“Foam the wild waters to the west” (MS VII;
Poems [1891];
Works [1903])—Foam MS VII] From Poems (1891); Works (1903).
The variant in the print versions may be owing to a faulty transcription or to a printerʼs error, or W. G. Collingwood may have made the change deliberately in order to improve sense, from his point of view.
While the original parallel structure in the manuscript seems superior, with the prepositional phrases in lines 9 and 11 paired with their respective main clauses in lines 10 and 12,
Collingwood perhaps recognized that it is geographically erroneous to state that the Rhine foams from both the Rhaetian and the Dinaric crests in the west,
since the Dinaric Alps lie in the east, across the Adriatic sea (see contextual glosses), far from the course of the Rhine.
Thus, by changing the parallelism to a series of three consecutive prepositional phrases, each of them modifying the same main clause in line 12,
Collingwood would have replaced the factual error with satisfactorily poetic sense, as if the spectator scans the horizon
of the entire Alpine chain—.
It is notable that, while the editors of the Library Edition rejected Collingwoodʼs alteration of line 7 (returning to the awkward but original “In all its aspect is as fair”
in preference to Collingwoodʼs more elegant but invented “In all its aspects ʼtis as fair!”), they nonetheless silently retained his change in line 10 from “Foam”
to “From”—perhaps an oversight, or perhaps an implicit acknowledgement of what seemed improved sense.