Thomson and the Druids

Summary

On 27 August 1748, the Scottish poet James Thomson, for over 20 years a literary émigré in London, died, to be interred in the churchyard at Richmond two days afterwards. About 10 months later, his death was commemorated in a sentimental elegy written by William Collins, a fellow poet and denizen of Richmond. Entitled ‘Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr Thomson’, its first stanza runs as follows:

In yonder grave a Druid lies,

Where slowly winds the stealing wave!

The ye ar's best sweets shall duteous rise

To deck its poet's sylvan grave!

This enigmatic poem has in recent times become something of a crux in our understanding of how both Thomson and Collins alike conceived the office of poet, and of how poets generally, in the mid-eighteenth century, figured to themselves the nature of their vocation. Surprisingly, however, it was only as late as 1946, in an article by J. M. S. Tompkins, that it seems first to have been proposed that in calling Thomson a ‘Druid’, Collins might have been choosing his words advisedly, and in a way calculated to conjure up a quite precise set of connotations. Tompkins claimed the invocation to be consistent with a composite portrait of ‘the Druid’ as bardic visionary, priest of nature and patriotleader that had been built up by antiquarians like Carte, Toland and Stukeley; and in demonstration of the aptness of the sobriquet as applied to Thomson, he pointed out that the poet held a religiously heterodox belief in spiritual transmigration, a philosophy also widely credited to the Druids.