“Hallow’d Mold”: Collins’s “Ode, Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746” (“How Sleep the Brave”)

Once celebrated as one of the great lyric poems of the eighteenth century, Collins’s “Ode, Written in the Beginning of the Year 1746” (“How Sleep the Brave”) is rarely encountered by students or non-specialist readers anymore.1 Its subject matter—the celebration of war dead—is unfashionable, maybe even offensive. The poem also seems to embody the tendency toward superficial adornment and prettification that we associate with 18th-century verse and that seems so far removed from what the Romantics have trained us to believe a poem should be. The one supposed problem compounds the other, as Collins treats his grim subject ornamentally. Here I acknowledge this conflict but argue that “How Sleep the Brave” harnesses it to complex effect: indeed, it enables readers to subsume the seeming contradiction.2 The poem both extolls the soldiers’ sacrifice in abstract terms and forces us, repeatedly, to remember the hopeless reality of it. In the dimension of form, it delivers its contradictory message via organizations that advertise themselves as such and cloak layer upon layer of imperceptible complexity. In both respects, the poem enables readers to apprehend more than what we might otherwise be capable of. “How Sleep the Brave” was originally published in Collins’s one major volume, Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegoric Subjects (1746), and has remained an anthology piece ever since.