Divine Songs and Meditacions (1653)

AN. COLLINS DIVINE SONGS AND MEDITACIONS (1653)
Selected, with an Introduction, by Stanley N. Stewart
Publication Number 94
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library University of California Los Angeles 1961
GENERAL EDITORS
Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles Lawrence Clark Powell, Clark Memorial Library
ADVISORY EDITORS
John Butt, University of Edinburgh James L. Clifford, Columbia University Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago Louis A. Landa, Princeton University Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles James Sutherland, University College, London H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles
CORRESPONDING SECRETARY
Edna C. Davis, Clark Memorial Library
We are dependent upon the autobiographical quality of the work for all we know of its author. She might have been any one of the many Annes who, during the first half of the seventeenth century, married into or out of the Collins name (or the name might be a pseudonym). But especially in the first third of the work, in the prose “To the Reader” and the metrical “Preface” and “Discourse,” we recognize the autobiography of a woman who was, from early childhood, the chronic victim of disease. In “The Discourse” (omitted here because of its length and repetitiousness), she describes the life of one whose hope lay in her adjustment to pain. Drawing upon the imagery of spiritual autobiography, Anne Collins describes her youth as a wilderness, her soul as a withered flower. Only when she takes direction from her sorrow does her soul draw in the rain of grace. And that regenerating force is the recurrent theme of her writing, the sole enduring source of peace; the world offered only the appearance, the “counterfet” of satisfaction. Thus, as Anne Collins composes her devotional verses, she is impelled by four pious reasons. These are indicative, not only of how the author justifies her writing from a poetic point of view, but of how completely she has explained away all the claims of a world that had once tortured her with longing. First, all creatures had been ordained to praise God; this, in her songs and meditations, she attempts to do. Recognizing that her talents are few, she recalls that even the man with a single talent would be called to account. Third, she wishes that some kinsman out of interest in her writing might be encouraged to read the Scriptures. And last, she thinks of those who will never meet or know her; by reading the Divine Songs and Meditacions , they may look upon “the image of her mind,” and from that learn how God takes pity on even his most lowly servant.