William Collins

Tenderly remembered on Chichester's cathedral walls is William Collins, the Chichester boy who became a poet.

William Collins, one of the exquisite poets who died young, was born at Chichester in 1721 and died here in 1759.

He is buried in St Andrew's Church, and there is a charming memorial of him by Flaxman in the cathedral. He was a poet's poet, whose work was choice rather than popular. It was almost entirely lyrical in character, and is slender in volume, but it challenges comparison with any 18th-century lyrical verse before Burns.

Collins had every advantage of education and companionship. He was a Winchester scholar, and studied at Queen's and Magdalen colleges, Oxford. His friends were literary in aptitude and experience. At school they included the Wartons and Gilbert White, who also were at Oxford with him, and later he lived in touch with James Thomson of The Seasons and with Dr Johnson.

Son of a Chichester tradesman, a hatter, he had some moderate means of his own, and an uncle left him £2000, so that exertion was not forced on him by urgent need to earn a living. He had written poetry from his boyhood and settled down to be a poet, as Milton did before him and Wordsworth and Tennyson after him.

Though his friends were attracted by him he had defects of character which account for his comparative failure. He was weak of will never grappled with Life seriously, lived loosely, dreamed and planned what he did not attempt actually to do, was easily discouraged and upset, and sank into ill-health with periods of mental disorder. His friend James Thomson wrote of him:

 

'A certain tender gloom o'erspread his face, Pensive, not sad, in thought involved, not dark. Ten thousand glorious systems would he build, Ten thousand great ideas filled his mind; But with the clouds they fled, and left no trace behind.

 

His was a tragic life, but the high poetic quality of his work within its narrow bounds is universally admitted. He inherited artificial forms of poetic expression, the personification of ideas and qualities of the mind, and well nigh all his poems have abstractions as their theme. Human life in its concrete manifestations is left untouched. In his own mode, however, he is unrivalled. It attains perfect expression in one twelve-line Ode:

 

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,
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 Honour comes, a pilgrim gray, To bless the turf that wraps their clay,
And Freedom shall a while repair, To dwell, a weeping hermit, there!'

 

Every lover of poetry will rejoice that the "lonely vesper chime" of William Collins is being wafted down the Ages in all its delicacy, sweetness, and sadness. Too lazy for the army, too dissolute for the church, he made a poor living by writing poems.

 

He was rescued from the bailiffs by Dr Johnson, but his mind gave way under the strain of his irregular ways, and he died at 37 near the Chichester house he was born in.

 

 

 

 

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