“The ocean barrier is beating” and “[The tide upon the bar is leaping;]”
(MS IA, g.1; MS IX; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—The
editor of
Ruskin, Poems (1891),
W. G. Collingwood, comments: “The second line of
‘Calais’ reads
in the original, ‘The ocean barrier is beating’, which must be a mis‐transcription of an insufficiently altered rough copy, now lost,
as the reading is neither rhyme nor reason”
(
Poems [4o, 1891], 1:280–81 n. 28;
Poems [8o, 1891], 1:282, n. 28).
As a substitution,
Collingwood devised his own line, printing it in square brackets, as shown in the
1891 witness,
‘Calais’ [poem].
The editors of the
Library Edition disagreed; and in
the
1903 witness of
“Calais” [poem],
they restored
Ruskinʼs original line,
arguing that “the young author, as we have seen in the case of the
‘Iteriad’,
was not always careful to get a true rhyme, and [that] the meaning [of the original line 2 of
‘Calais’] is clear enough”
(
Ruskin, Works, 2:341 n. 2).
In fact, the use of the term
barrier is significant; see
Hanson, “Ruskin in the 1830s”.
In hypothesizing a “rough copy, now lost”,
Collingwood evidently meant a draft version preceding not only
the
MS IX fair‐copy witness of
“Calais” [poem],
but also the
MS IA, g.1, witness of
“Calais” [poem]—the
earliest extant version, which is in the hand of
John James Ruskin, and which shows interlinear corrections by his son.
In the latter version, line 2 is identical to that in the fair‐copy version. Thus,
Collingwood was familiar with the
MS IA, g.1 version, and he was referring to this manuscript as the one containing
the “original” version of
“Calais” [poem], while hypothesizing a “lost” rough copy behind it.
From the
MS IA, g.1 version,
Collingwood did accept lines 5–6
as originally composed in
John Jamesʼs hand, rejecting
Ruskinʼs revision of those lines in that same manuscript.
The
MS IA, g.1 manuscript is the sole surviving witness
of lines 5–6, which
Collingwood preferred,
Ruskin having carried his own,
not his fatherʼs, version of these lines to the
MS IX fair copy.
In arriving at his published version of
“Calais” [poem],
Collingwood
appears therefore to have based his editorial decisions on his own aesthetic judgment, since his choices overall are consistent neither with the “original”
MS IA, g.1 version in
John Jamesʼs hand
nor with the fair‐copy
MS IX version in
Ruskinʼs (and with
Ruskinʼs
interlinear revisions in
MS IA, g.1, on which the fair copy is based).
Collingwood
even substituted a line of his own invention for one he disliked in both holograph versions. The editors of the
Library Edition,
E. T. Cook and
Alexander Wedderburn, seem somewhat more consistent
in preferring
Ruskinʼs final, fair‐copy version, although their decisions are as eclectic and aesthetically driven as
Collingwoodʼs in accepting the latterʼs re‐punctuation of the poem in combination with some punctuation
found in
Ruskinʼs fair copy. In the case of
‘Calais’,
Cook and
Wedderburn likewise clearly had access to the witnesses “in both the rough and in the fair copy”,
as they call them—meaning, by the “rough” witness,
what they referred to as
Ruskinʼs “fatherʼs copy”,
the
MS IA, g.1 version
(
Ruskin, Works, 2:341 n. 2).
By
1903,
MS IA, g.1, must have been bound as part of
MS IA, a compilation that
Cook and
Wedderburn collected
and identified in the
“Note on the Original MSS. of the Poems”
(i.e., in the
Library Edition, their reprinting of
Collingwoodʼs
“Preliminary Note on the Original MSS. of the Poems” as
“revised and completed from the edition of 1891”; see
Ruskin, Works, 2:530).