Ode To Evening - William Collins

Ode to Evening - William Collins
William Collins is regarded as one of the most skilled lyric poets

of the 18th century. Collins’s style is formally Neoclassical but
represents the themes of the Romantic period. His poetry is an
epilogue to classicism and a prologue to romanticism. His love of
Nature makes him a great precursor of the Romantic Movement.
Thus Collins occupies a very important place as transitional poet in
the history of English poetry.
“Ode to Evening” is one of the finest poems of Collins in his

collection 'Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects'. It
is composed in a single stanza of fifty two lines with unrhyming
pattern. This beautiful poem is addressed to the evening who is
regarded as the goddess, nymph or maid. The personified evening is
chaste, reserved and meek opposite to the characteristics of the bright
sun. This poem has mainly three parts. The first one is the opening
salutation to the evening, the second one is the center where the poet
requests for the guidance in receiving peace, and the last one is his
personal point of view and a return to the universal dimension.
When the poem commences, the speaker invokes the spirit of

Evening to compose a pastoral poem to sooth her ears as the
murmuring brooks. The day is almost done and the sun is descending.
There is silence everywhere except for the cry of the bat and the
beetle. The speaker prays to the quiet Evening to teach him to sing a
soft song. He says,
“Now teach me, maid composed,
To breathe some softened strain”
The speaker’s song passes through the valley that is becoming
darker and it suits to the quiet atmosphere. The song greets the return
of the lovable Evening. The evening star folds up the day and
announces the arrival of the Evening. At this point, deities termed
Hours, accompanied by elves who sleep in flowers and nymphs
wreathed in sedge and shedding freshening dew, become attendants
preparing Evening’s chariot for her entrance. Thus it is said:
The pensive pleasures sweet
Prepare thy shad’wy car.”
The speaker aspires to go to a ruined building in some lonely valley
to watch the beauty of the Evening, but he is disturbed by the rain
and the wind. So, he decides to visit a hut at the mountainside to see
the gradual spreading of darkness over the earth.
Collins then takes Evening through the year. When spring comes
along with showers of rain, it drenches the sweet smelling hair of the
Evening. When summer comes it loves to play under the prolonged
light of her. When autumn comes, the leaves turn pale and yellow.
The autumn loves to fill the lap of the Evening with heaps of dry
leaves. When winter comes it shouts and howls through air and
frightens the shrinking days and does a lot of damage. In the end, the
speaker admits that the charm of the Evening should continue to
bring peace and harmony and to inspire friendship, poets, science and
lovers of peace. Thus he says,
“Shall Fancy, Friendship, Science, rose-lipp’d Health,
Thy gentlest influence own,
And hymn thy fav’rite name!”
The application of femininity in describing the evening and
characterizing her is one of the strengths of Collins. Words and
phrases like ‘chaste Eve’, ‘fancy’, ‘rose-lipped’, ‘nymph reserved’,
and ‘maid composed’ are some of the illustrations of the use of
femininity in the poem. These traits of the evening add the concept of
an eye-catching woman who is reserved and patient.
The evening is the merging point of the sunlight and the sunset,
in a way, it is a transition from light to dark, day to night. Depicting
the negative side of the evening, the poet says, it symbolically hides
all the faces of the daytime whether good or bad. In its darkness,
everything is same and mysterious. It is the eve that makes sure that
the next day is certainly going to be bright and sunny. In that sense,
evening is the seed of the hope and life of the next day.
Collins personifies evening in this poem as ‘chaste Eve’ which
is a Biblical allusion to Eve. The comparison of the evening to the
Biblical Eve is ambiguous. If the fallen and flawed state of Eve is
associated to the evening, then the evening becomes something
negative and cursed state of the day when the bright light of the sun is
missed and set. But, if the poet is comparing evening with the
innocence and purity of Eve, then the evening means a beautiful time
of the day when everything comes to the resting point with peace and
harmony all around. The intention of the poet is still ambiguous.
“Ode to Evening” is a transitional poem as it has the elements of
a strong tradition of Neo-classicism as well as Romanticism. It is
transitional because it consists of emotions and imagination more
than the reasoning the Classicism.

Ode To Evening - William Collins

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ode To Evening - William Collins

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ode to Evening - William Collins

William Collins is regarded as one of the most skilled lyric poets

“Ode to Evening” is one of the finest poems of Collins in his

When the poem commences, the speaker invokes the spirit of

You might also like