“I woke to hear the lullaby” ["The Arve at Chamouni"] [poem]
Title (MS VIII; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—The title which was first applied to this poem in Poems [1891], “The Arve at Chamouni”, was invented by W. G. Collingwood, who printed the title in square brackets to indicate his responsibility. Collingwood does not explain his rationale, but a persuasive case can be made for the poem's association with the prose section that immediately precedes it in the MS VIII draft, “Source of the Arveron”, which is likewise set at Chamonix. Contiguity of the two drafts in MS VIII does not in itself prove that the two texts are related: most of the adjacent texts in the MS VIII draft of the “Account” clearly do not form verse/prose pairs that Ruskin meant to fair-copy together in MS IX as a topographical unit. In MS VIII, he was drafting verse and prose as needed for his sequential progress through the fair copy (a fair copy that, at the date when he started drafting in MS VIII, had reached only so far as the end of the northern France/Belgium sections and the start of the Rhine journey), while at the same time he was ranging ahead in drafting verse and prose segments related to Italy and Switzerland (see Account of a Tour on the Continent: Composition and Publication). Here at the outset of the MS VIII draft, however, he does appear to have composed a unit consisting of a prose and verse segment describing the same place, the source of the glacial tributary, the Arveyron, and its flow into the Arve River in the Chamonix valley.
Details in the poem suggestively complement features in the preceding essay, reinforcing the compositional unit. Just as the essay “Source of the Arveron” begins by describing a “reverie”, a “stilly dreamy waking vision”, the poem begins with the speaker awakening into sleep, as it were, by waking to hear a lullaby. The lullaby is sung by a river that, although unnamed in the poem, flows like the Arveyron and the Arve through mountain scenery, its voice joining “every mighty mountain stream”. This river, however, has a “monotonous” sound that one would associate with a broader current, perhaps explaining why Collingwood connected the poem with the Arve rather than the Arveyron. Another detail linking the poem with the essay is the trope of a morning sunrise, which complements the essayʼs evening sunset—paired tropes that Ruskin intertwines further by mentioning in the poem the “melancholy smile / On natures features” as evening descends.
Thus, Ruskinʼs title, “Source of the Arveron”, which in the MS VIII draft appears attached exclusively to the prose essay following the title, must be intended as a section head belonging to both the following prose and verse segments. In fact, this can be the only explanation for a title appearing in the MS VIII draft since, by the time Ruskin started composing the “Account” in that notebook, he had already begun the MS IX fair copy in which titles pertained only to composite‐genre units of verse, prose, and illustration. Had he fair‐copied “Source of the Arveron” in MS IX—and that title does appear toward the end of the Proposed Table of Contents for the Account of a Tour on the Continent—he presumably would have adhered to the fair copyʼs pattern of leading the unit with a vignette‐style illustration followed by the section title, and then by the fair‐copied poem and the prose essay.
Collingwood errs, then, not so much in the title he gives to “I woke to hear the lullaby”—for “The Arve at Chamouni” is apt enough—as in the giving the poem any title at all. His most questionable decision lies in separating the poems from the prose in the first place, to form a version of the “Account” solely in verse—a version that, if it ever conceptually existed at all, Ruskin had abandoned after composition of the first five poems about towns in northern France and Belgium.
Collingwood does use the title “The Source of the Arveron” (he adds the article), but assigns it to another poem, which is untitled in the MS VIII draft, “The foam globes round come riding fast”. This poem falls later in Ruskinʼs draft of the “Account” in MS VIII, amid draft of the prose section for “Heidelberg”. Unlike “I woke to hear the lullaby”, this poem identifies its subject explicitly as the Arveyron, and presents a more obvious complement topographically to the prose description of “Source of the Arveron”. Whereas “I woke to hear the lullaby” complements the mood of reverie in the essay, “The foam globes round come riding fast” complements the prose description of the glacier source of the stream.
In the Library Edition, in which the editors reunite the poems with their complementary prose sections, Cook and Wedderburn do recognize that the title, “The Source of the Arveron”, should serve as a section title, which they apply to the prose essay as well as, taking Collingwoodʼs cue, to the poem, “The foam globes round come riding fast” which Collingwood entitled “The Source of the Arveron” (Ruskin, Works, 2:386–87).
But how did Ruskin intend to situate these two poems vis‐à‐vis the essay? In the Proposed Table of Contents for the Account of a Tour on the Continent, he lists titles for the Chamonix cluster as follows. (It is unknown whether the proposed titles refer to composite sections, or to individual poems and essays, or to a combination. In ERM, these titles are treated as prospective composite sections.)
  • Chamouni
  • The Mont Blanc
  • The source of the Arveron
  • The morning
  • The Montanvert
  • The Mer de Glace
  • Our last walk
In extant manuscript, the first item corresponds to a poem and essay that could have formed a composite, the poem “Chamouni” in MS VII, and the essay “Chamouni” in MS XI—compositions that narrate the travelerʼs journey to the valley, first sighting of Mont Blanc, and the cultural mythology associated with these places. The second item corresponds to an extant poem about Jacques Balmatʼs discovery of the path to climbing the pinnacle of the mountain, “Not such the night whose stormy might” [“Evening at Chamouni”]. The next two titles in the list correspond neatly to the MS VIII essay and poem, “Source of the Arveron” and “I woke to hear the lullaby”—the latter fitting the description of a “morning” piece precisely. The final three titles do not appear to be especially represented in surviving draft, while the late‐composed “The foam globes round come riding fast” might conceivably have been placed at several points in this list—perhaps most consistently with the typical composite pattern, placed as the verse prelude to the essay, “Source of the Arveron”.