale." "Evening" struggles more laboriously back from eye to ear: from what the hut views to the "simple Bell" that it hears, from the light of Summer and "sallow Autumn" to Winter's noise.

Collins, in general, is unwillingly a pictorial poet.²⁰ "The shad'wy Tribes of Mind" ("Poetical Character," line 47) keep rising up in visions that never successfully materialize. They only "appear, / To hail the blooming Guest" ("To a Lady on the Death of Colonel Ross," lines 29-30); and if they really come "And gaze with fix'd Delight" ("Ross," line 33), they provoke an abrupt turn of thought to "deep Despair" and "joyless Eyes" ("Ross," lines 37-42). Collins is savage about the temptation to visionary excess, calling it "Rapture blind" ("Poetical Character," line 53). No rational consideration prompts the "But when" of "Evening" or the "But lo" of "Ross"; they can only be explained, I think, as a constitutional inability to be fulfilled by the satiety of the eye. Hence it is perhaps, that Collins's personifications remain parts and attributes rather than whole bodies. The eye is too singular in its perspective and in its framing of a scene; concord comes only from an ear that hears what all hear. Therefore even a "last cool Gleam" cannot calm Collins, whereas even Winter's yell can pave the way toward intimations of harmony. The curious movement to social virtues at the end of "Evening" and several other odes is one part of a complex of unprepared transitions that are motivated by a deep yearning for continuities such as only music can provide.

Natura non facit saltus is a maxim that the ode generically questions. With its "leaps" and "bounds" (Herder), its whooping and vaulting (Bloom), its form is predicated on discontinuities.²¹ Music may sustain the ode's flow from underneath—the "melodies unheard" of the "Grecian Urn," the continuous but often unattended warbling of the nightingale, the twitterings of autumn's music—but the passion of sudden vision is its defining characteristic. In willingly moving from stop (especially in the stuttering phrase "If aught of oaten stop") toward song, the "Ode to Evening" is thus written consciously against the grain. Nevertheless, the poem cannot so easily escape its own destiny. However slowly Evening comes on, the pace picks up as it approaches the psychic plunge into Winter. At first the speaker steals after Eve, but the goddess who approaches almost unperceived departs first in the pomp of a royal procession and eventually, it seems, in fear and disarray. This is (perhaps following Thomson's 1726 Winter, lines 40-63) an ode of leave-taking that begins with the parousia of a repeated "now" and then strives throughout to delay a departure. Since the star of line 21 is already the evening star, the car that is then prepared must be destined not to bring Evening on the scene, but to carry her away. The natural background here is the light that flickers rapidly across the hills as the sun sets. This is, then, an increasingly if unsteadily animated pursuit poem. The eye leaps in a moment from star to flower or from lake to heath to upland fallows, following Evening's abrupt appearances.²²

An acolyte of the hymnic ear who nevertheless foolishly entrusts his fate to the odic eye, the speaker loses the race for Evening.²³ He must always lose it because it is in Evening's nature never to abide her suitors. She is by nature "chaste"—another of the poem's conceptual puns that ruffle its wavy surface for those who read with the ear—because she is forever chased, never caught. "Shrinking Train" assures us that she will elude Winter too, whatever violence he may do to her regalia. In terms of the speaker's perceptions the poem ends in incoherence, with unfounded superlatives ("gentlest," "fav'rite") that single out undefined particulars of what should be a universal phenomenon (does she also have ungentle influences?) and thus miss the sought-after composure of the elusive goddess.

But in this ode the speaker is not the central figure, and his failure is the poem's success. As he loses his bearings, Evening grows on the poet. At first "reserved," hidden away in the dark corners of the landscape beneath the skirts of the setting sun and accompanied by minute, terrestrial phenomena, she gradually rises up through the landscape and into the sky. Eye and ear find her close up at the start, but spreading out into the distance later on. Attended at first by Hours but later by seasons, she begins small enough to be served by tiny elves and ends large enough for the leafy earth to be her lap. She begins subordinated to "the bright-hair'd Sun"; by the end her "Tresses" have replaced his, bathing in the atmosphere (spring's "Show'rs") while the sun's hair is bathed lower down, in the ocean. The speaker remains attached to fleeting earthly lights, whereas the celestial realities of the slowly setting sun and rising stars are larger and more continuous. The dusky veil covers the earth but opens the sky to view. Thus it is important that we take literally what is said of Winter, who attacks only the attributes of Evening. Her train shrinks; her robes are rent, too, but she has grown out from under them.²⁴ From this perspective—the poet's, as opposed to the speaker's—there is nothing abrupt about the ending or about the poem's other turns: the emergence and growth of Evening continue unabated.

Personification is here liberated from the constraints of visualization. Parousia fades away into a kind of manifestation that does not need to appear, or a personification without presence. Visual pallor (paly circlet, shadowy car, and the rest), allied with affective pallor (chaste, meekest, gentlest, together with "Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lip'd Health") conjure up a notion of a substratum behind observable phenomena. To the speaker it verges on tragedy that Evening cannot be grasped, and he projects his frustrations onto a nature that breaks into violence in response to her retirement. But it is precisely in leaving that Evening shows forth her essence. The speaker anticipates an embodiment such as is characteristic of eighteenth-century personification (see Wasserman, "Inherent Values"); the poet finds instead a personification in itself that refuses to become a personification for us. Evening becomes herself by outgrowing her fictive body. The corporeal form for which the speaker yearns is her spectral emanation, and it does indeed pass daily across the face of the earth. But the passage beyond is what makes her Evening. The speaker both fails and succeeds in his desire to join Evening by suiting his numbers to her stillness, a double outcome expressed by the otherwise baffling switch from violent Winter to rose-lipped Health. He fails because Evening has no body, no place, no home, and therefore cannot be found. But he succeeds because Evening is precisely what is always slipping away: hence, what steals through her vale may really suit it. To lose her as a phenomenon is to find her in thought.²⁵

In its manifestations time is unsteady, sometimes abrupt, disruptive, or fragmented. Such it is when it calls us to conscious action:

But Evening is the steady, musical pulse beneath the manifestations of life. The various oedipal readings of the "Ode to Evening" are true to its surface, that is, to the tense imaginings of the speaker, but they miss the dark, unstated background that underwrites its poetic accomplishment. In continuation of my thesis that what matters most in this poem is what it keeps in the shadows, I suggest that its true name for Evening is the one that is never spoken, namely, Even-ing.²⁶

The desire for desire is a common issue in this enfeebled period.²⁷ By the second version of the "Ode to Evening" the speaker manages to ask of Evening a slender boon: "Then lead … my willing Feet," replacing the first version's "Then let me rove." This falls far short of the "Teach me to feel" that, in one form or another, concludes most of the preceding odes in Collins's volume. Nor is his unstated longing for intensity of feeling requited. Instead, by joining with Evening, desire is transmuted. The "meeting Soul"—the phrase comes from the "Ode to Simplicity," which forecasts "Evening" in many respects—finds no Other, but instead the generative inwardness of self. The quietism of the last lines sheds a new gleam on the moment of meeting. Epiphany and turn in one, "Thy genial lov'd Return" now suggests not so much reciprocity as reflexivity—return upon herself, rotation, not return to the speaker. It is in Evening's nature to produce nothing beyond glinting reflections, yet always to be coming around again, and her flow of spirits mingles with a flow of emotions. If Evening is a regent, her kingdom is a state of mind. She is not a supernatural being confronting us, but more like a supernature in which we find our Being, transcendental yet, in her humility, not in the least transcendent. By the time it reaches its safe and gentle—and by no means inappropriate—conclusion, the poem has drawn us into a movement that knows no outside. Desire is not re-aimed (to use Bloom's term), but refined away: it is no longer necessary where no impotent stasis threatens.

The poem calls into question the whole notion of the individual as an intentional being. As a cult form, the ode had always tended to submerge the one into the many (as in Keats's line "So let me be thy choir"), and to that extent there is no surprise when Collins's speakers lose themselves at the end in social virtues. But cult forms are primitive and chthonic, whereas the belatedness of "Evening" dissolves their earthy originality into atmospherics.²⁸ Roger Lonsdale's notes (Lonsdale, ed., Poems) inform us that "Springs," early in the first version, does not mean fountains or sources, but is rather a metalepsis for brooks—middles, rather than beginnings. The revision, "solemn Springs," avoids the solecism of "brawling Springs," but continues to question originality. The next line encourages a desynonymization: "Thy Springs, and dying Gales" urges "Springs" back toward living origins. The poem edges repeatedly in this way toward origins: in the pun on "born[e]," in the "Star arising," in the "fresh'ning Dew," in the preparation of the car. But as termination is tentative in the ode—a temporary refuge under a shed—so initiation is even more so. "While … while … while … or … so long": time marches on, with no beginning. Some things go to bed at night, others (bats, beetles, and stars) arise. In the eternal circulation of waters of feelings, of meanings, a relative renewal is possible, but no real initiation. Absolutes steal on us gradually—"last," "meekest," "gentlest"—as Evening is revealed to be, not the primitive, but the inside of being. Selfhood is not an oedipal confrontation with the Other, but a being-with-others in a progress without beginning or end, originality or imitation, desire or repletion.

These two poems, Gray's "Elegy" and Collins's "Ode," took the urbane sublime style as far as it could go. Comparative thinking was always flexible, but also always entailed an element of competition in value or status. These two poems mute evaluation, eliminating the scale and universalizing relationship. The one comparative in Collins's ode is a mystery: if the "Pleasures sweet" are "lovelier still" than either the "fragrant Hours," the flowery elves, or the dewy nymphs, it can only be because they are more thoughtful—"pensive" and (at least by syntactic proximity) "shadowy." Pure mind takes over, effacing in the "Elegy" distinctions of higher and lower, leader and follower, or elder and younger, in the "Ode" distinctions of near and far, soft and loud, fast and slow. Hence we get in the former poem pure space without precedency, in the latter pure sequence without domination. (This is a difficult argument about the "Ode." I remind the reader that it is predicated upon taking the storm in lines 33-34 and the later outburst of Winter as figments of the speaker's imagination that do not interrupt the real progress of Evening from "last cool Gleam" through "gradual dusky Veil" to the complete absorption of the "shrinking Train" into vast night.) The poems leave behind the urgent animism that calls forth spirits in all other significant poems of the period, such as I have illustrated from Night Thoughts.²⁹ Mind is left to its own devices, "musing slow," and finding its way to universals that are beyond time in the former poem, beyond space in the latter.

To go further was to provoke a crisis. For thought, however unpressured, is not spontaneous in either poem. It continues to depend on perceptions to trigger it. The thought is always about something, however vague or general. The Youth—any youth—Evening—any evening—space—time: these are still promptings from outside the mind. Though generalized and not evaluative, thought in these poems remains relational, and therefore also social. To rest thought in pure time and pure space together would mean eliminating any externality and, with it, any conventional measure of truth. Thought then becomes an auto-affection. Kant eventually learned how to give a philosophical content to this intersection of a transcendental ego with a thing in itself, an abstract subjectivity and a featureless objectivity, and various imaginative writers of the 1780s and beyond learned how to give it an empirical meaning. But for the moment that could only appear as the emptying out of all reality. The "Elegy" and the "Ode" thus stand conjointly on the brink of solipsism, which proceeded to become the biographical curse of so many poets of the next decades.³⁰ As poets, Gray and Collins could only retreat into Manners and Passions, or into primitivism. The end of "The Bard" directly conjures up the abyss of liberation, but via suicide, and dark shadows light in the mesode of the "Ode on the Poetical Character" (particularly in the figure of the tercel, who is blindfolded except when he hunts), but not to comforting effect….

Notes

…¹⁹ Evening must "compose the composer," as Wendorf says in William Collins 130. But he takes composition in a pictorial rather than a musical sense, arguing that there is little movement in the poem, "a poem-as-process that gradually evolves into a poem-as-product" (134). This is, as he accuses Collins of being in "How Sleep the Brave," unrealistically hopeful.

²⁰ In The Figure in the Landscape 165-71 Hunt likewise concludes that Collins is reluctantly pictorial—particularly significant from a critic who specializes in literature and the visual arts. Also instructive is McKillop's clear-sighted struggle to salvage the notion of Collins as a painterly poet in "Collins' Ode to Evening."

²¹ Herder discusses Würfe and Sprünge in folksongs, but with the primitive passions of odes clearly in mind ("Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker," sect. 9, in Sturm und Drang: Kritische Schriften 534-39); Bloom's terms (Figures 7), while applied to a range of Coleridge's verse, likewise seem to me too apt to pass up.

²² See Merle C. Brown, "On William Collins' 'Ode to Evening.'" Brown also comments well on energy and on balance in the poem, though I do not think, as he does, that these two qualities add up in this case to energetic balance.

²³ I adapt my sense of the relation of ode to hymn from Fry's groundbreaking study The Poet's Calling 4-10.

²⁴ I take "train" here to mean attendants, as it does in the similar context of the "Ode to Fear," lines 9 and 24. The train is shrinking because Evening has disrobed as she vanishes into the bare night sky, and most of her attendants have gone to bed with her. "Shrinking" could, of course, also mean cowering with fear. My contention is that to do Collins justice we must take all plausible readings into account, and that we get the most consistent picture if we attribute the emotive alternatives to the speaker and the literal ones to the controlling poet.

²⁵ Imagination had better use a footnote to run rampant. I have little hesitation in hearing an echo of "thy darkning Vale" in "the gradual dusky Veil": the place of Evening is really her attire in its changeableness. But is it legitimate, in "May not unseemly with its Stillness suit," to hear an allusion to the seamless vestment later torn by Winter's noise? The indirection of these lines ("May not un-…," and the like) seems in any case an appropriate rhetorical dress for Evening, or, to put it in Collins's terms, fitting "Numbers" for his "willing Feet."

²⁶ Sherwin, Precious Bane 116, speaks of "Evening out of extremes," which is not quite the same. Sherwin's is the reading that most forcefully identifies Evening with speaker as his romantic self-image, and speaker with poem.

²⁷ See Weinsheimer, "Give Me Something to Desire," which also raises the issue of originality, to which I come in a moment.

²⁸ In The Poet's Calling 102-13, Fry has brilliantly related the belatedness of the "Ode on the Poetical Character" to the textualized solidity of the woven cest. I think that the "Brede ethereal wove" of "Evening," further dissolved by the partial echo of "wavy Bed," evaporates the problem. In "Poetical Character" scenes are "curtain'd close" behind a "veiling Cloud"; in "Evening" it is ambiguous whether the "gradual dusky Veil" is drawn open or shut. Other images that are freed from menace because they are duple, at least in affect, are "folding Star arising" ("folding" means shutting up or welcoming home) and the shadowy car that is prepared so late in the game. The "Ode to Evening" does not continue, but corrects the debilities of the poetical character.

²⁹ On animistic vividness see Jackson, The Probable and the Marvelous 39-88. Jackson overlooks the special character of the reticence in the "Elegy" and the "Ode to Evening." I would not, on the other hand, exclude as he does Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes from the period style. He distinguishes it as historical, but it is no more so than Collins's political odes or Gray's "Progress of Poesy," and no less animist (e.g., "And detestation rids th'indignant wall"), though it is more orthodox. In this connection see Sitter, "To The Vanity of Human Wishes."

³⁰ In pp. 284-86 of "Societal Models" Nemoianu argues that the "Elegy" negotiates this passage: "We witness the highly dramatic moment of the transubstantiation of an abstract epistemological subject into a living, breathing person." "Gray is … so extreme in his love of temperance that he becomes an extremist of non-expansion, and thus a Romantic." (This argument is not reproduced in the revised version of the essay printed in A Theory of the Secondary.) The difference between our readings is tonal; in particular, it depends on whether the Spenserian diction that describes the youth is felt to be conventional and generalizing or specific and individualizing. Perhaps it is best to call the "Elegy" a pivotal work that is amenable to being made romantic by a romantic reading.