Memorial Day
Looking back over the blog, I’m surprised that I have never posted William Collins’s “How Sleep the Brave” on Memorial Day. According to Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Collins “loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters,” and we see him merging fantasy, nature imagery, and high-minded allegory in this tribute to fallen soldiers.
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 hallow'd 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 Honor comes, a pilgrim gray,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall a while repair
To dwell a weeping hermit there!
The poem clearly inspired Sir Walter Scott’s “Soldier, Rest,” which is also appropriate for Memorial Day. Scott invokes the image of King Arthur dying on the Isle of Avalon in his first stanza:
Soldier, rest! thy warfare o’er,
Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking;
Dream of battled fields no more,
Days of danger, nights of waking.
In our isle’s enchanted hall,
Hands unseen thy couch are strewing,
Fairy strains of music fall,
Every sense in slumber dewing.
Soldier, rest! thy warfare o’er,
Dream of fighting fields no more;
Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking,
Morn of toil, nor night of waking.
Unlike Scott, Collins invokes fantasy only to reject it: the sod that covers that soldier is made sweeter by Honor and Freedom than it could ever be by fantasy creations. The poet imagines personified figures of those ideals making pilgrimages to the grave site.
If soldiers sacrifice their lives for Honor and Freedom, their country must make sure it lives up to these ideals when it orders them into battle. Otherwise, they have died for nothing.