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204 Restoration to Romanticism 1660–1789
little recognition during their author’s short lifetime. His poetry is
visionary and intensely lyrical, and some of his poems, such as How
sleep the brave, have become very well known.
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.
(Ode Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746)
Collins grew melancholic, and produced very little poetry after the Odes
of 1746; he died before he reached the age of 40. Another visionary poet
lapsed into madness – Christopher Smart, having begun his poetic career
in the 1750s with clever satires and elegant light verse, was overcome with
religious fervour, and spent several years in an asylum. He produced A
Song to David in 1763, a highly charged poem in praise of the biblical
figure of David. His Jubilate Agno was not published until 1939, more than
150 years after his death. It is an extraordinary, quite unique work, again a
poem of praise, in some ways not unlike William Blake’s work – and Blake
was frequently considered mad too. This time Smart’s praise is for the
whole of creation, from the days of the week to the toad, from the nations
of Europe to his famous lines in praise of his cat, ‘For I will consider my cat,
Jeoffrey’. Smart’s use of the language of the Bible and his simple
straightforward style in the expression of his belief and his joy in the world
give him a place among religious writers who celebrate their faith rather
than negotiate with their God – a phenomenon rare in English poetry.
In 1771, the same year as two important novels by Scottish writers
were published (Smollett’s Humphry Clinker and Mackenzie’s The Man
of Feeling), the first poems by Robert Fergusson appeared in an Edinburgh
magazine. Edinburgh was the centre of the Scottish Enlightenment, and
for more than fifty years there had been a growing move towards the
rediscovery of Scottish language and culture. The poetry and song
collections of Allan Ramsay in the 1720s and 1730s brought the work of
such writers as Dunbar and Henryson back into wide circulation. Fergusson
was the first contemporary writer to move away from the imitation of